The Calling Young Disciples (CYD) Project will come to an end in July next year. The objective of the project has been to see a significant and sustained increase in the capacity of churches across the Diocese to engage with children and young people - so that they respond to God’s call to be disciples of Jesus.
CYD, which began in 2017, was 40% funded by the Church Commissioners as a time-limited project and has already exceeded its planned timeframe due to money saved during the pandemic. Some of the project team will finish at the end of November with two Mission Enablers, Helen Laird and Sian Morgan, continuing until July to do some specific work with parishes where there is potential to reach a greater number of children, young people and families.
Youth Officer, Simon Hill is helping to facilitate the end of the project. He said: “CYD has been brilliant in increasing the number of volunteers who work with children and young people in our parishes, and we’ve met our target of working with over 50 churches throughout the life of the project. However, one of our aims was to increase the number of disciples by 600 and that’s taking longer than we’d hoped, partly due to the pandemic. Helen and Sian will continue to support the CYD Hub groups and also work for a few months helping parishes build relationships so that the number of new disciples continues to grow.”
The team is planning a celebration event in November to celebrate all that has been achieved, say thank you to those involved, hear about the Church of England’s national vision and outline the support for children and youth work going forward – including launching a new suite of resources to help parishes with children and youth work in their churches.
“The event will be a chance to say goodbye and thank you to those Mission Enablers who are leaving us, as well as Children’s Officer, Emma Pettifer whose role has also been made redundant. There will also be the chance for parishes to share their own stories and for us to understand the lessons that we need to learn from the project,” said Simon.
Moving forward, the plan is to use the Healthier churches Fund to enable more parishes to employ children and youth workers, who will work in their parish as well as support work in neighbouring churches. The first of this funding has recently been approved and it is hoped that a children's and youth worker will shortly be recruited for Pershore. Other opportunities to fund this work across the Diocese is being identified by the Mission Accompaniers as well as through Simon’s work in different parishes.
“CYD has taught us that more local leaders are needed to support volunteers and these need to be long-term appointments to enable relationships to be built and ideas and projects to be established. Our vision is for the Diocese to become a really attractive place for children and youth workers to come and work. Somewhere where there is the opportunity to receive ongoing training and which has a network of people supporting churches and each other as they grow their skills.”
Parishes who want to explore this further are encouraged to get in touch with Simon to discuss what might be possible. “We also want to hear from those in our parishes who feel they might have a calling to this ministry. It is a great chance to access training and work alongside others and we really want to grow our own leaders. Please get in touch if you think you could be one of them!”
