St Peter's, Torry, and the Food Co-op

The 2004 site kept one page for a congregation that was not St John's at all: St Peter's, Torry, a small church on Victoria Road linked to the Crown Terrace parish and given its own named page beside the cafe, the kindergarten and the choristers. The page names its own services, its own clergy, and its own ministry: a Thursday morning Food Co-op, by 2004 already in its fourth year.

A congregation of its own, inside the parish

The page's own title makes the relationship explicit: "The Church of St John the Evangelist, Aberdeen, with St Peter's, Torry." St Peter's kept its own service pattern, distinct from the Crown Terrace times: Holy Communion at 8.30 on the first Sunday of the month only, Holy Communion again at 11.15 every Sunday, and a Taizé Communion on Wednesday evenings. A congregation with its own weekly rhythm, in a different part of the city, is not a satellite chapel run off the main building's rota. It is a parish within the parish, and the 2004 board gave it the same courtesy as every other named page: a title, a service list, and a way to find it.

The building behind St Peter's Court

The page records a detail easy to miss and worth keeping: the church building that the congregation used by 2004 stood behind the original St Peter's, which had by then been converted into St Peter's Court, a residential home. The page gives the access route plainly, through the gate beside St Peter's Court on Victoria Road. A congregation that keeps meeting next door to its own former building, now a residential home under a different roof, is a small piece of Aberdeen's own church history folded into the parish's own notice board: the building changed use, the congregation did not move far, and the page kept both facts on the record rather than smoothing them into a single clean address.

The Food Co-op, in its fourth year

The page's longest paragraph is not about services at all. It describes the St Peter's Food Co-op, held every Thursday morning and, by the time of the capture, in its fourth year of operation. The arrangement is set out without embellishment: members of the congregation search the supermarkets each week for bargains, stock the Co-op with what they find, and sell the provisions at supermarket prices to people who cannot easily get to the shops themselves. The page adds that the Co-op meets in the warmth of the church building and doubles as a social spot, a place for a coffee and to catch up on news, and that many of the people who come are residents of St Peter's Court next door, the very building the congregation's own church once was.

A food co-op run by volunteers who shop for bargains on behalf of neighbours who cannot shop for themselves is unglamorous, weekly, unpaid work, the kind that rarely gets a press mention and almost never gets its own page on a church website. St Peter's gave it one anyway, filed as plainly as the service times above it.

Named officers, not an anonymous office

The page names its clergy directly: the Revd Isaac M Poobalan as rector, the same rector who served St John's on Crown Terrace, and the Revd John Duthie as deacon, alongside two lay readers, Margaret Richardson and Alan Finch, with Mrs Richardson also serving as secretary and treasurer. A linked congregation listing its own deacon, readers and treasurer is itself a small piece of evidence about how the two churches divided their public record: St Peter's spoke for itself, under its own byline, rather than appearing only as a line in the main parish's account.

How the board files it

One slip for the congregation the main board rarely mentions on its own pages: St Peter's, Torry, its own services, its own deacon, and a Thursday morning Food Co-op that had already run for four years by the time the page was captured, coffee and bargains and company for neighbours who could not get to the shops.