The Parish of Westbrook, St James

The Parish of Westbrook, St James

The Annual Report of the

Parochial Church Council

For the year ended

31 December 2016

Administrative InformationSt James Church, 302 Hood Lane North, Great Sankey, Warrington. WA5 1UQ

Official correspondence should be addressed to the church wardens at the above address.

The Parochial Church Council (The PCC)

Pioneer Team RectorRev Jeremey Tear

Chairman of the PCC:Revd Martin Thorpe (Pioneer Team Vicar)

Licensed ReaderMr Ian Richards

Wardens: Mrs Rebecca Lloyd

Mr Mike Cox

Deanery Synod Representatives:Mr Daniel Lloyd

Mr Nathan Thorpe

Elected MembersBarbara Brookes

Peter Shepherd

Julie Behan

Rosie Cox

Paul Smalley

Barbara Richards

Deborah Feltham

SecretaryMrs Barbara Brookes/Mrs Barbara Richards

Bankers:Yorkshire Bank, plc, 28-30 Buttermarket Street, Warrington. WA1 2LE

Independent

Examiner:Mr Bob Timmis, St Barnabas Vicarage, Lovely Lane, Warrington

Legal Advisors:The Bishop of Liverpool’s Registry

1 The Sanctuary

Westminster

SW1P 3JT

Architect:Anthony Grimshaw & Associates

Management:Management and control of the Church is exercised by the church Wardens:Mrs Rebecca Lloyd and Mr Mike Cox. The contact number for the church is 01925 489107

Structure:St James Westbrook PCC operates under the Parochial Church Council Powers Measure 1956. The PCC is excepted by order from registering with the Charity Commission.

Appointment to the Parochial Church Council

The method of appointment of PCC members is set out in the Church Representation Rules. A copy of the Church Representation Rules is available from the Vicar on request. All Church members are encouraged to register on the Ecclesiastical Electoral Roll and to stand for election to the PCC.

The PCC operates a standing committee. Membership of the Standing Committee consists of the: Pioneer Team Vicar, the Wardens, PCC Treasurer, PCC Secretary and Mr P Smalley.

TheChild Protection and Vulnerable Adults co-ordinator is Mrs Louise Herridge. Mr R Heaton is the Health and Safety Officer.

Objectives and Activities

The PCC (Powers) measure 1956 states the PCC “is to co-operate with the minister in promoting in the parish the whole mission of the Church, pastoral, evangelistic, social and ecumenical”.

Pioneer Team Vicar’s Report, APCM 2017 for the year of 2016, also reflecting on the last 5 years

Our 2012 Five Year Plan – to double the number of worshippers in 5 years – ie by 2017

This is now my sixth Annual Vicar’s Report since my first as Priest-in-Charge of St.James’ 5 years ago. Back then in 2012 I reported that the PCC had taken stock and noted that our congregation was faithful but not large – the 6 month average in the first half of 2010 was around 26 adults and 9 children. So we set ourselves the ambitious and challenging target of doubling the number of worshippers in 5 years. Praise God that this has been achieved, but not altogether in the way we imagined it would happen then! God had very different ideas to ours in terms of increasing the number of souls worshipping him which we have discovered together on the way on our journey of faith over the last 5 years.

From 1 Congregation to 7 Congregations

A congregation is a group of women, men and children gathering to connect with and worship God. St.James’ now has 7 distinct congregations, 2 each week on Sunday mornings and another monthly on Sunday afternoon. In addition 2 congregations meet weekly during term time, 1 in St.James’ Sankey Valley school and the other in Chapelford school. Another 2 congregations gather each half term in St.James’ Sankey Valley school and the other in Chapelford school. This is remarkable and very encouraging and it is worth remembering how this tremendous growth came about.

Emphasising our welcome of everyone

We have always been a welcoming church and we wanted if possible to become even more welcoming and child friendly and advertise how welcoming we are. So we worked through and gained the Child Friendly Church Award, introducing a crèche and introducing a very personalised ministry of welcome for baptism families.

We allocated funds to Mission and Growth to resource for the work we were keen to do in the schools and community and also committed to tithing our church income to help us to look outward to the needs of others as well as to our own needs.

For the first 3 years of my time here our main source of growth on Sundays was through welcoming baptism families. We needed to physically extend the worship space twice to accommodate the growth we were seeing. Much of this growth stopped when a Team baptism policy was imposed. We are now aiming to recover this through once again having a more personalised baptism policy.

Reconnecting with our community

Six years ago the PCC of St.James’ identified that the immediate challenge for their new priest would be to grow the congregation and reconnect the church with its community, placing our church once more in the heart of the parish community as it had been in former years. A quick succession of long interregnums and financial struggles had meant that the understandable focus and pressure on the church was to ‘keep the show on the road’ and partly as a result some of our community links has been loosened or lost. We wanted to renew our vision to be a proper parish church – a church serving its community which is made up of men, women, girls and boys who are to be welcomed, served and saved in Jesus’ name. Everyone in our parish is a person who God loves dearly, a soul for whom our Lord Jesus Christ died, just as much as he died for us as church members. After all God wants everyone in his family – that’s why Jesus came and died and rose again!

Over the last 5 years or so we have really enhanced our community relations with both our local Schools, our local Scouts group and our 2 Tenants and Residents Associations. This gave us a platform to grow and to build on through good relationships with people in our community.

So we began to reconnect to our local schools – initially through assemblies in both St.James’ and Sycamore Lane schools then with school Eucharist, confirmation, after school church for children, Messy Church, Open the Book, leading along the way to diocesan Church School Partnership Awards for our work with both Church and Community schools. The impact of this on growing the faith of children and their relationship to God cannot be underestimated. Their families also feel very positively connected to church through our work in schools.

Growing new Congregations in Schools

If 5 years ago we didn’t envisage having 1 or 2 extra Sunday congregations by 2017 we certainly didn’t see having 4 brand new midweek congregations in schools. But God opened doors for us in both schools and starting with collective worship (assemblies) and then introducing School Eucharists and the option of Confirmation in both schools these blossomed into weekly Good News Clubs (after school Church for Children) which see 20-30 children each week worshipping and growing in faith through their own choice.

In addition in order to connect with families in schools we started running Messy Church in both schools, half-termly in St.James’ school and termly in Chapelfordschool (formerly Sycamore Lane school). On average we see 50 adults and children at these events. Most of these families and children do not come to church on Sunday, so we are enabling them to connect with and worship God in a space familiar to them. The value of these after school Churches and Messy Churches in connecting adults and children and their families to God can not be underestimated – and connecting people with God is what we are about as a Church. This is well good enough in its own right. But as a bonus it is resulting in some church growth on Sundays too.

Of course these after school Churches are weekly during term-time only, and Messy Churches are one-offs 8 or 9 times a year, so getting a weekly average is tricky. However over the school year the weekly average attendance equates to 12 adults and 31 children, which in itself is more than the Sunday total we were getting in Church 5 years ago!

A new Sunday congregation is born

We were getting steady growth in numbers in church but also wanted to enable the families we were connecting with through schools to be able to worship with us on Sundays in a less formal service than our weekly Eucharist. After much discussion and research and consultation this led to the moving of our 10:30am Eucharist to 9:30am and the introduction and creation of Active Church for Everyone (ACE) at 11am. ACE is what is now called a pioneering fresh expression – an act of worship designed specifically for people who are new to church. ACE is very small child friendly throughout, participative, interactive, relaxed – it has attracted and kept new people, in particular young families, in a new way. ACE was phased in and the new worship pattern started in earnest in May 2015. ACE has grown slowly and steadily, with 7 new families having joined it since it launched. This is where we have seen the biggest growth in number of families with pre-school children. In ACE we have the crèche right at the front and these very young children have a dedicated activity and are involved throughout.

More Growth on Sundays – not just in ACE!

We have also worked hard to enhance the strengths of our Parish Eucharist. We have consulted the congregation about our worship and worked through your responses carefully, honing what is good and appreciated. We are now enhancing the Eucharist by marking the church seasons with special liturgies and have a list of favourite hymns and songs. Our 9:30am congregation is also growing.

In addition we introduced a monthly quiet, reflective service called Breathing Space. This is on the first Sunday in the month at 4:30pm. It is a quiet, contemplative hour of mainly silence framed by seasonal Celtic Night Prayer or Compline. Once again as with ACE this has met the needs of some existing members of the congregations and others who might not come to church otherwise.

(Also throughout 2016 we had Evening Prayer or Morning Prayer in church weekly on Thursdays open to all.)

Our growth in numbers of adults attending Sunday worship in 2016 should be recognised by the diocese by them no longer imposing a financial penalty on us for being smaller than they reckon churches in areas like ours should be. If this proves to be the case it should save us about £1000 per year in our payment to the diocese (Parish Share) which is our biggest expenditure.

In 2016, 4 adults (one with three children) from 4 different families joined the 9:30am congregation:

1 through friendship witness and pastoral care

1 because their church had closed and after trying several local churches settled with us

1 because they moved into the area and

1 because they felt called to come here from Kings Church after feeling called here.

In 2016, 5 families joined ACE – comprising in total 8 adults and 9 children (6 pre-school),

2 families through being parent helpers with our ministry in school,

and 3 families through personal baptism contact and welcome.

So in 2016: 12 adults and 12 children have joined St.James.

Also in 2016: 2 adults and 8 children were confirmed

So what about growth on Sundays?

As reported by the Churchwardens under Worship, the average Sunday attendances during 2016 are:

9:30 am Parish Eucharist - 27 adults and 7 children (34 in total)

11:00 am Active Church for Everyone (ACE) - 15 adults and 8 children (23 in total)

This gives an average attendance on Sundays of 42 adults and 15 children – 57 in Total.

So on average we are seeing well over 50 adults and children worshipping here on a Sunday which is over 60% up on what we were 5 years ago. We have doubled the number of weekly Sunday congregations and added a new monthly Sunday afternoon service in for good measure! But that is only half the story.

So have we doubled the number of weekly worshippers over the last 5 years?

Taken together our Parish Eucharist and 6 new congregations have resulted in weekly attendance averaging 95 adults and children, compared to a total of 35 adults and children only six years ago. This is spectacular growth by any standards, and comfortably more than double the number of worshippers we had 5 years ago!

A Big Thank You

I want to particularly thank and commend our faithful members who have lived through this period of incredible growth and ‘borne the heat of the day’ and remained faithful. At times it has not been easy and any change creates challenges, none more so in church life than changing the service time. I hope our faithful 9:30am members in particular will be encouraged by our growth in new members and new worshippers and our growing, valued place at the heart of our community. I know looking round on a Sunday morning it can feel like the Parish Eucharist service hasn’t grown much in 5 years – and it hasn’t in terms of pure numbers, although new members have joined over the years. But the sacrifices some people have made have allowed for our Church to grow in other places and in other ways – far more than we could have imagined 5 years ago. We have trusted God and he has been faithful and blessed us and helped us to grow. As the Warrington town motto says: ‘Deus datincrementum’ – God gives the increase!

Challenges and Opportunities

Financial - Our key challenge remains financial with a large deficit budget – the 2016 projected deficit was £6500 on £40 000 income, of which hall hire is a significant proportion. A stewardship campaign is planned for 2018 and we are applying for grants for additional hall hiring activities and are in touch with the diocese for advice. We aim to encourage everyone to adopt the Parish Giving Scheme if possible which will benefit the church by simplifying how we claim tax back from the government.

Retention Another challenge is retention. Of 12 adults confirmed in the last 5 years only 3 are still members of St.James’ although 2 are members of other churches (and 1 has died). The reasons for this are various, but nurture and discipling remain a key challenge for this group many of whom have attended with families. ACE is going some way to addressing this through offering additional accessible, inclusive, ‘young child friendly’ worship.

Volunteers - With a small congregation – often in the low 20s of adults at 9:30 and about 10-15 mainly new adults at 11am, it is a struggle to keep the tea/coffee rotas etc going let alone generate volunteers for new community/missional activities. The old 80/20 rule applies – a small number of committed members are doing most of the work. We need to grow volunteers and lay leaders.

Team – St.James’ having been leaders and enthusiasts regarding forming our Team, the last few years of perceived overly heavy top-down management and destruction of mission have been challenging to manage, but with new leadership there is a renewed willingness to engage positively with Team. Over the last 6 months there is new hope that we can make a positive fresh start, doing together what is best done together and doing in our own churches what is best done locally.

The Way ahead

There has been a lot of time and energy invested in community engagement and mission which has begun to bear fruit in terms of 6 new congregations and lots more worshippers and disciples. These new congregations are ‘fresh expressions’ of Church aimed at those who up to now have not or do not come to church on Sundays. These now need to be refreshed and consolidated and emphasis placed on growing the Sunday congregations to make a bigger Church for a bigger difference, but also we need to grow financial stability so that mission rather than finance can increasingly be our focus in the years ahead. We are laying solid foundations on our Lord Jesus Christ who is our Rock and our Cornerstone, on whom alone we are building. As we continue to put our faith and trust in God and are obedient to following his call, so he will continue to sustain us and give us the increase. The fields are white unto harvest.

Lord we pray that you would send us more workers into your harvest field here that we may reap the harvest of what we are sowing – sharing the good news of Jesus’ love and power to our neighbours in our parish and local communities. Amen

Worship

The average Sunday attendance, during 2016, at the 9:30 am Parish Eucharist Service was 27 adults and 7 children and the average attendance at the 11:00 am ACE service was 15 adults and 8 children.20 children and infants and 1 adult were baptised.There was 1 wedding here during 2016 and 2 funerals.Other services included: Easter Vigil, Christingle Service, Crib Service, School Services at Christmas, Easter and Harvest and some shared services with other members of Warrington West Team.

During 2016, as Martin has said in his report above, a small survey was taken in order to discern the feelings of the 9:30 regulars about the 9:30 Holy Communion service. A small working group was established and it began by considering the responses to the survey. The key points and measures to address them are shown on the following pages.