In the video below, Richard Lister speaks to Chris James from All Saints Bighton about rural ministry, and how his benefice have reached out to the local community:
Find the transcript below:
Richard: So Chris, lots of churches have a bit of a struggle about how to reach their wider communities and understand where their communities are at, and how they see the church. What’s your church and your benefice done about that?
Chris: Well, what we’ve done as a benefice or as a PCC is look at ways of communicating to the people directly. So rather than a questionnaire put through a letterbox or something in the newsletter for the parish, we’ve gone out and spoken to people. We’ve chosen 10 or 15 people from the village, young and old, those that don’t come to church and those that do come to church.
Richard: Yeah.
Chris: And basically said to them, what is All Saints Church to you in your community? And we got lots of positive feedback about the church, the way it operates, what else the church can do in terms of community based social events. We’ve also got feedback concerning when the services can take place. So we’ve had the younger people in the village say that they can’t do Sunday mornings because it’s sport for the children.
Richard: Yeah.
Chris: So, we’re looking at ways of providing them with the opportunity, maybe Evensong. We’ve got lots of other positive ideas from these people. All of them were engaged, those that came to church and those that didn’t.
Richard: What kind of feedback have you had? Can you give us some examples?
Chris: We’ve had people asking us, as I said, about the church services, and we’ve asked, and they’ve asked us to consider things like ‘come and sing’ events, ‘come and act events’ which could be Biblical or could just be getting children involved.
Richard: Yeah.
Chris: And we’ve also had people suggest, bearing in mind the setting for our church, that we could run a classical concert there, just to engage the community and get people involved with the church.
Richard: Brilliant.
Chris: So the next step for us now is to undertake a listening lunch, which will take place shortly. The idea behind that, via adverts in the newsletter for the village, is to get as many other people from the village to come and talk to us about what they feel the church is for them and how the church can better engage with them.
Richard: Brilliant. And overall as a result of this listening exercise so far, how are you feeling as a church?
Chris: We’re feeling more positive simply because of the fact we’ve gone out there and spoken to people and got them to react to what we’re saying, and we feel very positive about some of the suggestions they’ve given us and how we can enact them. And also it’s about mission. So we understand that we need to weave that through everything that we do.
Richard: Great.
