This year Barnabas: Encouraging Confidence has been supporting people and their church buildings across the whole diocese.
As part of Barnabas, our Church Buildings Support Officer, Alena-Rose Douglas, has met with some 30 parishes and offered them tailored and ongoing support for their churches.
The parishes Alena-Rose works with will be able to take what they learn and offer support and advice to other parishes, to share the learning from projects in a practical way.
Alena-Rose said: “A project that I’m particularly excited to be involved with is a pilot scheme for a maintenance collective.
“The aim is to work together across a geographic area (in this case a deanery) to make the regular care and maintenance of church buildings easier.
“I’m very keen to support training for our volunteers, alongside getting them access to the professional advice that they need.
“The support and enthusiasm from the volunteers involved in this project is fantastic, and I am very optimistic for its future!”
To find out about the support our Church Buildings Team offers, please click here.
Barnabas: Encouraging Confidence has helped many new learning communities get started in the last year, creating another way we can hear and grow from the wisdom in parishes.
Since last year we have begun several new Barnabas learning communities and trained their facilitators.
These communities cover topics including interim ministry, Messy Church, church grafting and planting, Growing Faith, Net Zero Buildings and more.
To find out more about learning communities, please click here.
At a practical level, there have been more than 200 users of our Barnabas policy bank, allowing people to easily find documents and templates to make the daily running of our parishes easier.
The policy bank is a page on the diocesan website that shares examples of policies used by our parishes to make sure they are running safely and well, and are supporting our local communities.
A Churchwarden said: “It has fulfilled a desperate need and long-felt want, and is putting an end to my endless searching and anxiety!”
The policy bank can be found here, with many more policies to be added soon.
Barnabas: Encouraging Confidence helped in securing national funding for our Every Good Work project that has reached more than 1,000 children through work in schools and other new initiatives in the parishes of South Wakefield.
Three parishes, St Catherine’s Wakefield, St Helen’s Sandal Magna and St George’s Lupset, are the bases for Every Good Work, providing discipleship and community for young people.
From these places, a team of youth workers are furthering links with local schools, encouraging children and young people in their passions and gifts, and looking to develop them as leaders through shared social action.
The Revd Canon David Gerrard, project lead for Every Good Work, said: “It’s been fantastic to see the launching of the Every Good Works Project.
“The youth workers have done a wonderful job of working in schools, having now worked with over 1000 young people.
“From this youth groups have been launched and over 100 young people have attended.
“We hope to further expand this work in September.
“We are also excited to be working on our ‘Acorn Course’, a discipleship course which encourages young people to engage in social action work.
“While we have a long way to go, and much more work to do, it is truly wonderful to see what God is doing in the lives of the young people of Wakefield.”