About us
Welcome and Inclusion
St Peter’s Braunstone Park is an Anglican (Church of England) church in the Diocese of Leicester serving the parish of Braunstone Park. Braunstone Park is an area of beauty and challenge which has changed dramatically since the New Deal for Communities initiative which started in 1999.
St Peter’s aims to serve the parish by praying for its people, and welcoming and including everyone we meet.
We want to welcome everybody regardless of background, age, experience, disability or ability, advantage or disadvantage. We want to encourage everyone in their journey of faith wherever they are along that path. With God’s help we want to make and serve a community where everyone can flourish.
Why we’re doing this website
We’re trying to reach people who are out of the area, looking for a church, interested in history, wanting to know what events are coming up.
We’re all part of creating a website for St. Peter’s, to communicate with the world as part of our mission.
What could someone from around the world want to know about us?
About St. Peter’s
(Written by Wednesday drop-in)
St. Peter’s is caring, to preach the gospel, there for you in times of trouble, there for the people (St. Peter’s in the community).
You feel completely at home, there’s no pressure, you’re drawn in after a while, there’s gentleness.
St. Peter’s is everybody, an anchor, where you go in trouble, welcoming.
The worship is good, happy, and we like hymns old and new as well as new songs with flow and rhythm which are attractive to new and young people.
Worship
There’s a trick in being welcoming and informal without losing a sense of the presence of the holy God (or worse, being patronising), and I guess we hope we get it right more often than wrong.
If you’re in the area, do please come and tell us how we’re doing!
- “Put on the armour of light…”
Young Rose Bateman lit the first Advent Candle on 30th November 2008, watched by Suresh Kumar (presiding at the Eucharist) and Chris Burch.
Rose lighting the Advent Candle
- If only I could talk (Poem by Linda Snutch)
If I could talk
What a tale I’d tell
I’ve seen them come
I’ve seen them go
If only I had a tongue
Babies small, children tall
They’ve had the water over them all
As they’ve grown there come to me
Weddings, funerals
I’ve seen it all
Throughout the years
Families change
Fashion too
But still they come to me
I toll my bells for all to hear
Sometimes happy
Sometimes […] - Worship at St Peter’s - What do people think?
Comments noted in discussions after the Parish Eucharist, when we were doing our Mission Audit in February 2006
What inspires? – hymns (especially rousing ones, like Shine Jesus shine!), spiritual uplift, prayers for self and others, the togetherness, readings (give an insight).
What renews? – Communion, something to think about each day, time to be still/say Sorry, […] - Worship at St Peter’s – What is it Like?
If a complete stranger came to the main service at St Peter’s, what would they experience?
(In fact, we do get visitors, so this is an important question for us.)
The service is mainstream Anglican, even “middle-of-the-road”. We start at 10am and nearly every Sunday morning service is a Parish Eucharist, with robed clergy and server. […]
Working in Partnership
We are part of the Braunstone Faiths Forum, and Churches Together in South West Leicester.
- Braunstone Faiths Forum
When the New Deal for Communities started in 2000, the newly-formed Braunstone Community Association (BCA) needed a way to liaise with the local churches and religious groups working in the area. Two community workers in Braunstone contacted the different churches and set up the Braunstone Faiths Forum - their names were Ruth Souter and […]
- Churches Together in South West Leicester
CTiSWL began 40 years ago with the Fish Scheme. Older people who needed help would put a red card with a Christian Fish symbol in their window. A warden for that street (who was keeping an eye open) would then visit. During the 1970s the scheme was gradually taken over by Social […]
Shaped by God
In 2006, we went through a process of auditing our mission, and creating an action plan to take our mission forward - as part of the Diocesan “Shaped by God” process. You can download our Mission Audit report and the Mission Action Plan we came up with. Our earlier Parish Audit report (8MB) from February 2005 was useful to us in this process.
- Mission Action Plan Update - September 2009
The Leadership Team and Parochial Church Council (PCC) have reviewed our Mission Action Plan, and this is the result - it’s also on a poster in the Church Hall.
1 - Empowering Our People
Review of Giving (done in September)
Convene Pastoral Care Group
Midweek Bible Study Group (September - then Advent)
Training for Readers and Intercessors
2 - Making New […] - West Leicester Mission Partnership
After some negotiations, five churches in our part of Leicester have agreed to form a Mission Partnership together. This will replace the Cluster, as all the Cluster churches are in the new Partnership.
The Partner churches are: St Peter’s Braunstone Park, Holy Apostles, Church of the Martyrs, St Anne’s Letchworth Road and St Paul’s Kirby […] - St Peter’s and “Shaped by God”
God shapes his people like a potter shapes clay (Jeremiah 18). The Bishop of Leicester has pointed out that the Church of England is being shaped – uncomfortably – by what’s happening at the moment. The culture in Western Europe is becoming more and more distant from its Christian roots, so that the […]
Mission Links
We have just decided (in January 2008) to form links with three new mission organisations - the Diocese of Trichy-Tanjore in the Church of South India, Malcolm and Ruth Lambert working in Belize, Central America, and famine relief and fair trade support in the Nandom area of Ghana.
In 2004 we had decided to adopt some links with the wider church, and support them with regular prayer and by giving a tenth of our church’s income, divided between them. We chose Geoff and Gill Kimber, working with CMS in the churches in Romania, Hope Africa, a community development organisation in South Africa, and the Welcome Project, working with asylum seekers and refugees here in Leicester. In 2007, we reviewed this commitment and decided to continue this pattern for the time being, but that autumn the Kimbers decided to come back to the UK - Geoff is now a vicar in Winson Green, Birmingham.
We took the opportunity to review all our mission links, and came up with the three new ideas mentioned above. Yes, they are all people we know personally - but that isn’t a bad thing! We hope our links will have three elements - prayer, giving and personal contact through letters and emails etc. In that way we can experience what it means to belong to the world-wide church, and help in the task of bringing God’s justice to some of the poorest people of the world.
- Famine Relief in Nandom, Upper West Ghana
Last September a series of disastrous floods washed away the houses and crops of a belt of land across northern Africa, including this part of Ghana.
When Chris Burch’s daughter Rebecca spoke to her friend Thomas Sekgura, he was cheerful and optimistic (as always). “Never mind: we’ll rebuild our homes - they were made of […] - Malcolm and Ruth Lambert in Belize
Belize is a small country on the Eastern side of Central America. Its seaboard is the Caribbean, and the strong Caribbean contingent in St Peter’s congregation will see Belize as a near neighbour.
Malcolm and Ruth are Leicester friends and colleagues. Ruth was, until recently, chaplain at Leicester General Hospital and Malcolm was Team […] - Diocese of Trichy-Tanjore
The diocese of Trichy-Tanjore is in the state of Tamil-Nadu, South India. It stretches from the East coast (badly hit by the Tsunami a few years ago) inland to the hills of central South India. The city of Trichy is inland, roughly in the middle of the diocese. Apart from the coastal […]
- News from an old friend Thierry
Thierry Bahizi, who spent 3 months with us in 2003 on a Mission Exchange programme working with asylum seekers, has been ordained Deacon in the Anglican Church of Burundi.
Thierry in his Deacon’s robes
At the time of his visit, Thierry was himself a refugee from the violence in Burundi, and came to us from Tanzania where […] - The Kimbers
The Revs Geoff and Gill Kimber are working with the Church Mission Society (CMS) in Romania, teaching English and Theology and forming links with the different churches there. (Under the former Communist regime, the Orthodox and Protestant churches were played off against each other, leaving a sad residue of suspicion which hinders their mission.)
After […]