Redevelopment plan for Aldersgate building

Press, 30 May 1987, Page 9

Redevelopment plan for Aldersgate building

The Christchurch Central Methodist Mission’s Aldersgate building in Durham Street is being redeveloped to enable the mission’s administration, social services, and church worship to be housed on the one site. The mission’s administrative buildings are in Cambridge Terrace. The Durham Street site already comprises the historic 123-year-old Methodist church, a hall and the Aldersgate building, built in 1967. The Aldersgate workshops have been relocated to 176 Durham Street, to specially modified premises owned by the mission. The $820,000 redevelopment of the Aldersgate building will include an extension to the upper floor on the Durham

Street frontage and to the o back of the building. A r key feature wijl be a

concourse to be built between the church and the Aldersgate building. The hall will also be refurbished.

The cost of the redevelopment would be largely met by mission trust funds that were available for this purpose, said the mission superintendent, the Rev. John Roberts.

Bequests, grants and donations made to the mission for social service purposes would be used in the way intended and not for resiting, he said. The Cambridge Terrace site, which consists of two old houses adapted for office use about 30 years ago, would be leased, but would remain in the ownership of the Methodist Church, said Mr Roberts.

The possibility of redevelopment on one site was foreshadowed in

1973, when the Methodist Conference sanctioned the amalgamation of the Central Mission in Cambride Terrace and the Durham Street church. Durham Street was chosen as the site for the redevelopment five years ago. It was chosen because of the concentration of people in the immediate area during the day, its closeness to the law courts and subsequent “human pain,” and because it was near an inner-city residential area, Mr Roberts said.

The alterations, once completed in November, would give expression to the Methodist "worship and mission” approach to social services, he said. "Worship and mission belong together as the Church’s response to the activity of God in Jesus Christ.”