No Holds Barred in Stockport…

No Holds Barred is a Methodist/URC fresh expression in Stockport, led by the Rev Stuart Radcliffe. Here he tells how Heaton Moor United Church, Stockport, is linking with the local pub to develop community links.

Bishop Graham Cray, Archbishops’ Missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team, this month highlights Fresh Expressions as an ecumenical initiative. ‘It was an Anglican Methodist partnership from the beginning,’ he says, ‘and now involves an unparalleled range of partners, including the United Reformed Church, Congregational Federation and Ground Level network. The fact is that we all face the same missionary challenges and the joy of this partnership is that each partner can benefit from the experience of all the others.’ ‘We are in lovely, green suburbia where people - on the whole - are not too badly off. Whilst there are those who have the daily struggle to make ends meet, many set off to highly paid jobs in the morning and come home much later that day to their very desirable, four-bed detached homes. But the thought kept coming to me that appearances were deceptive and that people had lots of problems behind their front doors. They can pay a very high price for those demanding jobs with enormous stress levels.

When we started to think about how we could make a difference in our community, a key question was, “How can we as a church recognise those stresses and make it clear that we care for the people living with those anxieties?”

At that time we were still two churches, Heaton Moor Methodist Church and The Heatons United Reformed Church, and we wanted to do something for people during Holy Week so we gave out coffee and hot cross buns, to those on their way to the railway station. We also gave them a little booklet about Easter and a leaflet explaining why we were doing it.

Two years on and we had become one church, Heaton Moor United Church, but the same question remained as to how we might best reach out into our community. The answer came when a few of us, including my colleague, the Rev Richard Parkes were in a local pub, The Plough, and we hit on the idea of having Beer and Carols.

Pub landlord Ian was really supportive and so members of the church gathered in the pub and - in between rounds of Ian’s festive quiz and fancy dress - we sang praise to God in carols. The result was that I had more conversations about faith than I’d had for months and we also raised £200 for Christian Aid.

What could we do next? Our thoughts turned again to Easter but we no longer had the building by the station for distributing coffees. However The Plough was in a perfect position. All we had to do was persuade Ian to open up at 6am, allow us to give away coffee and receive nothing in return!

Amazingly Ian agreed and from Monday to Thursday of the following Holy Week we met at the pub from very early morning and gave away coffee and hot cross buns and booklets about the Easter story.

Social media also had a role to play and we let people know what we were doing via Twitter. I’d just started the church Twitter account and people picked up on three keywords that I used: Heaton Moor, Community, Caring. What we were doing was picked up by a lot of people doing things in our area about community or caring.

At that time the messages were being tweeted to 3,500 people; they are now retweeted to about 7,000 people because we have hit the right networks – these included local radio, which picked up on the momentum of church doing something good in the community.

The Plough already hosted a knitting group, Spanish lessons and the history society. I said to Ian, ‘How about a monthly discussion meeting’ and he said, ‘what night do you want to do it on I want people to come in here and feel that they are sitting in their own lounge, the more we can offer them the better.’

That group is called No Holds Barred and it involves talking over a variety of issues with a Christian input but in a very informal way. We also put the discussion starter details on all the tables in the pub, not just the area we’re sitting in, so that people can still consider some of the issues even if they don’t join us.

In December the evening was called, ‘I wish it could be Christmas every day? How do I cope with Christmas at a time of financial austerity?’

Past meetings have seen us look at prayer through the story of footballer Fabrice Muamba who survived a heart attack and we have also discussed trust as a result of the Jimmy Savile investigations. We have also had other events, such as a curr y and comedy night at the pub.

It stands on its own as a specific community. Some months there have been 10 to 12 people taking part and other weeks there have been four of us. I think we need to give it two years before we assess what happens next. If it’s to continue to grow it will look very different than church as we know it today.

I’m always reluctant to put ‘labels’ on something like No Holds Barred because it’s organic and I don’t know where it’s going to lead. If it leads us to a fresh expression meeting in the pub I’d be delighted and I’d love that to be the direction that it takes.