Growing Faith Hub grants available for £10,000
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The Growing Faith Adventure is a call for a shift in attitude and culture so that it becomes second nature for every member of the church to include and value children, young people and households in every aspect of church life for the lifelong formation of faith in the whole of life.
Growing Faith promotes a partnership between the three communities of church, school and household to enable the discovery, exploration and growth of faith for all in those communities. The partnership is imagined as intersections of a set of overlapping spheres to find and promote ways to help faith grow with children, young people and households.
Each 'sphere' might already be interacting with one of the others, but very few contexts demonstrate clear and fruitful interaction between all three - the 'central intersection'. The intersections encourage joint ventures or activities for developing prayer and gathering for worship, leading to conversations about Christian faith being normalised. The question Growing Faith is asking of worshipping communities is whether our doing has helped us become the whole people of God. Do the activities we organise and attend help our faith to form and flourish, understanding ourselves in the context of God’s love and God’s story?
Growing Faith Principles
Three principles are shaping our approach to Growing Faith:
Connected Communities - looking for the meaningful connected community of faith in the intersection between church, school and households
Spiritual Encounters - engaging in conversations about and expressing faith as people encounter God as individuals and together
Imaginative Practices - searching for 'new ways of being church' and creating new thinking and new doing in relation to children, young people and households.
Assessing any activity, vision or attitude through the three Growing Faith principles helps to draw the thinking toward that central intersection where all three communities are operating in partnership.
The vision is a call to aim for the central intersection of the three spheres, so that our communities of faith might include and value children and young people as fellow pilgrims in all aspects of their life.
Youth, Children and Families Adviser - Jonny Masters - Email: jonathan.masters@chester.anglican.org
Jonny worked for seven years at Christ Church Alsager as their youth leader, and has been with the Diocese since 2017. He is passionate about the Church being a shining beacon in communities and every child, young person and family having access to a vibrant, welcoming and worshipful church in their locality. He is keen to help churches in the Diocese develop and grow in their ministry with children, young people and families. Jonny enjoys kayaking and walking with his dogs, Mozart and Ruby.