Diocesan Church Growth Strategies - Pulling it All Together

The blog has gone a bit ballistic with material from the Diocesan Church Growth Strategies conference last week, so here's a list of what's on here:

Specialist Input
Fresh Expressions of Church and Church Planting - George Lings
Priorities for the Church of England - Archbishop Justin Welby
Leadership development - James Lawrence
Mission Action Planning & Analysis of recent national stats- Mike Chew & Bob Jackson
Research into church growth - David Goodhew
The role of the national church - Paul Bayes & Rachel Jordan

Case Studies by Diocese
Birmingham - focus on Mission Action Planning
Coventry - focus on Natural Church Development
Exeter - focus on financial investment in mission projects
London - focus on church planting
St. Albans - focus on Mission Action Planning
some quotes from a diocesan setting where there isn't any kind of strategic approach (yet)

quite a diverse bunch of strategies in a fairly small sample! This isn't an exhaustive list of what happened at the conference, I've done a bit of editing...

There was a final session trying to pull together all the threads, looking at what were the common ingredients for a diocesan growth strategy (and the implications for the national and local church). If something public becomes available on that, there'll be a post linked here.

and finally, we had an inspiring 3 minutes from an 'ordinary' CofE member who was attending the conference, and here's my summary of that:

“There are thousands and thousands of us out there, ordinary lay Anglicans, who are really willing to get involved.”  lay people have mixed levels of capability, but high levels of willingness.

how do we enable lay people to live out their Christian faith to the best of their ability

-          help us to develop our private and corporate prayer lives

-          help us to be able to tell our own Christian story with confidence

-          help us to be able to talk confidently about our faith.

“we can get into places where clergy can’t…give us a prayer life, an ability to tell our story, and an ability to communicate our faith.” 

what an exciting challenge...