At the start of Inspiring Ipswich we were tasked with setting up 25 new worshipping communities.
We use the term new worshipping communities to include church plants, fresh expressions of church and new congregations. We currently rejoice that we have over 45 New Worshipping Communities. These include River Church, Lindbergh Road Community Church, Bridge Communities, Safe Harbour Church, Haven, Sheltered, numerous messy churches and many more.
Seven to eight have fallen by the wayside since they were started and several are fragile.
To support our new worshipping communities:
- We have two Pioneer Developers, Alicia Holmes and Bob Hamilton, who support lay and ordained pioneers to get new congregations off the ground
- We run a 'CPAS Growing Leaders' course every year and find that many people emerge from the course keen to start something new
- Alicia and Bob run programmes including ‘Greenhouse’, ‘Growing New’ and ‘Envoy’ offering three slightly different support groups, all of which help our leaders to develop their groups
- The Centre of Mission is a diocesan-wide pioneer network supported by Gail Southgate, Diocesan Lead Evangelist, in conjunction with Church Army
- For the last few years we have asked all new clergy in the diocese to set up two new worshipping communities in their first five years. It has been a delight to see that many of them have done this in the first two years
- A group of us go to the national ‘Multiply’ conference every year to be inspired about church planting.
If you want to know more please do get in touch with Bob or Alicia by emailing Inspiring Ipswich.
