There will be a coach trip to Holy Island on July 27th. Please add your name to the list if you’d like to go. Further details will follow.
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Partnership in Missional Church (PMC)   UPDATE

We finished the first phase (year) of our PMC involvement in September 2023.

The first Phase was ‘Listening’

The second phase, started in October is ‘Experimenting’.

The third phase in a year’s time will be ‘Focusing’.

The transition event from first to second phase was an open PCC meeting in October when we reviewed the first phase and decided what we believed God wanted us to take up in the second phase. This is expressed in our Missional 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 and other areas. Thus our focus is not to be inward looking but going out to our communities as we try some experiments this year. 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.

Progress in Phase 2:
In November, there was a meeting with the other churches in our Diocese involved in PMC. We heard how other churches are getting on and shared our progress with them. We also learnt about how to develop ideas for experiments, sharing with the congregation and the importance of hospitality.

In the Core Group we planned a number of things to set up experiments. We also discussed various possible ideas for experiments:-

o A Christmas tree carol service, with trees sponsored by companies in the Industrial estate. Too late to do it this year, but maybe in 2024
o Concerts in the church, e.g. Brass band, Choir concert.
o Quiz + buffet and drinks (a cold buffet could be held in the church)
o There are a lot of lonely people in the parish, such as isolated young mothers, widows and widowers.
o Children and youth events – perhaps building on the contacts we already have with Primary Schools. Could we do anything with the Carrside Youth work?

The above refer to St. John’s, but some of these ideas could be adapted to St. Catherine’s also.

Any experiments will have to involve other members of our churches as well as the PMC Core Group. This may be at two levels:
1. Helping with a specific ‘experiment’
2. Joining the Core Group to help develop new ideas for experiments.

What Next?
Not much happened over the Christmas/New Year period, but the Core group will meet in early February to take ideas forward.

If you would like to offer to be involved in either of the two ways above, please contact Fr. Carl, or one of the PMC Core group, Susan, Louise, Darren, David Gregory-Smith.

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.