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Working
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Throughout Autumn 2004 we held a series of meetings entitled Working Together Through the Holy Spirit. We wanted to explore the idea of learning to talk together ‘from the heart’ about the ‘things that matter’. We recognised that social chat after a Sunday service is all to the good, but that it was much harder to talk about the very things which bring us together in church as a group of Christians. Some of us had been on an Alpha course and had found this aspect to be the most valued part of it. Could we get something like this going in our two churches? That was the idea. The meetings were well attended and resulted in plenty of talk about our church and about being Christians. Some of the talk was practical and some of it, both insightful and spiritual. There was a consistent undercurrent to our discussions that suggested a shared desire for our churches to move forward. Neither of our churches was in any sense failing; both had strengths and weaknesses - different in each church. But we seem to feel the need for a reappraisal. |
The result was a recommendation to the PCC that the two churches should make use of the Seven Marks of a Healthy Church scheme, created by on of the CofE’s leading missioners, Robert Warren. Accordingly, Nigel, the Vicar, arranged for the ‘Seven Marks’ to provide the theme for our Lenten Courses in 2005 and we were able to compare our own ‘performance’ with the general characteristics of ‘a healthy church’.
Once
again, the meetings produced a quantity of thoughtful comments.
All of these have now been collated and will be considered during
the coming months by a new Steering Group which is committed to
producing some draft proposals for ‘movement
forward’. |