Partnership in Missional Church (PMC)  

We have finished the first phase (year) of our PMC involvement.
The first Phase was ‘Listening’
The second phase, starting in October is ‘Experimenting’.
The third phase in a year’s time will be ‘Focusing’.
You will have seen the notice about the PCC Open Day Away Day, held on 21st October. It was attended by a number of non-PCC members for the first half of the day.
This was a very important meeting to set the plan for next year.
The main task was to decide an ‘Adaptive Missional Challenge’ for the second phase, the next 12 months.
Fr. Kyle from Horden facilitated the meeting and at the beginning he gave three aspects of the day:

• Discover – Where are we?
• Discuss – What is God up to?
• Discern – How is God sending us?

We will all have to change as we respond
to the leading of the Holy Spirit.

He explained that an adaptive problem is when a problem exists,
but it may not be clearly defined and the solution is not clear.
The work of solution will need to adapt to the problem as it evolves.
We reviewed all that we had discovered during the first phase – about our church congregations, church location
and the community around us.

We then broke into two groups to suggest ‘themes’ for the future.
These were reported back to the whole meeting.

After lunch, we then prioritised the top three to five themes.

We produced three:

• Use of our buildings, helping their visibility in the Community
• Children and Families, in church, schools and uniformed organisations
• The Meadowfield Industrial Estate

After discussion we came to the following consensus:

This PCC resolves to continue with the PMC Process with the following adaptive challenge:

God is challenging us to make more Missional Use of our buildings
to reach our whole community
and help them discover God’s love for us all.

So to make better use of the great buildings
(St. John’s and St. Catherine’s)
we will reach out into our communities, which may involve Children and Families and the Industrial Estate.
Thus our focus is not to be inward looking but going out to our communities as we enter the ‘Experimenting’ Phase of the PMC.

The experimenting will be worked out by a
‘Mission Innovation Team’ in addition to the present PMC Core Team.
The point about experiments is that if they don’t work, that does not matter.
We try a few initiatives, and depending on the results, adapt our activities as we move forward.

Above all we must be guided by the Holy Spirit as we move forward. This will require us all to listen and pray to God every step of the way. The PMC is a ‘Journey of Spiritual Discovery’
for our churches as the logo above says.