When a congregation in Leicester had to move out of their dilapidated building, they were given the chance to start a fresh expression of church in a local school. With that came the opportunity to do some serious listening and to refocus church life around the needs of those they were now in contact with. Revd Alison Roche takes up the story.
I was appointed the Vicar of St Christopher's parish church in the Saffron Lane Estate in Leicester City, an urban priority area. Before I arrived, the building had fallen into a pretty grotty state, so the previous vicar started the process of looking to rebuild on the same site. Following much discussion, the Bishop raised the question of locating the parish church within a proposed Church of England Academy School. So I took the job knowing that the parish church would move in two years time.
The church had a history of being good at outreach and community involvement. They took the risk and went with it. So a couple of Septembers ago, thirty people marched with me from the old church to the new building. We are now in a fantastic location, very accessible public space, with people dropping in and out of the building all the time. I loosely have a chaplaincy role to the school, which has reframed my job, but I am still the vicar of a parish. So we have used the relocation as an opportunity to listen and explore the possibility of new forms of loving service to local people.
We have focused on the real needs of families with children, mostly because the parish is in one of the highest areas of social depravation and educational need. We have therefore consciously worked collaboratively with the school to address the particular community and spiritual needs of the area.
In the last year, the church has grown in attendance to an average of forty adults and ten children. We try to also cater for older people and single people who have got involved. It is a very welcoming church. All the new people have been local.
One of the first things we did was an after school service. The identified need was around the exploration of parents and children's spirituality at the same time as the many after school clubs. So 3pm on a school day became an opportunity for engagement. When it started, no one turned up for three weeks which was really hard. On the fourth week a couple of families turned up and it took off from there, but it was a real lesson in patience and trust. We have also managed to continue and develop relationships with families with children who go to other schools, which has been really important as we are still the church for the whole parish, not just the Academy.
Our main challenge remains how to engage more with the families of children who go to the Academy School who are not Christian and unchurched. We haven’t quite cracked this yet. The good thing about the Academy School is that there are no selection criteria for attendance which is purely geographic. So the challenge for us has been to develop an accessible Christian ethos in a Church of England school where most of the teachers, parents and children are not Christian.
Now that we have been here two years where we have established trust and joint working relationships, we are now beginning to see greater engagement from local people seeking us out for spiritual needs. So this is beginning to grow. Amongst other things, the school end of term collective worship aimed at parents and students has increasingly grown which enables our greater visibility. I hope to spend more time in the morning in the restaurant area at the heart of the school between 9 and 10am, where parents are invited to have free tea and coffee, to get to know parents who do not come to our events.
Regarding discipleship, it remains a real challenge how to engage people from a non-book culture. We have been using the START course by CPAS, but like everyone else we don’t find it easy to find appropriate resources. START is good because there are things to make and do, and is less wordy than some discipleship courses, but this is an ongoing struggle. People in a UPA are may not necessarily be the sort of people who are confident sitting around in a group. One thing that we are actively doing is to ensure discussion groups in every other Sunday service to make it more participative, more effective and grow confidence.
We hope that the Church will grow by developing small specialist congregations, which will get more missional. We hope that a recent and jointly appointed detached youth worker will in time, set up some form of youth church beyond the walls of our church buildings.
StillPoint began out of our work as Ordained Pioneers and the hOME and mayBE fresh expressions of church communities in Oxford. We became aware that there were many 'on the edge' of our work who were interested in spirituality but not religion, who would not look to the church for what they are seeking. We had become increasingly convinced that there were great resources and practices that could nurture faith coming from the contemplative tradition. One of the great opportunities for today is that ancient contemplative approaches to faith find resonance in our current post-religious context. We therefore wanted to explore how we could enable people to encounter such treasures through some form of resource centre offering ways into the practise of Christian spirituality. This could open up a depth of faith for Christians living in the 21st century, and could assist spiritual seekers to encounter the Christian contemplative tradition. This would be offered as a gift, as a way in, an accessible approach to Christian contemplative spirituality.
In a place like Oxford, the sense of being 'spiritual and not religious' is huge, so connecting with such people is important. We also wanted to do it for ourselves, so that we could be living a depth of the faith informed by such practices. The focus then has to be assisting people on their particular spiritual journey, a key area for the church to get involved in if it is serious about mission in the twenty first century.
So we began StillPoint, offering a mix of resources and possibilities. We have run a series of meditation workshops drawing on the Christian tradition. We have invited some long-experienced practitioners of the Christian contemplative tradition to run workshops and offer their insights. We have also put on an Art Exhibition on a theme, again aimed at enabling people to quest. It is very important to us that StillPoint is focused on the experiential. We want StillPoint to be a centre of practice rather than another study centre.
We have deliberately from the beginning not used church spaces, but used a cinema and a local arts café as public space, to seek the spiritual in the ordinary so that it can be trusted space for spiritual seekers. We have created a website, again aimed at those who might define themselves as spiritual and not religious.
St Paul's is an Anglican church in Willington Quay, an area of urban deprivation on the banks of the Tyne. In 2000 the church was reordered to accommodate a community project, managed by the church. Steve Dixon, Church Army Evangelist and Lay Pioneer Ministry in the Diocese of Newcastle, continues the story.
In amongst this is St Paul's Church, which was one of nine churches in the area. As the area suffered increasingly from the trauma of post-industrialisation, all the other churches were demolished as their congregations became unsustainable. In response to the increasing social needs, St Paul's Church was reordered in 2000 to accommodate a community project, managed by the church. This was a very brave decision, as St Paul's Church itself was finding it difficult to keep going.
The project aims to make a difference to local people facing deprivation, with groups and support for single parent families, young people, people living with long-term unemployment and older people. All these activities were centred on offering loving service, working in partnership with local government and other voluntary organisations. The project has created social cohesion for those engaged with it. We can expect 150 people to turn up for community events that we run, because there is now real ownership of it. My post was created by the Diocese to develop a fresh expression of church out of the work of the project, as part of a team ministry. Given that there is now a viable community, I was charged with exploring the need for discipleship and forms of worship. The two church wardens and I are the people on the ground. One of the first things we have done is to set up a new more inclusive and empowering management approach to the project, now called 'St Paul's Community Partnership', that involves local residents and institutions.
We did a lot of thinking about how we can rebuild a form of church coming out of the project. Do we start with some form of discipleship course or worship gathering as a bit of a taster – to give people room to explore questions? We chose the latter, because contextually there is real resistance to training and education type approaches, as many people here had a poor experience of education. So on Pentecost Sunday 2009 we started worship services again in the church, using the CPAS 'Start course' and adapting it to meet the discipleship needs of our context.
The Church now faces new challenges. A lot of the ex-industrial land has been bought up for new housing, for those who have money. Clearly this is not going to be the people who already live here. It seems that more affluent people living in Tyne & Wear are moving in. This raises huge issues around social cohesion, with the 'have's and the 'have not's living in different parts of our expanding village. We are currently exploring setting up some new forms of groups such as book clubs, evening classes and explorations of spirituality to engage in these 'new build' areas. We are still dreaming!