PLANS to ascertain “music missioners” at Sheffield Cathedral are among the many components of a bid from Sheffield diocese that has secured £14.3 million in Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment (SMMI) from the Archbishops’ Council. The positions construct on the established Schools Singing programme.
A £2.6-million Strategic Development Fund (SDF) grant awarded in 2018 was partly used to create a resourcing church at Rotherham Minster, helping to fund its Choral Outreach initiative working with primary schools (News, 25 January 2019). The senior musical director of the mission area, Ian Wilcock, has described an aim to “draw more people into the relational fringe of the church after which more people into the body of the church, with hopefully some help for individuals who haven’t encountered faith before to start out their very own faith journey”.
In 2023, Sheffield Cathedral appointed Tom Daggett, formerly the OBE Organ Outreach Fellow of St Paul’s Cathedral, as its director of music. The Dean of Sheffield, the Very Revd Abi Thompson, is a music graduate who sang with the ladies choir Cantamu, after which professionally before ordination; she has described coming to faith through music. The funding can even be used for a digital evangelist, and to support a latest religious community focused on mission and evangelisation and latest congregations in the fashionable Catholic tradition.
The SMMI funding will construct on parish revitalisation and mission work in each Rotherham and St John the Evangelist, Goole, a part of the New Wine network. Goals included the creation of 23 latest congregations and 36 latest activities. The diocese’s latest annual report (2023) records growth as “slower than expected”, but “solid foundations being built on”. The diocese reported this week that the worshipping communities of each had doubled since 2019.
There at the moment are plans to designate Doncaster Minster and St James’s, Doncaster (currently in interregnum), as centres of mission, with support for clergy and team costs among the many allocations.
Money can even be allocated to expanding the Centenary Project: a ten-year plan launched in 2015 with £1 million of the diocese’s reserve funds, and supported by monies from SDF, to employ children, youth, and family employees, targeted in probably the most economically disadvantaged areas (News, 14 December 2017). One of the goals included “energetic ongoing engagement with at the very least an extra 2000 children, young people, and families, many unchurched, resulting in 300 moving into discipleship groups”.
A Church Army Research Unit evaluation published in 2022, said that, by January 2022, an estimated 2966 children and young people had been “recurrently engaged”, while 761 individuals were in “regular discipleship groups”. Through the project, 54 parishes had been enabled to share or appoint a employee, and these churches had the next proportion of under-18s of their worshipping community than those without: a “dramatic difference”. Data for average weekly attendance was “less pronounced and never statistically significant”.
A briefing note for other dioceses advised that “where parishes, deaneries and dioceses find themselves with ageing attendance and more thinly-stretched resources, this project ensures quality children, youth and families ministry.” The diocese said this week that provisional data for 2024 showed a rise in child Sunday attendance higher than the national average: five, versus two per cent.
In a presidential address to a gathering of the diocesan synod in 2023, the Bishop of Sheffield, Dr Pete Wilcox, suggested that, when it got here to the reform of the Church Commissioners’ funding distributions, including the establishment of SDF, “few dioceses have benefited as much as this one”. In addition to £5.4 million of SDF, the diocese received £5.7 million from the Strategic Transformation Fund in 2019, for plans including a shift to oversight and focal ministry (Features, 10 September 2021). About 60 per cent of stipendiary clergy within the diocese at the moment are licensed in oversight positions, while a complete of 109 lay people (out of a goal of 150) have been commissioned as focal ministers in eleven out of twelve deaneries.
In April 2023, the SMMI Board allocated £4.7 million via the Diocesan Investment Programme to fund five latest “graft” teams specializing in highly deprived areas, with a goal of 300 to 500 latest disciples. A grants scheme, “Small Sparks”, for lay-led congregations, has also been launched. The diocese, which is among the many poorest within the Church of England, has a budgeted deficit of £2 million and £10 million of reserves with which to fulfill this deficit. In 2023, Dr Wilcox spoke of being “well aware that our planting and grafting story continues to be too Sheffield-focused, and an excessive amount of led by white male Evangelicals — but we’re starting to diversify in each of those categories”.
Last month, one other £2.7 million funding of SMMI was awarded to the diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich to support latest congregations in rural areas, mission to people on newly built estates, and outreach through music. Under the SDF programme, dioceses were discouraged from submitting projects in rural areas, and the Chote review noted that they felt “undervalued” (News, 10 March 2022). It diagnosed an “urgent have to discover sustainable models of rural ministry”.
In 2018, the diocese secured a £4.95-million SDF grant for its “Growing in God” programme (News, 25 January 2019). The “Growing God within the Countryside” strand aimed to “develop fresh-expression communities and enable cultural transformation for rural mission”. Goals included the creation of 1500 latest disciples over five years, measured by those that had not previously engaged with any type of discipleship, who, by the tip of the project can be engaging at the very least monthly in some form.
The diocese’s 2023 annual report lists 40 energetic “Lightwave” groups (designed to achieve individuals who haven’t any previous experience of church), and greater than 500 people attending these, fresh expressions, and mission initiatives. In total, it records 514 latest disciples for the reason that starting of the project.
The Inspiring Ipswich strand sought to ascertain 25 latest worshipping communities and to make 15,000 “latest contacts”, with 7500 exploring faith and 1500 defined as latest disciples. A 2023 report recorded that greater than 18,000 contacts had been made, and greater than 40 latest worshipping communities established, with almost 1000 disciples counted. The exploration of religion had been harder to each track and achieve.
The then Archdeacon of Ipswich, now Bishop of Southampton, Dr Rhiannon King, who led the project (and previously the diocese of Birmingham’s SDF-backed Growing Younger programme), wrote that the diocese had laid out in all job descriptions for brand spanking new clergy a request to “help start two latest congregations of their first five years. . . We often find that they’ve began one or two before their first anniversary.”
