May Update from the PCC

Hi everyone,
So our last PCC meeting saw us officially welcoming in Jayne and Sheree into the group. It's nice to get new members each year as it keeps things fresh!

The first item on our agenda was to have a chat about where we currently are with our buildings project. We realise this has been going on for some time and we're trying to think of ways that we can escalate things, whilst ensuring what we are doing are the right things. We'll be discussing this topic in a lot more detail in a later PCC meeting.

We then spent a bit of time chatting about the Parish Giving Scheme. This scheme is a good alternative to the way that most of us already give to the church. The advantages of this scheme are that it takes a bit of the load off our administrators working out gift aid and doing paperwork, and usually means gift aid monies come back far quicker. We’ll pilot this as individuals on PCC before deciding whether to encourage the wider church family to make the switch.

With GDPR a hot topic right now, Sam Taylor has gifted us with his expertise in this area and helped us to draft the new data privacy and data protection policies. We had copies of these to read prior to the meeting so we just took questions and a quick vote that we're happy with these docs.

We next discussed the pattern of our PCC meetings. You might recall from one of my previous blogs that we had an away day in February and we all enjoyed having more dedicated time together to pray, break out into groups and have fellowship with one another. So we're currently looking at potentially throwing in a few more Saturday meetings and having less on Monday evenings. This suggestion seemed to go down pretty well, as I'm sure you'd all agree it's hard sometimes after a long day working and commuting!

The next item on the agenda was the Deanery Mission Action Plan. We had a copy of this in advance to read through so we just had a quick review and then discussed the need to spend time putting together a Parish Mission Action Plan.....which should have line of sight from the Deanery one. We've got lots of good stuff to add to this now that we have settled on our 7 mission priorities and starting to put together plans for those.

We finished up our meeting with updates on safeguarding, Bishop's Commission for Mission and something called a Terrier. This is not a dog, in fact it's a log of all items in St James and St John's. We send this log to the Diocese and it keeps a record of any items moved in and out of the church, and new items too.

Right. That's all for now folks. I'm off on my holidays. A week in Scotland with family...bliss!
Helen