Growing Faith In Action - Sharnbrook Deanery, St Albans

I suppose my first question then is, what would you like to celebrate about your learning hub? Becky, I think you're going to start us off.

Yeah, I'd like to celebrate lots of the little stories that have bubbled along through

this

experience.

It's really interesting how quickly things change.

And so something that was maybe happening a year ago isn't happening now, something new is happening.

So it's not so much about these kind of big answers we've discovered, but it's It's the little stories along the way.

So it's things like seeing a group of teenagers empowered to lead worship together and to see them taking a real lead in that.

It's seeing churches become more confident to give things a go.

And some of those things that we've tried haven't worked.

And that's OK because we've just learned that that didn't work.

So we try something different.

And some of those things that have worked have been things like a hot chocolate stop.

for teenagers on the way out of secondary school, on the way home.

So discovering new ways of doing youth ministry that perhaps weren't in the book, so to speak, but they work in our context.

Or seeing an older congregation get excited about what it means to be grandparents who can grandparent their grandchildren and play that role in their wider community from a faith perspective.

So it's seeing those little moments of transformation are the things that I'm celebrating.

Tim, is there anything you'd like to add to that story of celebration?

Well, two celebrations, I think, on the wider scale.

First of all, that all the parishes really are involved.

Nobody's declared UDI.

Nobody said, oh, we're not doing this.

And the other thing is all the clergy are.

we've got eight or nine clergy plus assistant clergy and again in different levels of what people do but again nobody's saying refusing to meet with with this and discuss it and engage with it it's a big part of every clergy chapter meeting and every deanery synod meeting whatever the subject we always have a whole slot on cypf at the end so it really has been owned across the whole deanery which is a wonderful thing to celebrate

I see really significant achievement in those areas and with their schools as well, Tim.