(To note: Completion of this project is subject to further funding and various building permissions.)

St Francis of Assisi CofE Church in Bournville is approaching its 100th year anniversary in 2025 and one of the many ways in which we are celebrating this notable milestone is to create a stained glass window using ideas from the entire Bournvillian community and beyond - anyone with links to Bournville.  
 
It has been important to choose a theme for this window which sums up what is significant both in the past, the present and the future for the church and its surroundings, and there could be many things that would meet that target, but in Bournville, probably the most outstanding thing which comes to everyone’s mind is the environment.
 
Bournville was created by the Cadbury brothers as a factory in a garden village situated four miles out of Birmingham, and they ploughed back their profits into creating housing and community living for ordinary people away from the slums that factories were often surrounded by.
 
The result is an amazingly beautiful and green area which has been described as one of the happiest places to live in.
 
This centenary stained glass window is being designed using ideas from the entire community of Bournville.  The theme is the beauty of Bournville, and also the ethos of St Francis himself who was the first known eco-warrior 800 years ago, in that he regarded the natural world as equal to himself, describing parts of nature as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’: ‘Brother Sun’ and ‘Sister Moon’ . . . as seen in his ‘Canticle of the Sun’.  This is good as it focuses us all on caring for our world at a time when it is so necessary.
 
This has meant reaching out to all the many communities within the community including: schools, businesses, residents, clubs, churches, societies and places where people meet.
 
We have had a Creativity, Coffee and Cake event where we invited people from the entire community to come to offer their ideas in ways which would encourage them to use their imagination and not feel pressured or inadequate.  We had visual ways in to generating ideas, and also ways in using words.  It was very well attended and has added to the gradual accumulation of ideas.
 
We are also inviting everyone to contribute whatever they feel moved to create along the lines we have given, and we are having a number of fantastic responses from different schools, groups and individuals.  Examples of this are a knitted stained glass window, a stone carving, a needlework piece, paintings, poems, prose, computer graphics, etc.etc.  At the end of the entire project we are going to have a celebration of everyone’s contributions in a huge exhibition alongside the installed window.  We have had hundreds of offerings so far.
 
This is proving to be a very exciting way to bring people together from the wider community alongside the church community, and give people a common sense of having contributed to something that will outlast us all.