St John’s Weekly Bulletin – Sunday 25 June 2017

Our historic church and hall both have problems with water in the walls. In the hall, this shows as patches where the wall feels wet, and where sections of paint peel away. In the church, we are seeing paint peeling away from the walls, interior and exterior walls crumbling, stained-glass-window surrounds disintegrating, and finding objects wet in one of the cupboards.

We have just received notification that we have been successful in applying for a grant from the NSW Department of Heritage to fix the problems in the roof and gutters and do groundwork to get water away from our buildings. However, this is a matched grant and we will need to raise around $60,000 over the next two years to complete the project.

This is a significant amount of money that we need to raise. At its June meeting, your Parish Council decided to begin a ‘1K Club’, inviting members of our parish to commit to giving committing $1000, or multiples of $1000, between July 2017 and June 2019 over the next two years to see this project through.

This Sunday, we would like to invite you to take part in this project.

If you are able to make a contribution up-front, that would help us a great deal. But if you would like to commit to $10 a week, or $42 a month extra on your giving over those two years, that would get us there as well. If you wanted to organise your own fundraising towards that total, we would greatly appreciate it. Can you commit to one or more ‘K’s to protect our buildings for the years to come?

There are four main ways to contribute:

This bulletin was emailed to members of the parish on Friday 23 June 2017 – if you would like to join the Weekly Bulletin email list, please call the church office on 02 4927 5399 and we will happily arrange this.

Account Number: 00021969

Account Name: St Johns Anglican Church Newcastle Restoration Account

Giving can be done as a one-off transfer, or regular donations.

Account number: 898154

Account name: National Trust of Australia St Johns Church (Newcastle) Restoration Account.

If you give to this account, please ensure that your name is used as the Reference information for the transfer. Without this, we cannot give a tax-deductible receipt.

If you give by cheque, please give the cheque directly to Murray or Howard Benson. Howard will provide you with a tax-deductible receipt for your tax return.

This Sunday, we are asking for written commitments to this project. We will be distributing cards to members of our congregations and asking people how much they would like to commit, and how they would prefer to give out of the four options above.

Please consider how you would like to support this project and please join us on Sunday to help us begin!

Blessings,

Murray