News

This time of year the completion of Statistics for Mission, especially in multi parish benefices, can be a daunting task!

However, I found after being in post for a few years, that this became a really helpful benchmark to reflect on the life of the church and its outreach in the community.

I would meet with the Churchwardens for each parish, and we would spend an hour filling in the form from the registers including making a list of the people who were part of our church community for the stats.

It was helpful to compare this list year on year, and helped us bring to mind those people whom we had maybe lost sight of… those who we hadn’t seen for a few months, those who we had been in contact with for weddings, christenings and funerals. This prompted us to make contact, to look out for these people when out and about in the parishes, or to invite those people, particularly to the next mission event as we felt appropriate.

It was also helpful to use some of the graphs generated from the statistics given in the annual report for the APCM. This saved a good amount of time a couple of months later!

The deadline to fill out and return your Statistics for Mission forms is 31 January. These forms can be downloaded here or if you would like an online account to submit these, please contact Ben Tooke.