On Saturday July 14th we have our next in the series of discipleship days at St Paul’s Chippenham. This is the third movement in the progression from thinking about developing our own spiritual journey; through reflecting on how the church enables us to live as Christians in our everyday lives to thinking about how we can work together towards enabling growth in discipleship.
Finding ways of supporting one another can be an antidote to a sense of isolation that the parish system can sometimes create. Jesus models a way of working that is built on deep and trusting relationships. Our hope is that this day will inspire us in our leadership and in the teams we work with to leave us filled with hope and renewed confidence in our church communities.
The day will be led by Lead Academy who have worked with over 300 churches and 1000+ church leaders (lay and ordained) to enable people to build effective and positive teams that work collaboratively. Using the model of a house with four rooms which shelter under a roof of prayer, they will help us to reflect on four key areas for teams through the day – purpose and culture; the benefits and whys of leading together; developing a shared missional culture within our churches; how we might work together to grow disciples.
We will introduce people to the concept of learning communities and offer different options for working with Lead Academy or CMS to develop and support strong working partnerships. Over the coffee and lunch breaks there will be opportunities for people to engage with the team from Lead Academy to ask questions and think about how learning communities and working more together might work in their contexts.
The aim of the day is not to offer a ‘single model’ for working together, but to offer principles and thinking that will enable people to go home and think creatively about their own contexts and to offer resources that might support them. We are working closely with Rachel and Nick from Lead Academy team to deliver this.
This will be a particularly helpful day for mission area teams, multi-parish teams, local parishes that are thinking of how they can build closer working relationships.
In all our conferences we are consciously trying to showcase good practice and learning from people in the diocese who are trying new things that are bearing fruit. Please could you let Chris Dobson know if there are places where you are aware that people have been working together well, seeing growth in hope, purpose and encouragement so that we can invite them to add some of their experience into the learning for the day.