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Leap of faith that brings church and village together
This Christmas you can get more than a cuppa at a café in the Pennine village of Honley. Roger Ratcliffe discovers private prayer is also on the menu.
IT all makes such perfect sense to Pastor Ian Sharp now, but at the time it seemed like a bit of a gamble. The Holme Valley village of Honley had no church for Elim Pentecostalists, the nonconformist denomination into which he had been ordained. And neither did it have a place for people to go and have a quick cuppa.
To try and find a congregation for his church where none existed was a big enough leap to make. But to try and follow that by fulfilling the village's other need was an even more ambitious plan.
But it has worked brilliantly on both fronts. The church may soon require premises larger than its current venue of Honley Village Hall for Sunday Prayer Meetings. And as for the caf, it has received recognition far beyond the Huddersfield area for its "inspirational" work in the community.
Honley is a village of about 6,000 people and one of the more sought-after addresses in the Huddersfield area.
But Honley has managed to buck the national trend in villages of its size by hanging onto most of its local shops and services. It still has several large food stores, including a Co-op, and even a bridalwear shop. There is a dentist, an opticians, a florist, a building society and the most endangered local service of all – a post office.
That Honley can also support several churches – all with healthy congregations – is also against what is happening in country areas.
Pastor Sharp had been living there for years while working in middle-management for one of the large supermarket chains. When he decided to devote his life to the Elim Pentecostalists, taking a two-thirds cut in salary in the process, he became part of its ministerial team in Huddersfield.
But he and his wife had settled in Honley, where several other members of the church happened to live, and it was decided to see if there was a larger need for Elim Pentecostalists in the village.
They are a somewhat stronger brand of conformism than, for instance, Methodists, taking the Bible at its word, firmly believing in the power of prayer to make a difference to the world and also believing that miracles can and do happen in the modern world.
With the church established, next came the idea for the caf. The concept was to open something that would be run as a not-for-profit service to the village. It was given the name Caf Plus because it would offer more than simply food and drink.
Pastor Sharp said: "Many churches have coffee mornings, sort of mothers' union things with home-made cakes and a tea urn in the corner, and they are usually on church premises. But we decided to establish our caf away from the church, right in the main street. You can't get closer to the heart of the community than that."
The basic aim was to offer the best cup of coffee in the village, serve the best bacon butty and the best jacket potato. It was a basic principle that if they were going to run a caf, then it had to be done extremely well and, first and foremost, give real value for money. The "Plus" side of the venture is its extra dimension as a church outreach centre, although many people who use the caf go there simply for a cuppa or a snack.
"We deliberately don't engage with customers," Pastor Sharp says. "We don't hand our literature out at the door, don't push it at all. We let people come to us... if they want to, that is. We don't push our message or our meetings.
"Having said that, though, a lot of people who are now members of our congregation we first met in Caf Plus. We've made many friends here. Over the months and years, they might confide in us that they have a need of some kind and we will say, 'well, pray about it', and they suddenly found that they were comfortable about having a relationship with God."
Caf Plus offers a prayer room in the basement where customers can go and either pray alone or with one of Elim volunteers who are usually behind the counter. There are prayer request forms, which people fill in and pin onto a board or post in a special prayer box. There is another board for answers to prayer, space for people to relate their experiences after they prayed about a particular problem.
A lot of the prayers involve illness in the family, marital problems or searching for employment.
Another function that Caf Plus fulfils in Honley is as a place for teenagers and young adults with a variety of special needs to be given work experience.
Although some of those who run the caf are volunteers from the
church, others include students from local schools who have learning
difficulties.
One regular face behind the counter is Annette, who has Downs Syndrome, and Pastor Sharp is delighted to have provided her with a chance to "feel wanted, feel useful" as a worker.
Recently, Caf Plus received a commendation in a national survey by the church magazine Inspire.
It asked people to nominate churches which were especially valued by the community they served.
"The magazine liked the idea that we are more than just a caf, but a listening post," says Pastor Sharp.
"We are valued because we interact with the community in Honley as people go around their normal lives."
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Friday 25 May 2012
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