Over the last year, Stratton Methodist Church has been working on Community Kitchen. The project’s original vision was to provide hot meals and a drop in centre for homeless and lonely people once a month on a Saturday. And although that’s what happens, not many people have attended.
However, there has been a rethink throughout the year and now, in addition to offering meals, the team take meals and sandwiches out to where those in need are. Mainly to the Salvation Army hostel in Swindon – Booth House.
Yesterday I went with some of the Stratton Team to visit Booth House and help drop off Christmas goody bags for the residents. The goody bags contained a box of mince pies, some sweets, some crisps, biscuits and a Christmas Cracker. All 60 bags had been put together and paid for by members of the Stratton Methodist Church.
Part of the set up at Booth House is a social enterprise project called “Recycle” a project that restores bikes and then sells them on.
The bike mechanics are residents from Booth House and in learning to restore the bikes they are learning new skills and studying for NVQs. The Stratton folk have struck up a real rapport with the men and women who work in Recycle and we dropped in to the project.
I got chatting to the manager of the project. He was so enthusiastic it was infectious. But what really touched me was the following story.
Often when customers buy a bike from the shop or have had a bike serviced, they leave a tip for the mechanics. The mechanics have been pooling the tips they’ve received. And last week they were asked how they’d like to share the tips out. Perhaps paying for a takeaway? But no the mechanics said they wanted the money they received to go to Swindon Foodbank.
That’s right. These men and women who have nothing by the standards of the world, wanted to give away what little they now had to others.
As I was being told this story, “The power of love” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was playing in the shop. The chorus of the song is this:
The power of love
A force from above
Cleaning my soul
Flame on burn desire
Love with tongues of fire
Purge the soul
Make love your goal
Those men and women in Recycle know what it is to be unloved to be poor by the standards of the world. Yet their lives are being turned round by the love shown to them via the Salvation Army. And those men and women have chosen to share that love – the love of Jesus Christ – with others. What more powerful Christmas message is there?
