News (and a challenge) from Totnes

St Mary’s Totnes

Peter Hilken, Secretary of Totnes St Mary’s restoration and renewal project:

St Mary’s. Totnes, has embarked on a programme to renew and transform its five hundred year old building. The plan is to make it more accommodating for a wide range of purposes, some of them non-religious. This will be accomplished without impairing the church’s beauty or sacred character. We have thousands of visitors every year. I talk to many of them, and find hey are keenly interested in learning what we are doing to keep the building open, in good repair, and useful in new ways.

We value our membership of the Major Churches network, and would like to have more contact with, and learn from, our fellow members in the South West.

Our proposal is to produce a poster exhibition illustrating how we serve the community. Our own poster is likely to show some of the school students who are currently conducting a survey of wild life in our large and rather bare churchyard. The church will be shown in the background. At the end of the summer the three schools involved will recommend what we might do to make God’s Holy Acre more friendly for plants and creatures - including humans.

All other churches producing a similar poster will receive electronic versions of the complete set. At a later stage we may reach out beyond the South West. I fancy having pictures here of what is happening in Bath and Hexham Abbeys!

If you would like to participate, or to learn more about what is proposed, please contact me: peter.hilken@ntlworld.com