Flintwood Community Garden

For the past couple of years, Flintwood Methodist Church have been developing a community garden, where people are given the opportunity to garden and talk about faith. Today we gave them a visit to see it in action.

Ian Ogley, who cofounded and manages the project shares how a local resident was unsure of the idea at first, preferring the abandoned space to be used as a car park, but ended up donating a large amount towards it. Today they have a good relationship and are able to have times of prayer. Ian goes on to say;

'if you're a church who is running a community garden, people will come up and say "where are you from?" and we say, we're from the Methodist Church. They then say "why would a church want to do a garden?" and we tell them it's a mess and we want to tidy it up, and in a way that is what God does with people.'

Ian goes on to talk about how there are a lot of gardening metaphors that can be used to explore faith, whether that be cutting a tree back, or sowing seeds.