Leading your Church into Growth: St George’s URC Maghull sees series of positive impacts
St George's URC, Maghull, has found many opportunities for strengthening their identity and promoting community work and talking faith, after taking part in Leading your Church into Growth
This has included small amends to current activities and changes to traditional worship, through to advertising, branding and opportunities for talking faith at existing community events.
Reverend Catherine McFie explained: “Since taking part in Leading your Church into Growth, we don’t miss opportunities to promote what our church is doing and what we can offer the local community. This might mean small changes, like adding details of our upcoming services and events to the knitted gifts for the local nursery and playgroup we do at Christmas and Easter.
“We also now have consistent branding on our posters and any advertising, and we update our website regularly, make sure that we post on our own Facebook group and local community ones too and have a monthly newsletter that gives different church members a voice each time. This means that people can easily find out about what we’re doing, and we have a consistent identity.
“We have made small changes to how we worship too, through dropping old formalities. Now we keep the Bible in the church the whole time and Elders don’t go out to the vestry, so any newcomers feel more welcome and included.”
A recent 'invitation service' saw numbers swell over time from nine to around 50.
Church member, Christine Walker, who took part in LYCIG and also runs the Food Bank at St George's, said: “Leading your Church into Growth has given us new ways of working together as a church community. It is open for everyone at the church and not just Elders.
“A key message that the Mersey Synod Missional Discipleship Enabler Stuart Radcliffe gave us was that it is our job to invite people to our events and services, but it is the Holy Spirit’s job to make them come. So, we shouldn’t stop asking and we shouldn’t lose faith. Everything we are doing is part of the growth of our church and we plan ahead, reflect and review our activities and work and think about linking to the community, building relationships and meeting their needs.”
St George's has started to grow what their Warm Space sessions can offer, changing the name to Welcome Space and investigating the possibility of courses in mental health for church members running the groups.
Read more about the work at St George's URC Maghull: https://st-george-s-urc-maghull.webnode.page/
About Leading your Church into Growth
At Mersey URC, we think Leading your Church into Growth is perfect for our churches. It has a strong emphasis on numerical growth, but also addresses the challenge of spiritual growth (us growing closer to Christ), and missional growth (our churches growing in service to their communities). All of us are different, and each of us will have one of these areas to which we feel most drawn. A healthy church is one that keeps a good balance of all three.
Contact our Mersey Synod Missional Discipleship Enabler Stuart Radcliffe for more information or to sign up to Leading your Church into Growth: mde@urcmerseysynod.org.uk
Or visit:
Leading your Church into Growth — URC Mersey (urcmerseysynod.org.uk)