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Rossendale Youth Movements

In addition to theological reflections, we also feel as a team it's important as part of our monthly features to share stories we come across of effective fresh expressions of church. This month we hear from Rossendale...

Background to Rossendale
Rossendale Valley roughly corresponds to a Methodist circuit and an Anglican deanery at the northern end of the Manchester Diocese. Most church and chapel attendances are falling as elsewhere, but an exciting youth fresh expression is emerging across the denominations and across the valley. It’s called “Vision” and at the core is the “Life Team”. This includes four young adults who have moved into a redundant vicarage provided rent-free by the diocese. With others, they mounted the recent two-week impact mission into all the valley schools. They plan to continue this work with assemblies, classes and after-school clubs. There are three youth bands, and an open-air event in the summer drew nearly 1500!

Schools opportunities
Three times recently we have heard of the openness of schools to take on clearly Christian values into their programs. In one case two schools in an urban area had both funded part-time Christian councillors to work with pupils. This has led to all sorts of openings, relationships and programs leading to a fresh expression of church.

An integrated strategy for a Diocese?
One rural diocese we visited recently is clustering parishes to create viable mission units. This includes plans already going ahead to employ regional youth workers to plant youth congregations in these clusters of parishes. There will then be sufficient youth across the villages and small towns to generate viable youth congregation developments. Our suggestion was that to make this even more strategic, the diocese recruit someone with 5-10 years experience of youth congregations and deploy them half-time as a mentor-coach to the network of regional/cluster youth congregation planters and half-time to plant a young adult/student church in the cathedral city.

 

Bob Hopkins

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Ordained Pioneer Ministry guidelines - download your copy!

The Fresh Expressions website is full of resources for those involved in church ministry. Amongst other resources - guidelines for Ordained Pioneer Ministry are available for download here.

Lambeth Gathering - Podcast

Over 40 candidates for ordained pioneer ministry gathered at Lambeth in October 2007 for a one day consultation with Archbishop Rowan and each other. Listen to the Archbishop's address here.

Job opportunity: Carptenters Community Church

Associate church of St Andrews are seeking a full time youth pastor to work with church and youth in the community. (Job Page)

Watchnight Prayers - Live Video stream for churches

Archbishop Rowan and Methodist President Martin Atkins will lead "Watchnight Prayers for Mission & the nation" on New Years Eve 2007. All churches will be able to get a video link for use in Watchnight events.

National Anglican Church Planting Conference 2007

This conference was a great success at the start of October 2007 looking towards 'Hope for the future'. The recordings and accompanying PowerPoints are now online for those who missed out or want to re-listen to the sessions. Click here

Is planning "Old Hat" for church planting and Fresh Expressions of church?

Bob Hopkins explores the conflicting values of planning vs the organic development of church plants and fresh expressions of church. Click here

Homogenous Unit Principle Paper

This paper by the Lausanne Committee for Evangelism has now been published to the articles section of the website. This is of particular reference to those on a Mission Shaped Ministry course. Click here

New Job Listing

Pioneer training opportunity with youth / families in Mansfield. Click here for more information

Cluster book

Bob Hopkins & Mike Breen explore the concept of mid-sized expressions of church - clusters, as a way of radically reconfiguring and recovering truly biblical congregations in their latest book. Click here for more details, and to purchase.

Mission Audit

This new section of our website seeks to meet the need for the increasing importance of new and up to date Mission Audit resources - including the new booklet 'Listening for Mission' released October 2006.  (Click here)

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