How Oxford’s cathedral at Christ Church is helping the Advent Sleepout Challenge
AS the night of the event gets closer, the reality of spending a cold night on the stone floor of Oxford’s Cathedral at Christ Church is starting to dawn on me.
But I’m trusting the Church Urban Fund’s (CUF) Advent Sleepout Challenge will be a great event that will help a charity that once helped me when I was working in a deprived parish.
Somehow, despite my advancing age, I’ve been foolish enough to volunteer myself to stay out all night to raise money for CUF. ‘Team Christ Church’ students and cathedral staff alike are preparing to get together as rather chilly volunteers for a common cause. We will be joined by people across our the UK including St Mary’s, Iffley, a week or two later. St Mary’s is less than four miles away from the cathedral. There the clergy and the congregation will be sleeping in the Rectory carport one cold night in December. They will have a breakfast, cooked by a volunteer from the congregation to look forward to, to warm them up the next morning.
The Church Urban Fund highlights the need for churches and the wider community to tackle poverty and build community. Thinking about the importance of CUF’s work reminded me of a story about George Clooney, the Hollywood superstar doing some volunteering. He was helping out in a charity café in Scotland called ‘Social Bite.’ Social Bite employs former homeless people and operates a "suspended" coffee and food programme where customers can pay for a hot drink or food for someone who needs it more than them. Its customers must have got quite a surprise to find themselves being served by ‘Gorgeous George’ himself! OK it’s a stunt. OK he gets publicity for himself as well. But he’s rich and famous enough already not to have to worry about that. He didn’t have to get on board with a charity in his spare time, but like hundreds and thousands of people up and down our country he did. George was following the age old commandment perhaps, ‘to love our neighbour as we love ourselves’, or ‘to treat others as we would like to be treated’. Or perhaps simply to do our little bit to make this world a better place. To help a sometimes hard world be a little bit kinder, a cold world a little bit warmer.
As the Archdeacon of Oxford I get to meet people all the time who work as volunteers, giving of themselves, their money and their time to help others. Whether it’s in my local Oxfam shop, or in the Student Hub; Whether its in Emmaus or Gatehouse projects with the homeless, foodbanks, community cupboard, low carbon hub, Asylum Welcome, Refugee Resource, the list goes on and on. Often I meet people I know from our churches giving of their time in this way, alongside people of all faiths and none. Volunteering can be a great way to meet people and to gain experience, as well as to feel that you’re giving something back and doing something constructive with your time.
The Church Urban Fund has been supporting people in the poorest parts of our cities for the last 30 years. I used to be the vicar in a very poor part of Birmingham, among great people who had few opportunities, and little in the way of amenities. We had a run-down old church hall, cold and damp but very well used. We hosted parent and toddler groups, a playgroup, old people’s lunch clubs, youth groups, dance groups. The place was always busy, but I wished it could be better. Standards of health and education locally were really bad and the council wanted to improve them. So did the health authority but no one wanted to go to their health centre, two bus rides away in an area where people didn’t feel safe. I wanted us to work together. We could provide the people and the safe place to meet. They could help provide appropriate health and education opportunities working with us in a re-modelled hall, a Healthy Living Centre. We needed money to get us started, and some good advice. We found both through the CUF, then as now a well-respected charity giving grants and advice to church based projects working in the most deprived parts of our country. All of their funds, then and now, are raised by volunteers like you and me. You can find more details in their website, with good advice for any voluntary group or local project starting out.
That’s why I’m looking forward to the Sleepout – for the opportunity to raise awareness and to raise funds for an organisation that’s doing such important work.
- Ven Martin Gorick, Archdeacon of Oxford
The Advent Sleepout Challenge at Christ Church, Oxford, takes place on Thursday.