Leading Out Course
What is it?
Pioneering Parishes provides tools to help parishes become more outward looking, enabling parish priests and congregations to extend the care of souls – without increasing workload.
Founded on the belief that pioneering is integral to parish life, the webinar courses, events and tools enable churches to shift energy out into the parish or mission community.
Pioneering Parishes began in the first COVID lockdown after Rev Greg Bakker was tasked with creating a response to the pandemic to help church leadership teams adapt to the new environment. Working with Rev Tina Hodgett, they devised a four-week webinar series called Looking Ahead, which gave attendees the skills and tools to nurture the conditions for moving congregations outwards into cross-cultural pioneering mission among people who are not like them, and to manage the shift of balance from an inherited mode to a mixed ecology of church.
Since then, Pioneering Parishes has grown organically with the involvement and interest of a number of collaborators. It is currently provided in partnership with the Church Mission Society and with funding from Church of England Innovation Fund.
Pioneering Parishes has now been repeated six times and around 400 people (lay, ordained, in a variety of roles) have participated.
Who is it for?
The course is particularly suited to new incumbents, incumbents who are new to the diocese of Carlisle and incumbents or curates who want to do new, relevant things in their parish.
What resources or time would you need?
This six week course held over zoom will feature stories from around the diocese and beyond of churches who are building on traditional worshipping communities to give their local community something new, engaging and attractive. You will gain tools and strategies which you can use in your context.
Each session has a different focus and builds on the previous session.
Week 1: Setting values: ‘Who do we aspire to be for God and our community?’
Week 2: Capacity building: Operating in abundance
Week 3: Adaptive church: Developing the servant
Week 4: Becoming a pioneer advocate: holding together the time-honoured and newly emerging in a mixed ecology of church
Week 5: Different lenses: managing people with a pioneer charism and call
Week 6: Bonus week!
What will it do?
When you finish the course, you will have:
- Considered how a process of setting and embedding values in your congregation allows decisions to be made on principle rather than personal preference.
- Encountered tools and strategies for re-balancing the distribution of resources between new and time-honoured forms of church, between mission and ministry.
- Explored the factors in becoming an adaptive church: roles, partnerships, learnings from ‘Adaptive Church’ by Dustin Benac.
- Considered the postures and practices required to lead a mixture of churches, traditional, recent and new, as equal, connected and distinct.
- Received guidance on how to manage people with a pioneer charism and call, and nurture alternative thinkers.
Where is it?
Takes place via Zoom.
How much does it cost?
£15 each person for the series of six webinars when coordinated by the Diocese.
The real cost for the facilitation and materials is much higher, so if you feel able to contribute a little more you will be helping to support the continuing work of Pioneering Parishes.
Link to website for further information:
https://churchmissionsociety.org/pioneering-parishes/about-pioneering-parishes/