If you would like a downloadable version of this video please email beth.cluer@leciestecofe.org
Transcript:
Shaped By God Together is the process we're following in the Diocese of Leicester to explore how church is changing and how we can better support one another as we seek to live out our everyday faith. That process has been running for some time already as we've been gathering stories about people's faith during the pandemic and the lockdown. And it's going to continue for some months as we approach a time when we will have to make some decisions about the future shape of ministry, about how we use our finances, how we care for our buildings and so on. But within this whole process we're also going to be working with five particular priorities areas of the life of the diocese where we want to add additional resources so that those resources can then grow and be shared more widely across the whole diocese.
So in this short series of videos I want to share with you about these five particular priorities and in this first one to explore the priority of new communities. Our society is such now that we can no longer assume that people will simply come into contact with the church at some point during their lives and that when they do come in contact with the church they'll have some background knowledge of the Christian faith. That may have been the case 30, 50 years ago but it's not the case today. And therefore this priority around new communities is all about how we proactively go out to meet people where they are and to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them in those places.
Now within the Diocese of Leicester in particular there are opportunities emerging for us particularly around areas of new housing; we have some huge new housing estates that are going up all around Leicester and Leicestershire,
and we want to be able to have the resources to be able to start new Christian communities in those new areas of housing. There'll be other priority areas for us too some of the economically deprived areas of the city and the county likewise we want to be putting additional resources into those communities and enabling new Christian communities, whether that be fresh expressions of church or church plants to beginning in those sorts of areas.
Setting these sorts of priorities is, I believe, hugely important for us when Jesus sent out the first disciples he told them that he was sending them to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria and then on to the ends of the earth and the book of Acts outlines how the disciples went about prioritizing particular areas as they journeyed out. Particularly they focused on cities, they focused on trade routes, these sorts of areas.
So setting clear priorities and saying that these are the areas where we want to focus resources, in order to grow those resources and share them with others, is going to be important part of how church changes for the years to come. We hope that you'll engage with this whole process and help us to learn together about how God is changing the church. And my prayer for us all at this time is that we will grow in our boldness of wanting to speak to others of Jesus Christ that those who have never heard may come to hear for the first time and may find true hope and new life in Him.