Deanery Synod - Liz Richardson
Deanery Synod ( in case you didn’t know) considers church life within a specific area ie Bath & serves as a forum for discussion & policy making at a local level. What it means in practice is that Brenda, Gary & myself attend 3 meetings a year at different churches to talk & learn about what’s going on!
It is usually an august body so when I turned up to our last meeting at St Matt’s Widcombe to find a group of tall young men in baseball hats ( some worn the correct way!) I thought I’d gone to a Youth meeting by mistake. Which turned out to be both right & wrong! The focus was on Youth work across the city & thank God there was so much! Here’s a flavour…
LIFE PROJECT is a local charity working with & supporting young adults with learning disabilities & their families. They take Psalm 139 v14 as their starting point. We are all unique, fearfully & wonderfully made. They run several projects in the Old Acorn Barn at Englishcombe,(so very local to us!) including gardening, drama, music & games.
YOUTH TOGETHER A2 is run from Life church Bath, taking as it’s starting point Judges 2 v6-12. They aim to run city wide events to gather young people together. Our Youth Group has been to one of their events.
HOPE IN ACTION @FOXHILL. Founded in 2022 this enables churches to house young homeless people. They have 3 houses at present but their vision is to have 10.
LUX (formerly Bath Youth for Christ) works in as many Bath schools as they can get into! They run a mentoring programme in school as well as 8 Youth Clubs & a street dance group called MOTUS who are very good ( I’ve seen them).
FLOURISH is an Anglican 2 year pilot to establish small worshipping communities in schools. Combe Down Primary has a number of initiatives including a secret prayer garden open 3 times a week.
St Mark’s with our very own Sam Packer is also in this pilot at St Mark’s where she works 3 days a week. She runs the Sanctuary as well as Breakfast Club & a collective act of worship once a week. Their motto is ‘Let your Light shine’ & as part of Flourish they do something called The Wednesday Thing!!??
As I said this is really just a ‘drive by’ of these projects. If you’d like to know more just Google them as they all have an online presence.
I came away from this meeting excited & inspired. Please try & find time to pray for some /all of these initiatives.
Thanks for reading to the end ………. Liz Richardson