Bath Abbey’s congregation has donated over £42,000 to five charities around the world, as part of the church’s annual Pentecost Appeal.
The total raised surpassed even the Abbey’s own expectations as it was £10,000 more than the amount collected from a similar Appeal last year.
The five projects that will benefit from the donations, or what the Abbey refers to as its ‘Big Five’ mission links, range from a Bible translation project bringing literacy to 35,000 people in Cameroon to helping the homeless and vulnerably housed here in Bath.
The Abbey has a particularly close working relationship with The Genesis Trust and currently supports the Lifeline drop-in centre which offers advice and support for the homeless, ex-homeless and vulnerably housed on weekdays from 1.30 to 3.30pm in the Abbey’s vaults.
The Reverend Prebendary Edward Mason, Rector of Bath Abbey, said: “The Abbey’s ‘Mission Links’ isn’t just about charitable giving. It’s also about being connected to others that we might never meet, sharing our wealth and gifts, and learning to share poverty and disadvantages.
“Our connections with each of these five projects is very special because they have been the continuing focus for the Abbey’s community for a number of years, and we have shared in their ups and downs and joined in their remarkable journeys.
“In fact, one of our Mission partners from previous years, a development project to help women-headed families in Sri Lanka, has proven to be such a great success that in just five years it has become largely self-sustainable and the need for outside funding has reduced significantly.
“This is fantastic news for the women taking part in this programme, their families as well as for the future of the programme. We’ll continue to support this project, but at a lesser scale, which will enable us to take on a new mission partner, ‘Reaching the Unreached’ in Southern India.”
For the first time, a fifth of the Abbey’s Pentecost Appeal (£8,000) will be supporting ‘Reaching the Unreached’ (RTU), a community of four children’s villages in Tamil Nadu, Southern India.
The main purpose of RTU is the care and welfare of children who have been abandoned or orphaned. Sometimes a child is just left at the gates.
RTU will take them in at any age and see them through to the end of their college studies. 14% of the children in the villages are HIV positive and more are from affected families. If they become seriously ill they will be cared for at the nearby Jeevan Joythi Hospice which RTU also supports.
Local GP Dr James Playfair and his wife, who are members of the Abbey’s congregation, played a significant role in securing the Abbey’s support for RTU.
As a Trustee of RTU which is a registered UK charity, Dr Playfair and his wife regularly visit the villages in Tamil Nadu to offer their support.
Dr James Playfair said: “In a part of the world with extreme poverty and hardship, RTU is a place of care, compassion and love. The children are universally happy and content, and have really wide smiles!
“When my wife and I visited recently, we met a 12 year old, Vishalini, who had been recovering from a serious infectionat a nearby hospice for a month. She had not wanted to leave her home at RTU and go to the hospice. There had been tears.
“We were able to take her in the jeep back home as she was better and being discharged. There were more tears. Vishalini’s story and plenty more like it show what an impact RTU has had on this remote part of Southern India and on the lives of the people who live there.”
RTU is the brainchild of Brother James Kimpton, an inspirational character who has lived in Sri Lanka and India since leaving the UK in 1952. It is now more than 35 years since Brother James heard of a group of children wandering the roads with no home and no family.
He found them a house and a foster mother and set up RTU. There are now 950 children living six to seven in small houses and all cared for by a foster mother.
Thanks to RTU hundreds of orphaned or abandoned children now have clothes, food, shelter, a home as well as a family.