A home for making disciples
For over ten years the parish has talked about building a house alongside the vicarage to support the mission of the parish. At a special general meeting held on July 23, 2023 members voted in favour of the motion to proceed. You can read the proposal below.
The next step of the process is gaining the approval from the Diocesan Council, who consider the missional alignment, and Diocesan Board of Trustees, who are legal owners of the land. The proposal to them can be found below:
The vision
A home to a discipleship community of young adults who are active in parish life and champion the spiritual growth of children and youth in the parish through relationship, discipleship and evangelism.
Such a resource:
Such a resource:
- is faithful to Jesus’ commissioning of us to make disciples
- is wise stewardship of the resources our parish does have (land and funds) to resource an area that is currently lacking
- creates future resources for growing our local mission.
The process so far
- Late last year, Vestry presented a proposal to the parish to build a new, discipleship house at the back of the St Aidan's property, and explained how this connected to our focus on evangelism and discipleship with particular attention on those 12 and under.
- Vestry hosted several Q&A sessions and had many discussions with parishioners about this proposal – the reasons why, exploring detail about the proposed house, and some possible approaches to funding it. (You can find the documents that record the Q&A sessions, as well as the presentation, below.)
- As a parish, you provided approval-in-principal for Vestry to progress to a house design stage and consider funding arrangements, to bring back to the parish for further consideration and a vote to decide whether to proceed with the house.
- After much consideration, Vestry has a preferred option for the house to propose!
- Vestry’s investigation into a bespoke design and build of a two-storey house, with a one-bedroom apartment and a four-bedroom house as originally envisaged, showed this was far more expensive than we imagined: about $1.1million. (This is just the cost of building – we already own the land.) This sum is simply beyond our means, would not represent a prudent use of resources, and would indebt our parish for decades to come.
- Vestry then considered what options there might be for a ready-built home, that could be moved onto the site. Such a house is far more affordable and in the range of $350,000-$500,000k, although we would be constrained to a one-storey house, of 3-4 bedrooms depending on the size of the footprint. However, moving such a home onto the site has proved technically infeasible, with the Council confirming earlier this month that it is unwilling to provide access for a house to be moved onto via the polo grounds behind the property.
- Vestry has arrived at last at a workable and affordable option: a pre-designed house that comes partly built and can be brought in piece by piece using the existing driveway. We have found a provider that we believe offers the right balance of cost, quality, amount of time to completion, and a building approach that will work for our site.
Previous Documents
Below are links to the documents that were distributed to the parish prior to the 2022 AGM, and the 2022 AGM minutes: