St Andrew’s Te Awamutu has seen its community outreach snowball from cooking classes and coffee for mums, to parenting courses and exercise sessions that involve more than 70 families every week.
Family worker Pat Schwass says minister the Rev Diane Yule has been challenging St Andrew’s to be a “church without walls,” which means “using the gifts and talents we have to reach the community for Jesus Christ.”
Pat juggles the 15-hours-a-week family worker job with other part-time work, having made “a career change just before 60” when she started the role two-and-a-half years ago.
She began with a “mothers of pre-schoolers” (or MOPS) programme, which lets mothers spend a couple of hours chatting over coffee, often including a speaker on topics like parenting or budgeting, or working on a craft project. Their children are cared for in a crèche staffed by older women from the church.
At the same time, church member Kathy Malcolm felt inspired to teach people how to cook. The church offered to fund a six-week course called “Homemade” that would give parents tips on basic but delicious meals, as well as how to make cooking fun for their children.
About 20 mums come along to MOPS every week, and around 10 people are part of each cooking course.
Pat describes the networking that has come out of these two programmes as “amazing”. MOPS attendees were interested in the cooking programme, and Pat helped out with crèche that ran during cooking classes.
Relationships developed and people started to talk about difficulties they were experiencing with their families. So Pat decided to train as a Parents Inc. facilitator and run parenting courses. “Everything we’ve stepped out to do, God has brought the resources. We’re learning that as a church.”
She says many of the people being attracted to the church’s community programmes have little support, with grandparents unavailable, and are stuck in the trap of debt-driven spending. “You think you know what’s happening in communities but it’s not till you’re working at the coal-face that you recognise the pressures. You start to see what people are up against and what they’re dealing with. It’s opened our eyes to the needs in the community.”
Pat says she aims to run a parenting course each term, and if people can’t pay the course cost, then the church helps out. “We teach them to enjoy their kids instead of just enduring the parenthood.”
To attract people to their programmes, the church “puts information in all sorts of places” – including Plunket, counsellors, the community house, and public health nurses. Pat says nearly everyone coming to MOPS is from the community, rather than it being primarily a social group for people already in the church.
About 80 people usually attend the two services Te Awamutu Presbyterian runs every Sunday, and those attending the community programmes haven’t necessarily started coming along to worship.
“But it was never about that,” Pat says, “It’s about us being in the community. If we don’t spend the time building the relationships, we don’t really have the right to share the Gospel. It’s amazing, once you step out in faith, how the community gets to know, and it draws the people in.
The congregation is heavily involved in supporting the community work, Pat says, “with the helpers for MOPS being mostly grandmas over 70”.
Diane says the church also saw the need for an exercise class that “took account of God’s intention that we need to care for all of who we are” and so decided to start an programme called “Body, Soul & Spirit”, which provides lower impact exercises for older people.
A dedicated team “front” the weekly classes, which at 40 people a session have grown almost too big for the church hall. Relationships are grown during the coffee time afterwards, with many of the people who attend having no other link to the church.
Pat says it takes a while until people feel connected “beyond what they come for”, but it is starting to happen. The exercise group has donated money towards the parenting course, and at the church fair a number of the MOPS mums ran a stall and “felt part of it”.
“I feel we’re on the threshold of people wanting to know about the Gospel.”
By Amanda Wells