Your Parish Church needs Friends for the future
Milford is not one of those idyllic villages in an old world setting around a square but it is a thriving and expanding area with all the infrastructure for modern living -shops, doctors, dentists, chemist, post office, schools and of course train services to London and Portsmouth. So it is not surprising that Milford is so popular and in demand for families and older folks.
The Parish Church of St John’s is right at the heart of the village providing a place of worship, a place in the history of the village and its people. The Church and its Centre is for the use of the whole community whenever there is a need......meditation, marriages, funerals, celebrations and community gatherings.
It is too easy to just take for granted that the church will always be there when needed with the regular churchgoers keeping it going. That is reasonable as regards the cost of worship. To maintain an old building like St Johns in good condition is well beyond the regular giving of the congregation. Recently for example the bell tower has had to be renovated and essential work to remove dampness in the Lady Chapel has had to be carried out costing £22,000 that has completely exhausted our Fabric Fund.
So we urgently need funds to enable us to continue to look after the church buildings. The Diocese of Guildford gives us that responsibility and properly ensures that it is carried out by making surveys every five years.
Hence we would like to set up a Friends of St Johns. This is primarily so that villagers can feel part of our church community by contributing either by making a donation or as a regular contributor towards the maintenance cost of the church. It will also provide a source of funding for future developments. All your contributions will go directly to the Fabric Fund and will not be used for other church purposes.
This website that can be browsed to keep you aware of all of our activities and this section will be specifically for the Friends, so we can keep in touch.
Ultimately we might extend the Friends into a charity with a formal structure, to enable us to access more grant funding, but at this stage we just wanted to embrace the whole village into St John's by contributions to the upkeep of the church buildings, in other words to put down a foundation.
We would like to welcome you to work with us to maintain St Johns for future generations of people living in Milford.