I had a really good idea on my way into work this morning.
You know that we are planning on moving in with the methodists up the road, what you don’t know (because we don’t) is what we are going to do with the buildings we currently occupy.
When we took the decision to move it was ostensibly for 2 reasons:
1. The buildings are beyond economical repair.
2. The congregation is too old and too small to embark on a major redevelopment of the site.
Those reasons still stand but it has troubled me a little that if we just sell the site on to a developer (and lets face it who else is going to buy it) then it will be a waste of what is a prime site. Also the number of usable buildings for the churches in the area goes down by 1 more (after the Anglicans have left theirs a few weeks ago).
The baptist secretary rang me the other night because he had got wind that we were moving and that they would be instrested in buying the whole thing. I don’t want to talk numbers but they had quite a lot to spend. Of course they will be buying a set of buildings that need a lot of money spending on them to make them properly usable or they spend some money knocking them down and starting again. The amount they have to spend would preclude that I believe. This is where my idea comes in….
We move to the meths temporarily and we jointly develop the site at the bottom of the road with the baptists. It is brilliantly simple, we invest the land, they invest the money and we all get to share a purpose built set of buildings that can be used by the whole community.
Just got to convince everyone that the idea is as good as I think it is.
