Annandale Churches Together in south west Scotland ran summer holiday clubs in a local secondary school for many years. Very few of the children involved had any relationship with existing churches. Pam Mellor and Deborah Steele explain how Fridays in Faith has helped to bridge the gap.
The holiday clubs in Annan were really, really successful. They took place in an Academy and attracted about 150 children on average but they seemed to disappear as soon as the clubs were over.
Then the questions started, 'Where do they go afterwards? Why don't they come to church?' We said, 'Maybe church is not the place for them. Maybe we should ask if there is something else we should be doing.' Amazingly it was as if everyone had the same thought.
We had a team of 60 helpers for the holiday clubs and we all started to think about what this alternative would look like. After discussion, thought and prayer we thought about going back to the Academy on a Friday night to run something which would incorporate a lot of the key components of a holiday club – things like fun and food and games – but for all ages. The Academy costs about £150 to hire so we went to the churches and asked for their support in this.
Fridays in Faith is backed by Annandale Churches Together, an ecumenical group that includes Annan Old Parish Church, St Andrew's Parish Church linked with Brydekirk Parish Church, Annan United Reformed Church, St John's Episcopal Church, and St Columba's Catholic Church.
They were fantastic, simply saying, 'It's a great idea and we will support you!'
Our first step as co-leaders and co-planners of Fridays in Faith was to find out whether the people themselves actually wanted us to do something. We recognised that those who were coming along to the holiday clubs were not anti-church: it was simply that church wasn't even on their radar. In saying that, there were a number of kids from church families at the holiday club as well so we could see there were great opportunities for those within our churches – as well as outside – to grow together as a community.
On the final day of a holiday club with an Olympics-type theme of Going for Gold we did a 'closing ceremony' when nearly all of the children's parents came along. At the end of the session we stood up – very nervously – and said, 'We would like to ask you all something. We recognise that you love your kids coming here and you are enthusiastic about it all. We also recognise that church isn't working for you for whatever reason. Would you be interested in joining us as we would like to offer something for the whole family? We would set up and run the whole thing but would you like to come along on the first Friday of the month?'
The answer was clearly 'yes' with more than 140 people coming back for the first Friday night session. We read out a statement on that first night to set out what we were there for and we often remind ourselves of it to help us keep focused on the work in hand.
The statement reads:
If what we do here tonight, helps you to find faith, or helps you get to know God better, then that's what we're about.
Faith is a journey and people have helped us on our way. That is all we are trying to do – give people a little bit of help on their faith journey.
These evenings are about fellowship, fun and faith in a new and different way.
We hope that you will have a good time with your own family and with each other, that will be great.
If in time, in coming here, we all become closer to God, then that will be a wonderful blessing. Thank you all for being here and journeying with us.
Each session has a biblical theme running through it. Everything is centred on different activity tables and many of the people who helped with the holiday club became table hosts. Each table works as a team, moving from one activity to another throughout the evening. But on that first night they didn't have time to complete the activities before they had to move on to the next thing. It ran for two hours and we simply tried to cram too much in to the programme!
So we cut back on the time to 90 minutes and allowed a breathing space in activities. Now people have the opportunity to sit and talk during supper time.
We also have a time of prayer, when people are free to join in with us or not.
In terms of planning for the sessions, we meet every week. We set a theme for the year and follow it through each month. This year we are looking at travel, with Peter's journey as the Bible thread.
We told people that we would be looking at faith as a journey and that we'd imagine it as a journey in a car. For the first session we asked, 'How do you go about buying a car?' We thought about listening to people, listening to other opinions, having a look at what was available, counting the cost of it and getting in the car and having a test drive.
An interesting process involved stringing up a very long washing line on which we had pegged A1 sheets with various statements written on them about where you were on your faith journey. At one end of the line we had, 'I don't think there is anything' through 'I think there is something but I'm not sure what' through to things like 'I do think there is a God but I'm not involved in church' and 'I really do believe God is in my life'. There were also blank sheets of paper in between so that people could mark where they thought they were on this washing line.
What was so interesting about that was the fact that so many of our church helpers felt they could be really honest about how they actually felt on their own personal journeys of faith.
The sessions went on to include the MOT for which we looked at the Beatitudes; and Breakdown – which was our Easter session.
We set out on this journey to do 3 months and we have just come to the end of 3 years! We recognise that there are still many questions as we go forward and many issues for us to consider, such as offering the Sacraments. We have broken bread, but recognise that this is not Communion.
All of these issues of leadership and Sacraments come up again and again. We have to stop and think, 'Are we leaders? Are we getting it right?' Sometimes we both wrestle with that a great deal.
It's also difficult when people ask us whether it is 'church' or not. The label of 'church' can be a very real stumbling block to people, we want it to be a place of God's Kingdom where people can cry, ask questions and be real. We didn't know the word 'intentionality'; we didn't know the word 'incarnational' – all we thought about was, 'These are our families. How can we connect with them? How can we make faith more relevant and more real? How can we move them on in that faith?' We're still not sure whether we're going to run Alpha because once you introduce a course like that the concern is that you're imposing something that doesn't quite fit with the context and culture of your emerging community.
For the future, we realise that we have limits as co-leaders and some people have already stepped forward to get involved in various aspects of the work. Our funding runs until the middle of April next year and we continue to listen to God as to what he wants for Fridays in Faith. However, if our Presbytery wants to do something else, we have to be ready for that – if Fridays in Faith has served its purpose in helping the people in the churches to see what's possible by looking at things differently, then so be it.
For now, we continue to be excited at what God is doing in Annan and are blessed to be a part of it.
John Marrow is a Church Army evangelist working in Guildford. He works with local schools and runs an after school midweek fresh expression of church for families in three different locations across the diocese.
Do people think of it as a church? I think it's a mix. Some people, when they first come, see it as a club while others decide to come along because they don't see traditional church as meeting the needs of their children. A further group would see it very much as 'their' church because a standard setting is very alien and strange to them.
One of our previous themes was Godzworkus Circus and I was Jonno the clown. When I first did that, the kids realised that I didn't actually mind being a fool for Jesus. We want the children to know that it doesn't mean that you're boring if you go to church; we can be full of life and have fun.
It has now got to the stage at Emmanuel where we're thinking along the lines of 'what's the next step?' I work closely with the staff team there and a major question at the moment centres on the Year 6 boys who think KidsAlive325 is now 'too young' for them.
At Emmanuel we have already celebrated a baptism from one of our KidsAlive325 families. This was a major step forward because, years ago, that particular family had been 'turned away' from a church and they had real bitterness about the institution of church and all that it stood for.
The development of St Mary's After School Club (SMASH) started in September 2009 when I approached two members of the church I attend, and asked them whether they would be prepared to help me re-launch an after school club I had been running a couple of years previously which I had to close down due to the pressure of my own training for ministry.
It was during the first term of 2010 that one of the original mums involved with SMASH approached me and asked if she could have 'a chat'. We met over a period of weeks talking about her spiritual journey, and how she felt that she was wanting to find a new way of living. This led to talk of baptism, and eventually on December 11 we held a special baptism service in the newly acquired school chapel, with a gathering of a combination of church family and new friends from SMASH.
SMASH uses a very simple formula. We meet at 3.30pm opening with a prayer and the lighting of a candle, when we remind ourselves of the words of Jesus which we say together, 'I am the light of the world. He who follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life'. We then have a game followed by a song, after which we play one more game and have one more song. After that we have a short time of Bible teaching, which usually includes some kind of interaction with the children. This then leads into a time when we do some craft, based on the theme of the teaching for the afternoon. An interactive time of prayer follows this, and we end by eating tea together. This has been a key part of the afternoon, as it is where relationships are built and deepened.
We are very excited with what God seems to be doing in our midst. It is like having sown a mustard seed, and we are now watching it grow under our noses. Others from the main church have felt called to this ministry, and the leadership group has now grown to six members.
Further ideas we want to develop with SMASH are a summer beach outing with young families from the local Sure Start Children's Centre, alongside the SMASH families. A couple of staff from the Children's Centre have been helping to look after children aged 0-3 during SMASH meetings as a joint working initiative. They too are very excited by this idea, as it covers both our visions of trying to reach members of our local community, and serve them in different ways.
One of the school's developmental aims has been to increase opportunity to explore spirituality, and provide space for developing that spirituality within individuals. SMASH helps towards meeting this goal; but more than this, its very presence within the life of the school speaks louder than any words can. It exists as an open invitation to anyone who feels they want to explore faith in a non threatening environment, where they will find Christians and members of the local school community enjoying each others company and having fun together.
Reside is a Christian project evolving in response to growing housing developments to the south of Loughborough. It is led by Methodist Deacon Ellie Griffin, Reside's full-time paid worker.
It was only 25 years ago that the whole of the Fairmeadows estate was nothing more than a farmer's field. Eventually the community will consist of about 1600 homes. When the original plans for this development (known as Grange Park) were first set in place, the churches in Loughborough saw the need for the potential community to be developed and so looked to appointing a full time worker to live on the estate. I moved here with my family in September 2007.
A five-year funding plan was put in place for us so we are now at the stage of looking at how things can be sustained in future. We are already starting to get some income from the local community but it's nowhere near enough for us to be financially sustainable – and that's in an affluent area! How can people hope to achieve that sustainability in poorer areas?
The story of alive and kicking goes back to 1991 when the Methodist and Anglican churches in Kinver organised a week-long Rob Frost mission. Out of this came a drop-in event at the church hall called 'Hole in the Wall' for the young people who hung around the church premises in the evenings. Shortly after this, another group had to be started as an alternative for the church kids who felt threatened at Hole in the Wall and, in the end, the behaviour of young people at Hole in the Wall became such that it had to be stopped.
That was to change when numbers got too big to continue in front rooms and the group moved into the church hall. However numbers were very soon low enough to move back into front rooms! So in 2001, we had a look at other possible venues and fixed on the newly-refurbished 'youth hut' – located on the edge of the school premises and run by the County Youth Services. They agreed to gives us free use of the building. We're now part of the management group set up to maintain and run the venue after the Youth Services let it go.
We finish with a prayer time. Again, we try and vary the way we do this to give as broad an understanding of prayer as possible and allow people to find the way they can best build a relationship with God. One of the things we're keen to avoid is running a youth group and shoe-horning in a five-minute 'God slot'. Instead we want to try and model Christian community in all that we do; some of our best conversations about what it means to follow Jesus in our whole lives have come on the football pitch or over a drink.
Already in 2001 we were seeing fewer churched young people coming and more young people who were not regular churchgoers. Indeed we're now at the stage where the majority of young people who come don't go to church, a significant number have never been in a church and several have to go back to their grandparents for any church experience. It also became increasing obvious to us that, despite our best invitations, most of the young people who came along on a Sunday night would not make the transition to a Sunday morning church service. The key barriers seem to be didactic teaching with no opportunity to interact or question, not feeling valued or part of the community, the timing of services, and seeing it as irrelevant. As a result we have explored different ways of building elements of church amongst the alive and kicking community.
We ran a couple of small groups for 17 to 18-year-olds where they could build friendships and explore more adult questions than were appropriate on a Sunday night. We've tried several different sung worship 'praise' events such as 'akpraise' and 'Worship on Wednesday' which were very good for a time. A Sunday morning event called 'eleven' also ran for a couple of years, attempting to bridge the gap between the Sunday morning congregations and the Sunday night alive and kicking. None of these were long-lasting, but all were extremely useful for those that were part of them, all of them helped people grow in discipleship (which couldn't have been done just as part of the Sunday night meeting) and all of them contributed to the ongoing story of building God's community.
One of the tensions around alive and kicking has always been its place in the Christian life of the village. We don't see alive and kicking as a church, but some of the young people who come would consider it their church. The two traditional congregations in Kinver have often struggled to understand how young people meeting off church premises can be part of the Church in the village and wondered why they're not seeing any new 'recruits' to the pews.
Our current leadership team, nearly all of whom came to faith as young people through the work of alive and kicking, meet together for an evening every week to plan and prepare for the coming week's session and, equally importantly, to share in prayer, fellowship and food! One of the interesting things has been how community has developed amongst those who have been involved in leadership over the years. A couple of house groups now running started from these weekly leadership meetings.
We know that alive and kicking will only ever reach some young people. Many just don't want to engage in organised groups for instance, and for them it's never going to scratch where they itch. For others, a games and discussion format doesn't engage them. Our current vision is to start a network of small activity-based groups alongside alive and kicking to broaden the ways young people can encounter God. We've started a photography group and there are plans for a drama group to start soon with several more in the pipeline. The aim of each of these groups is to explore what it means to encounter God through their activity – how, as people who really enjoy photography or drama or sport or cooking, can we relate that to God – and how can we relate God to that activity and our wider lives.
One of the dangers of having so many small groups is that they all head off in their own directions and we build a load of small ghettos so we want to connect everything with a new monthly gathering called 'breathing space', which draws together people from all the different small groups, from alive and kicking, from the leadership team, the house groups and the traditional congregations. We plan to meet over food in an informal setting to worship, to build relationships between groups and generations and to have fun. Whilst individual groups may only be for a particular niche, with breathing space we want to build a place were people from the whole diverse body of Christ can meet together.
As for the future, we're excited to see how the new small groups and 'breathing space' take off. No doubt some will last, some will change and some will be for a short time only. We also have a dream for a Christian youth drop-in space in the village somewhere – an idea which echoes the original 'Hole in the Wall'. It has not happened yet but the thinking and praying about that space is what shaped our vision and values, led to the pastoral support and prayer team, the establishing of a board of trustees and many other aspects of the work.
Sometimes we have theme evenings at Holy Commotion when we get involved in other activities as part of our act of worship. Truro Methodist Church's Speaking in Drums group has visited us a couple of times.
So we decided to launch Holy Commotion! in the school hall. We now have a very committed bunch of people and the way we break it down generally is that I do the 'bits' that requires someone with a dog collar and they do the 'commotion'. It's very informal and, to my mind, combines the best of both worlds to establish some kind of early church model.
Holy Commotion! is quite intensive in terms of energy and resources – and of course I have the life of the wider parish to look after as well but thankfully, because this is 21st century, I can communicate with the Holy Commotion! people extensively via email, text or Facebook.
Church Army evangelist Captain Andy Milne first launched Sorted in 2004. As a keen skateboarder he got to know the area's young skaters, many of whom went on to become founder members of the youth church in north Bradford. Now skateboarding is just one of many activities they enjoy every week, explains Andy.
Fridays will see us have a testimony, short talk for about five minutes and then different activities in the various rooms. Last year we asked the young people what they wanted to do at this session. We have to be facilitators in it – otherwise they are going to get bored. There's quite a wide age range for this one, it's about 11 to 20, and the older teens run it with some adults as well. We can get 40 or 50 people coming to that.
When we started, one of the ways I was able to build relationships was through the skateboarding but it's quite a small part now. It has been good to see a lot of young people come from very different backgrounds to be part of this and I have been privileged to witness young people having experiences of God on a Monday night, come to faith and develop into leaders and disciples.
There was a real sense that God was asking us to go there. Then one lady had a picture of God giving us a key, opening up something that hadn't been open for some time. People were amazed when we were then invited to go in. As a result we started working with youngsters there and developing groups. We now see about 30 young people every week in Sorted 2. It’s a massive thing for us.
That could clearly be seen earlier this year when six of our teenagers were baptised by the then Bishop of Bradford, Rt Revd David James, in the River Wharfe. A further five then joined them to be confirmed and take Communion by the side of the river in Ilkley. We find that the young people often have an experience of God before they follow him. Rather than a gradual intellectual process, they often have an encounter with God and begin to make sense of it later.
After many years of working in the area, Greenwich United Church (United Reformed and Methodist) has started a fresh expression of church on the Greenwich Peninsula. SACRED explores the sacred in body, mind, heart and spirit. Revd Martyn Coe explains more.
We meet in Millennium Primary School on Wednesday nights for about an hour-and-a-half and have a four weekly pattern encompassing worship, reflection, thinking creativity and symbolic action. We look at Heart – looking inside ourselves; Body – worship reflecting on the whole body of Christ throughout the world; Spirit – communion influenced by the Iona Community and Head – using a DVD study course to explore faith.
There is undoubtedly pressure on developers to keep to that deadline – otherwise it will still be 3,000 parking spaces by 2012. That wouldn’t look too good with the world's cameras trained on London!
We are looking to welcome to people when they move into the area, a sort of drop-in facility. As part of that we are in talks with the local authority and the Scout District about starting Beavers and Cubs to meet immediately before SACRED.
We also need to be aware that in many of these new developments what looks like public space may not be public space at all. I may think I'm on public property because it's an open, green area but I could be asked to leave it because I am actually on private land.
We are talking about offering daily prayer there in the middle of the day. Everyone involved is hoping that it will work together but we have been very, very clear that what we are doing is a multi faith activity rather than an inter faith activity. We are people of faith working alongside each other for the common good.