The parish of Malvern Link with Cowleigh applied for a Kingdom People grant to help with their parish vision planning. Their vicar, Phillip Johnson, explains what they've been doing and how the grant has helped.
I arrived as Vicar of Malvern Link with Cowleigh (MLWC) back inApril of this year and early on began working with the PCC toexplore what we might focus on as a parish. It's worth explaining a little bitof context though as MLWC is a tad unusual. Firstly the parish has threechurches (St Matthias, St Pters & The Ascension) but behaves mostly asone congregation. Rather than having a service in each church on a Sunday,the main 10am congregation moves between the churches. There are midweekcongregations as well in the churches but having nearly everyone together atthe 10am has meant that ministry has been able to continue in this place. Mostclergy dream of being able to convince different churches to worship togetherso to find one actually doing it Is hugely rewarding.
Whilst that is the upside, the downside is that we stillhave three buildings to maintain, an aging congregation, very few children andsome complex social problems in the parish. A narrative which Im sure isfamiliar to lots of parishes in the diocese. Oh, and were also the onlyLiberal Catholic parish in the deanery which means that we have a number ofpeople who come for a particular style of worship and theology from outside theparish. This is a big plus for diversity within the Church of England but alsomeans that any change is going to have to be carefully negotiated.
As the parish hasnt had a formal mission or vision plan fora few years we decided to go through a process which would help us to discernwhere we were and then where God might want us to be. We are doing this throughfour workshops running from June to December this year. Each workshop has atheme and also a visual minute taker. For those not aware of what that might be they are basically artists who are trained to listen to conversations anddiscussions and then to create a mural providing minutes of thoseconversations. These are then displayed in the churches so that people whowerent there can see what was discussed and those who were can explore theideas further. Theyre an excellent way of communicating effectively muchmore powerful than a set of written minutes.
Workshop 1: Who weve been
This workshop asked members of the congregation to come andtell stories about the parish its highs and lows, as well as bringing alongartefacts and photos to explain them. This gives a good basis to any futureplans recognising and honouring everything that has gone on before as well asseeing if any particular themes or Parish DNA can be discerned.
Workshop 2: Who we are now and who we could be
This workshops asked members of the Parish toconsider what were good at as a parish, what were not so good at and what wecould focus on. It looked at these ideas from the perspective of the wholeparish as well as the individual charisms of each building. It was anopportunity to dream and explore possibilities.
In between all of these workshops, the PCC has met todiscuss the outcomes and what the next stage will be. Workshop 3 will be onwhittling down all of the ideas into a plan for 2019 what are the thingswere going to focus on. This will then tie into setting a budget for next yearand will then lead on to Workshop 4 possibly the most important of allhow.
The final workshop takes the decided on ideas and works outhow they are going to be done. Most vision processes stop at stage 3, but inorder to be as effective as we can with the limited resources weve got, weneed to think through how these things might actually get done.
The Kingdom Fund allowed us to employ the artist SianMcArthur from www.morethanminutes.comHer help has been invaluable and it means that our final vision for 2019 willbe a big picture we can all look at rather than a dull document nobody reads.Without this funding I suspect we would have just gone for something much morepedestrian.
Finally how are we going to make sure that we actually dothe things weve said well do- wellweve asked one of our neighbouring parishes to be an accountability partner.Were inviting them in after 5 months next year to measure us for a day againstwhat we said wed do. Before then there should be some serious planning alongwith some serious praying. Wish us luck.
