St Peter's Church, Rhoose

After years of planning and fundraising, our new building and church extension, The Hub @ St Peter's is finally a reality and taking its place at the heart of our village. The Hub is now home to an increasing amount of activities and events and numbers using the building have continued to grow. 

New to the Hub is our Community Cafe, supported by Purple Shoots (www.purpleshoots.org) which is currently open every Tuesday and which provides work experience for adults with learning difficulties. A very successful Play Cafe has been run in a separate area, alongside the main cafe: as the opening hours increase this will be a weekly term-time event. A Dementia Cafe has just started each Tuesday morning in the main church building: this is run by a local care agency on a referral basis but once well established, will be available to all as a drop-in cafe.  In the main public space next to the cafe there will be new courses organised, e.g. Adult Learning Wales will provide a 4 week computer course about accessing the Internet, Christians Against Poverty Money Course will run as a 2 week session three of four times a year.

Our extended Church space means we are now able to offer more places at our existing Meet on Mondays group for toddlers and their accompanying adults. Similarly our Messy Church events are growing in size. Our most recent had an attendance of 62 people in total. The Community Choir has resumed and is enjoying the enhanced comfort of the church space during their singing sessions. Now that we have a commercial standard kitchen we can offer greater hospitality at key services and are looking forward to a convivial Harvest Supper, not to mention bacon rolls for all at our next All Age Service! We are also able to hold a Christmas Fayre this year and several local craftspeople have booked a space with us to promote their products.

A taster session of a new look Youth Group was held recently which attracted 19 young people and this will now happen every Friday night during term time. Our increased space means we can now offer badminton, mini-football and air hockey as well as the usual board games etc and of course food to feed hungry youngsters.

Replant Rhoose, an independent community action group, have offered to help us landscape our grounds and we are thrilled that they want to be involved in enhancing our facility.

We hope this gives a flavour of what's happening at The Hub. Everyone worked so hard to make the dream a reality (including raising over £650,000 in funding and donations) and we are committed to ensuring that The Hub goes from strength to strength. The journey is still very exciting.