For the past few months, there has been a new feature in the Alvechurch parish magazine which explores how people are living out their faith in their everyday lives. ALM Martin Allen explains:
“In the past we have had short interviews with members of the congregation within our services, asking people what they will be doing this time tomorrow. When our new vicar joined us, she said she’d done something similar, but in written form in a previous parish magazine and it had worked well. It also meant we could include people who felt uncomfortable standing up in front of the whole congregation.
We have set questions that we send to people via text message. Some of them are generic questions and others are linked to our own church’s mission statement, asking people how they interpret it in their daily lives. The answers are then published each month in the magazine along with some context about what everyday faith means. We encourage people to submit a photo, but not everyone is keen to do that!
We’ve spoken to all kinds of people from each of our different services that we think might have an interesting pattern to their faith. The answers are very individual - we’ve heard one person’s experience of being a Christian in a uniformed organisation and from another person who spends time delivering food parcels in Birmingham city centre. However, there have also been common themes around family relationships, struggles, loss and bereavement.
The articles are a good way of introducing people who might not be so well known and help us get to know each other better. I hope that they also help people to take their faith with them into whatever they are doing through the week and understand that other people aren’t so different to them – we all have the same joys and challenges.
It might be interesting to revisit interviews in a few years’ time to hear how people’s walk with God has changed and how their faith has developed. The series has been part of an overall refresh of the magazine, so we’ll be asking people what they think and if they find it useful over the next few months. We also might look at doing some filmed versions for our social media pages!”
