Luton, St Mary version: 2

What progress have you made with the Goals from your previous MAP, and what do you want to celebrate?

• 1.To develop our Welcome and Connecting: Started real coffee after services, launched churchsuite to enable us to connect to people; updated website; begun more regular socials
• Inspiring Worship. We have more intentionally differentiated our Sunday services to reflect our demographic, changed their times. The 9am service is far more popular than the 8am was; We launched a Sunday evening cafe style church in January 2017. We relaunched Soul Space our Wednesday service in September 2015 which has doubled in numbers. We employed a part time Children’s and Family Worker; We employed a Students / 20s worker (6 hours per week).
• Holistic Mission. To develop at least one St Mary’s missional ministry that is beyond youth & children’s ministry. We launched the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation

What Goals did you set where you saw less progress than you would have liked?

• Supervision and appraisal is partly implemented;
• We employed a part-time Worship Curator (4 hours per week) who left to go to Theological College;

Things seen about our local community

• Deprived; International; Presence and Engagement: Deprived area with resulting issues; Increasingly international: : 132 languages are spoken here; the town is 55% non-British ethnic origin (first town outside of London to be majority non-white) Presence & Engagement parish because 23% of the population consists of faiths other than Christianity. Muslims form 12% of the population. As of Sept 2017; Growing problems of families being put up in hotels with possible opportunities for ministry arising.
• Work and movers: Lutonians average take home < average wage of workers in Luton; additionally as 20s turn to 30s key people move out for work / schooling; The Mall and The University are in the parish.
• Doubling of the population of the parish possible in the next five to ten years with 5-7500 people moving in; Major development work happening in the future in the parish (Power Court; Vauxhall site); could mean a football stadium very close to the church - with opportunities and threats that causes; Some people are moving from London into the Hightown area near to church. New secondary school will be coming into the parish. Just had a Primary School start

How have you begun to engage with these concerns / needs / issues?

• Centre of Peace and Reconciliation launched.
• Reorienting our ministries: Student Ministry, Church at 7; potential Fresh Expressions; licencing Luke Larner "ragamuffin pioneer"
• Working across the partnership planning for mission and ministry in the future; engaging with the Powercourt developers

Vision (for five years' time)

Loving God, loving Luton and following Christ. As a church of many nations together in Christ, we hope to be seeking God's kingdom and his presence growing community and the church being a reconciling presence in Luton

Current Situation

From our Parish Statistics for Mission, we see that we are / have...

bottomed out from a long period of decline

Priorities (for the next five years)

• Our ministries are currently divided into various streams: 1 Governance & Direction Stream; 2. Worship and Holy Spirit Stream; 3. Growing Community Stream; 4. Growing Church Stream; 5. Reconciling People / Mission Stream; 6. Partnership streams; 7. 0-25 Stream; 8. Admin and Operations Stream; 9. Events, Hirings & Civic stream; In parallel there is also 10. Cemetery Stream which though separate impacts the vicar, curate and administrator All of these have their own priorities. In terms of this MAP we will:
• 1. Develop in mission; 2. Grow community; 3. Grow church. We look at this by demographic:

Goals (for the next year)

• Children: Greater focus on WASC and CHIMPS. Possible messy church or similar with partner churches or holiday club? or other midweek groups KS1?
• YOUTH: Continue focus on outreach ministries; new funding streams; new personnel; continue collaboration with youthscape; possible collaborative FX with partner churches;
• STUDENT/20/30s: Increased focus and resource for this demographic; focus on Church @7; increase collaboration with partner churches; possible FX.
• ADULT: Focus on enhancing Welcome and evangelistic initiatives e.g. Alpha; Better communications inc. presence online and signage; focus on community building eg MEns and Womens ministries; development of leaders; consider practical ways to reach out to new people who may be more middle class;postcard to welcome people?
• SENIORS: Build on 9am and Soulspace: Enhanced focus on community building; reorganise our pastoral structures and utilise gifts of people to deliver pastoral care. A second level would be to offer more but not at this stage; pool resources with other churches for seniors? Dementia friendly church?