St Peter's Yaxley

…reaching out in love and faith

Fostering & Adoption Support

by

You may have seen in our social media recently the statistics around children in care in the UK. This year 40,000 children will be taken into care, that’s twice the amount that can be seated into the 02 arena! In Cambridgeshire there are currently over 700 children awaiting loving homes.


Due to the circumstances around the need for adoption and fostering, many adoptive & foster parents face major challenges with children who have multiple difficulties, such as special educational needs, attachment disorders and insecurities. Therefore, parents can become physically and mentally exhausted; which is why a group of people from St. Peter’s Church are getting together to discuss ways in which we, as a community, can support these families who are doing something amazing. We will be guided by the charity, Home for Good, who’s core aim is to find a home for every child who needs one, but we also need help from the community.


We are holding an initial meeting in September at SPC, to discuss ideas of what the support will look like and our hope and prayer is that this will also be guided by others in our community who want to be involved. If you are an adoptive or foster parent, please do come along and talk with us about how we can help support you. If, like many of us involved in this initiative, you’re not an adoptive or foster parent but it is on your heart – come along and chat, share ideas or just listen. Everyone has gifts to offer and we would like to use these gifts to provide the best support that we can for families in our community who are working hard to provide for children who otherwise would not have a loving family.


We look forward to meeting you in September! Look out for the meeting date on our social media and on the Yaxley Gazette Facebook page and if you express an interest with us, we will ensure to inform you of the meeting details, once confirmed.

If in the meantime you’d like to hear from the charity who will be assisting us, you can listen to their talk from their visit in June, by clicking here. 

Yaxley Foodbank

by

Firstly, we would like to thank all those local people who so generously support the food bank. Without your regular donations, we wouldn’t be able to continue to help vulnerable families in our community.

This year, we have been busier than ever, having already given out over 2 metric tonnes of food from our base at St. Peters Church. This has meant that with the busy summer holiday period fast approaching our stocks of food items are significantly lower than usual for the time of year. During the school summer holidays, when school meals are not available, we provide weekly food parcels to a number of families struggling to make ends meet. This means we give out a large amount of food during this period.

We would like to make an appeal to the folk of Yaxley and the surrounding villages. Would you consider placing a few items in one of the collecting baskets around the locality?

We are particularly short of the following items:
Tinned meat and fish
Tinned vegetables
Tinned potatoes
Tinned fruit
Long life milk
Long life custard
Tinned rice pudding

Our baskets are in the following locations:
Yaxley Co-op
Yaxley Lakeside Surgery
William de Yaxley School
Fourfields School
Yaxley Infants School
Farcet Primary School
Austin Hall
St Peters Church
St Mary Magdalene Church Stilton

Thanking you all again for your continuing support.
St. Peter’s Church

For all enquiries, please call or email Laura 

Together We Are A Community

by

The term community gets used a lot these days but what do we actually mean by community?

In the Bible, God encourages us to take care of one another; through this we ensure a thriving community. Therefore, the idea of community comes from a sense of responsibility that we have for each other.

The community of Yaxley, along with the surrounding villages, have shown overwhelming care for each other through the support of the Yaxley Foodbank over the past year. A staggering 7145kg of food was donated between September 2017 and August 2018. We’ve also recently celebrated the Harvest Festival, where we’ve had fantastic support from the school communities in and around Yaxley.

The donations we receive help many people and families, and we would like to say a big thank you for your generosity in supporting local people in need. We would also like to thank everyone who signpost to Foodbank and all those who volunteer their time to help and be a friend to those in need. It takes a team, a community, to ensure the success of the project.

Without our sense of responsibility to one another, great community projects such as the Community Fridge and the Winter Night Shelter, and St. Peter’s projects like Yaxley Foodbank and Community Sunday, would not succeed. It is through the help and kindness of each other that we are able to improve situations for those less fortunate, and ensure our communities thrive.

Thank you again for your continued support for your community.

If you would like more information on the Yaxley Foodbank, or other community areas God has called St. Peter’s to invest in, please visit www.saintpeters.co.uk/community

Follow St. Peter’s Church on Facebook and Instagram to see updates on the Foodbank’s shopping list.

God Bless

Laura

 

Parish Communications Officer

07939 449255, lauraashley@saintpeters.co.uk

 

 

Love your neighbour, build our community

by

When I said in a recent interview that Yaxley was a close-knit community I was challenged by someone (not the interviewer) to support this comment.

I thought I would record here just two of the things which came to my mind in support of what I had said.

Firstly, just before Christmas we gave out hampers from the Food Bank to 29 families. These hampers had a combined weight of 1,138kg – all of which was donated by the local community. I am aware that some of this was donated from people living outside Yaxley. Thank you to everyone who so generously donated in order to enable us to support these families in Yaxley and the surrounding area.

Secondly, there have been three recent and tragic deaths in Yaxley where the costs of the funeral have been largely or wholly covered by “crowd-funding”. What amazing generosity has been displayed by both those who knew the families and those with no connection at all – other than wanting to reach out to a local family in distress. In addition, I know that an enormous amount has been done in and by the local community to support the bereaved families.

When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was he responded by encouraging us to love God with all our heart, body, mind and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus’ response is the focus of our sermons  series throughout February and into March. Whether you have a Christian faith or not, and wherever you live, my prayer is that we would all love our neighbour as ourselves and continue to build our local communities. Through this may we come to know the real love of God.

It would also be wrong of me to let the month of February pass without mentioning Valentine’s Day. My congratulations to all those of you who have recently got engaged and who will do so on February 14th. If you would like to get married at St. Peter’s I would love to hear from you. Please contact me as soon as you can – we already have around 25 weddings booked for this year and 12 for 2018.

With my continuing prayers,

Jon Randall (Vicar) 01733 240339; vicar@saintpeters.co.uk

Read this article in the Yaxley Gazette.