Diocesan Strategy Update 16 September 2024
We are really grateful for the team of people from across the diocese who have formed the four working groups developing our strategic plan. They have been meeting since May, supporting Jon Pocock (Strategic Programme Director) as we pull together our detailed thinking in each of the four work streams:
- Growing our Missional Health - helping each worshipping community (of which parishes are a main constituent) grow in their personal discipleship to Jesus Christ, and their mission together in their local community
- Increasing our Missional Reach - helping each worshipping community to reach those key demographics in their local context who are not currently part of their worshipping community - in particular this is about helping us becoming younger and more diverse
- Planting new Missional Communities - helping each worshipping community to be inspired to plant one new worshipping community by 2030, and looking at specific strategic planting / collaborative mission opportunities
- Developing Missional Leadership - encouraging and supporting our existing leaders (ordained, licensed, employed, volunteers), and creating the pathways to ensure that we can grow, train and release more people into missional leadership.
It’s a huge and exciting piece of work, and we’ll be using our ebulletin to bring you bitesize updates and details of how you can help. As a starting point, Jon’s asked us to pray for the process and progress.
‘Pray looking of the window’
Jon says: ‘Our vision is to bless the 1.5 million people in our community who haven't yet encountered Jesus. But this mission of salvation is not ours, it's God's, and so we need to start by listening to the one who goes before us. So, we'd love to encourage you to join with us as we pray looking out of the window each day, thinking about what’s going on in our communities and outside of our churches. We need to remain alert, asking for a sense of where the Holy Spirit is already at work, aware of the places we are being led to and the people that we are bumping into. What is God already doing among us in our local context, and how can we join in?”