Although the millennium was a few years ago now it’s still a very special time!
Many people spent a lot of money to commemorate this time, just look how many things are devoted to the millennium even now!
For the millennium our church wanted to do something special, after all it was very special for all churches! We spent lots of time having meetings to decide what to do, first it’s important to decide what you want the money to do before actually starting planning as otherwise you may not be able to raise enough money.
There were lots of proposals, from creating a beautiful landscaped garden, to fitting a new stained glass window in the church. After a lot of debate we decided to install a brand new stained glass window in the church, trust me it took a lot of debating!
Anyway once we are decided we had to do some research to find out where we can get a stained glass window from, they’re not the sort of things that anyone had brought before! We had to choose an artist, which was more difficult than you might imagine.
Many people wanted to have a traditional window, but other people didn’t like that idea because there were already windows like that.
Many people argued that the millennium should be celebrated using modern designs, rather than simply putting a normal stained glass window in the church, it was important for it to look different and special.
Anyway we finally found the artist and some people went to check his work out, they were impressed! Even the people that wanted a traditional window were impressed because it wasn’t as abstract as they might of thought.
We did however get quite a shock when we learnt the price, the stained glass window would end up costing us around £20,000 ($40,000) which is a lot of money for anyone, especially our small little church! Some people felt like giving up; while others urged us to plow on to get the money.
We had a little under a year to raise the money, so we worked out exactly how much we would need to raise each month. We then asked for people to become “Golden Angels” These are people that would promise to meet the monthly targets if we can’t meet them.
For example if we said that we would earn £1000 in January but only earned £500 then they would promise to pay the remaining £500.
This was actually a very clever idea and a good way of making sure that our targets would be met, fortunately I don’t think we ever actually needed to ask them for help because we did ok.
We elected someone to keep records of the donations, and the profits from any fundraising activities we did. We also teamed up with the local school to hold events to raise money.
One of the best ways of making money was when we took a van over to France, filled up with cheep alcohol then sold it to everyone in the village! Of course this is not technically legal, but the police knew about it and even brought some crates off us! It just goes to show that you really can make money if you know how!
Raising money for the church’s stained glass window was a challenge, however we managed it and now it looks fantastic! I wouldn’t change a thing about it as I love it to bits!