THE diocese of Durham has been awarded £8 million by the Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment (SMMI) Board for plans that include an ambition to “double the variety of young people engaged in weekly discipleship over the following three years”.
SMMI is a recent funding stream through which funding is allocated to dioceses (News, 18 March 2023). It replaces Strategic Development Funding, Strategic Capacity Funding, and Strategic Transformation Funding. It features a £340-million Diocesan Investment Programme for the present triennium (2023-25), for which dioceses can bid “to advance their plans for . . . local parishes and communities”. Bids should be according to the priorities of this overarching strategy for the 2020s.
A press release issued by the diocese of Durham this week said that the £8 million had been secured to support its “Called to Fruitfulness” strategy. It would fund numerous initiatives, including planting not less than 20 recent worshipping communities, revitalising the mission of as much as nine parishes (including a selected programme at Sunderland Minster), and developing youth and kids’s “mission hubs” — churches engaging not less than 25 young people in weekly, lively discipleship — in as much as 20 locations. One aim is to double the variety of young people “in lively weekly discipleship”.
There may even be support for parishes to further links with schools, through “missional chaplaincy” and other means, and for “developing recent leadership pathways to equip and release lots of of latest lay leaders”, with a concentrate on “raising up and supporting recent youth and kids’s leaders”.
In 2021, the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Revd Paul Butler, noted the closure of churches in his diocese and warned that, “realistically, the situation is grave. Unless we see recent growth over the following ten years, there might be many more closures.” One third of the parishes are within the ten per cent most deprived communities nationally.
Between 2014 and 2019, adult attendance fell by 18.9 per cent (compared with 11.7 per cent nationally), while child attendance declined by 29.6 per cent (compared with 16.7 per cent) to 1900. A study of 1 deanery at the beginning of 2020 forecast that, by the tip of the 2020s, only three of the present 12 churches would have “viable congregations”. Around the diocese, a decline of 1 third in Sunday attendance by 2029 was projected.
In 2021, a five-year strategy — “Renewing Pilgrimage” — was launched. The following 12 months, a ten-year “Called to Fruitfulness” programme was adopted by the diocesan synod, with a view to securing SMMI funding. A key strand is church-planting: the diocese seeks to plant 100 congregations by 2029 — a contribution to the national goal of 10,000 (News, 2 July 2021).
It has set targets including 450 lay and ordained leaders “equipped and supported between 2016 and 2029”, and for brand spanking new congregations to grow to a mean size of fifty, “with the bulk being previously unchurched, younger and more diverse”.
The diocese also hopes to determine church-based missional chaplaincy teams in every college of further education.
The diocese secured greater than £11 million of SDF between 2016 and 2022, including £3.9 million to take a position in five churches within the centres of Bishop Auckland, Durham City, Gateshead, Stockton Central, and Washington, in 2019 (News, 23 January 2019); and £4.2 million, in 2020, towards the creation of 14 “Communities of Hope” (News, 8 July 2020). Led by local lay people, these include Hope4All, in Sunderland, a project run by St Thomas’s, on the Pennywell estate, where attendance had dwindled to 12. Now, it runs a community shop and café.
Last 12 months, the diocese was awarded £2.6 million from the Diocesan Investment Programme to fund the appointment of missional chaplains in further-education colleges, and enable “parish regeneration” through three interim change-ministers. The latter posts, funded for not less than seven years, are being advertised (with a stipend of £42,394). Experienced parish priests are sought to “work as agents of change in parishes, equipping and enabling PCCs and congregations to take care of barriers to growth and alter”.
In 2014, the diocese of Chelmsford was awarded an £850,000 SDF grant to realize a “turn-around” in parishes that were struggling financially, through the appointment of interim ministers “with a proven track record in turning around parishes” (Features, 15 November 2019). An evaluation reported that “in lots of cases the pattern of decline was not reversed within the lifetime of those short appointments, but that didn’t mean that positive progress had not been made.”
