The Barn - An Amazing Answer to Prayer

Those of you who have been at the prayer meetings over the last year will know that we've been praying for office space away from the Kerith Centre to move the staff to. This is for four primary reasons:

• Our growth in Sunday numbers means we have run out of space for children's work on a Sunday, particularly at the 11am meeting. We want to use the space freed up in the Kerith Centre to do children's work on a Sunday, and in particular to run separate teaching for years 5 and 6 (the 10 and 11 year olds).
• We have also run out of space to run courses midweek. Freeing up the offices will provide us with more space to run courses and small groups during the week, as well as giving us more break our rooms when we run conferences and other events.
• The current office space is completely full, especially with the addition of 15 Academy students this year and the hope to have more in future years.
• As we look to become a multisite church meeting in multiple locations, and doing social justice in each of those locations, having an operational hub which is more central to all those locations makes a lot of sense.

Well our prayer has been answered in an amazing way, with Tony and Elizabeth Pudner offering us the use of The Barn, which is the office adjacent to their house on the outskirts of Bracknell and Wokingham. Initially we will have use of The Barn for a year starting from November. I can't tell you how grateful I am to Tony and Elizabeth for their incredible generosity and faith, and to God for providing us with the next thing we need to allow us to continue to grow and to flourish as a community.

The plan is as follows:

• A number of the staff will be staying at the Kerith Centre, primarily the receptionists and the facilities team.
• Through November the Creative Arts team (all the music, video, print media, website and production people) will move to the Studio, the building in the Kerith Centre car park. This will become a creative arts hub, with a recording studio / practice room upstairs.
• Also through November and Decembr the rest of the staff will be moving over to The Barn, which will become the operational base for everything which happens at Kerith.
• Once everyone has moved out we'll start work on converting the Kerith Centre offices to rooms which we can use for kids on a Sunday and other ministries midweek.

I know this will raise a load of questions, to which hopefully over the next few weeks we'll provide some good answers. Please feel very free to ask those questions, either to me or someone else on the team. For now can I just encourage us to be thanking God for this amazing answer to prayer.

Simon.

ps - I've included some more photos of The Barn below - God is good!