When I moved to Cherry Hinton, I was also searching for some meaning to life as well. Just previously, I had been living with some friends who introduced me to the pagan life, and although it was interesting in places, in other areas I grew frightened, so when I moved it was with a renewed sense of purpose that I started looking again at the Christian church. I say again because I had been brought up in the Christian traditions, but during my teenage years I let it lapse; I had not achieved any sense of understanding or acceptance, and it felt wrong to go to church without getting that.
I now believe this was partly because the Anglican churches I had been attending were making no real effort to educate and involve people like me at the time, although I doubt I was in a good place to receive it, either! By "happy chance" next door to my new house in Cambridge were two christians who were very active in the local Baptist Church. I plucked up the courage to go one day, and haven't stopped! It was a gradual thing, though. At first I was happy to get to know people and I was lucky that there was a very strong church housegroup that I could join. Some time after I started attending, I was taken ill for a couple of weeks and a friend kindly looked after me. During that time I had the chance to really consider what I thought and felt, and decided to apply for the baptism course and full membership. In our church we have a full baptistry, in which we can do a full adult immersion. It is very different to the sprinkling of a few drops of water, but good, too.
Later on, I started to get more involved, regularly attending the church youth group on a friday evening, the church administration meetings and, when the opportunity arose, taking over the production of the newsletter. Although that first time I gave it up after a year or so due to pressure of work, later I was able to restart and have been doing it for over 5 years now as a 12 or 16 page A5 booklet.
Community Newsletter 2007
While the internal newsletters are, well, internal, I have contributed more publicly too: the community newsletter was designed and published by me (using InDesign) and delivered to over 3000 residents in the area in 2007. We have done similar things more recently, too. I enjoy this sort of publishing - it's great fun to make something that looks good and has a real purpose too.
I also helped to set up the church website, providing programming advice, the web server space, and bandwidth. This originally used the wiki MoinMoin to provide a web-editable platform so others in the church can edit, and in 2011 a new site was built using Drupal 7, and in 2019 that was replaced by a new one using Drupal 8.
The Church has gone through many changes in the time I have been with them, not least the loss of several long-term members and the calling of a new minister. We do a lot in the community, for example an annual Holiday Bible Club, a weekly choir, and several sorts of child, youth, and retirement groups.!