Teams and Tasks

The Navigation Team

Together, team members co-ordinate and oversee the transition from individual, smaller parishes to the new, larger parish. They ensure that good communication is taking place, in the early days from this team, and later from a Comms team. The Navigation team prays together, listens to all stakeholders in the current parishes, discusses and ensures the project moves forward.

The Communications Team

This team develops, creates and distributes all comms to update on the transition, publicise events and develop communication across our community. With our diverse rural and urban communities in mind, we’d love to see some innovative ideas developed along with traditional comms. this team needs a variety of skill sets, creativity and the ability to communicate with care and accuracy.

The Buildings Team

With support from a building’s specialist, this team co-ordinates a process of gathering soft and hard data, building inspections, workshops and vision conversations. It aims to fully consider the buildings in each participating parish, how they are currently used and other ways in which they could be used. It also looks at their sustainability.

The process takes time and requires input from people in each current parish. Team members should understand buildings, their relationship to the opportunity and needs of the local community and worshipping communities and be able to understand and make recommendations from large quantities of different types of data.

The Finance Team

This team oversees the transition to centralised finances, with support and guidance from the FfM team. This team will be trained in using specific systems and software, to understand and adhere to the legal compliance involved and will also be aware of individual church and congregations’ needs.

The Finance Team Leader should have finance oversight experience and knowledge. Team members might have book-keeping / treasurer experience. Together, they will make proposals and create processes that make the financial and practical running of our worshipping communities and new parish more streamlined.

The Cultivate Team

Passionate about mission, justice and reaching our local communities, the team work closely with the Fit for Mission Cultivate Team to train and release others into their potential. This includes organising and eventually facilitating ongoing Pyramid Reviews, Shape Courses and Cultivate Programmes.

The Growth Team

This team develops the mission plan each year, looking for ways to reach out more into our community and grow the church. They will consider the community, justice and missional activities already happening in our communities and look at how we can work together to develop these further as well as propose and develop new growth activities. The Growth Team leader will be a strategic, missional thinker and enabler. Team members will be passionate about community, justice and missional activity and understand the diversity of our local communities.

The Support Services Development Team

This team will initially develop a proposal for a single support services function for the larger Parish. Alongside the day to day administrative support, there are statutory services and important compliance activities and checks that need to be enacted. This team will cover a large array of significant activity. The Support Services Change Leader will have change and administrative process experience. Team members will have administrative and process understanding and skills.

PCC

The larger Parish PCC will operate under current Church Representation Rules as normal.
However, because of the size of the Parish, the nature of PCC meetings will feel different to the smaller Parish PCCs that we are used to.  The meetings will focus on governance (employment, finance, safeguarding and buildings) and may feel more akin to a medium sized charity trustees meeting, rather than dealing with matters to do with the day-to-day activities in local worshipping communities.

The PCC members will be responsible for governance of the whole Parish, for working for the good of all churches / worshipping communities, and for resourcing ministry across the whole Parish.  They will take this wider responsibility seriously and will not be representing the church / worshipping community that they attend.  The new PCC will be particularly concerned to champion diversity of forms of worship, ecclesiology and justice in all parts of the larger Parish.

Clergy Leadership Team

This team will work with the Rector to deliver structured and purposeful priestly leadership for the development of the mission and ministry of the larger parish. For week-by-week activity the CLT will be accountable to each other and to the Rector. The Rector will be accountable to the Archdeacon. The CLT will be accountable to and liaise with the PCC, through the Rector and two other clergy members of the PCC.

Membership and roles

• All the stipendiary clergy of the larger parish will be members of the CLT.
• Other clergy (SSMs) may be invited at the discretion of the Rector and in reference to their working agreement.
• Retired clergy will not be members of the CLT, but will engage in specific areas of ministry through the work of other teams and by agreement.
• The CLT will be led by the Rector.

Portfolio Ministry teams will facilitate a new, collaborative approach across the larger parish; they will share expertise and resource to enable more ministry to happen in more places.

With a focus on the four priorities, specific areas of ministry will be identified by local leadership (i.e. clergy leadership teams and FfM Navigation Teams) to be co-ordinated parish-wide; obvious examples could be discipleship, youth work, children’s work, and chaplaincy.

Portfolio Teams will function in one of two ways:

• They may be tasked with both developing strategy and the actual delivery of an area of ministry across the larger parish.  An example could be a ‘youth portfolio’ where activities were planned and delivered by a team operating parish-wide; or
• They might focus on developing a strategy, overseeing and resourcing local volunteers to deliver ministry in local settings.  An example of this might be ‘toddler groups’, where the portfolio team would ensure the ministry is resourced across the larger parish, but delivered locally by members of individual of the worshipping communities.