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Parish Council Briefing — St Philip’s Parish Planning, 2022&ndash23

The purpose of this paper

The Parish Council initiated a planning process in 2022 where we set some planning principles which you will see below and we arranged a day in October to draw people together and dream about the future for St Philip’s.

We are keen to make sure that everyone who would like to has a chance to dream with us, add your input and ideas and join the thinking.

We suggest you: read through these thoughts and then make a time to catch up with Martin or others from the Parish Council and have a conversation.

Parish Council Planning Principles

  1. We need to start with what we have already — and understand and value this.
  2. What we have already includes the ministries that extend past our church door that include the Army chaplaincy, the kindergarten and the aged residential centres.
  3. We need to take care with the language we use and seek to be inclusive and not jargonistic.
  4. We need to take the whole congregation along with us so that we build engagement and sustainability in from the beginning.
  5. We should not start anything new without a group of people committing to it – it’s too hard to sustain new things alone.
  6. We should allow ourselves to trial new things as ‘pilots’ and let the fail if needed. Some things will take hold and some things just won’t and that’s OK.
  7. We believe that each person in our community has gifts and talents which we can encourage them to share, and just being part of our community is also OK.

We talked through the following questions — what are your thoughts?

  1. What is the Mission of the Church?. What does the early church teach us about mission?
  2. Revisiting Past Planning Work. Were you at St Philip’s in 2012? What did we learn from that time in our Parish life?
  3. Dreaming about the future. What are your dreams for St Philip’s?
  4. Our Diocese. Are there things about where we ‘sit’ as a worshipping community that could guide our thinking about the future
  5. Our local community. What are the demographics of our area and what might this tell us about the unique opportunities we have on our doorstep?
  6. Our Parish. What are the practical constraints we have? Safety and risk, finances, smaller congregation.
  7. Stand-out ideas. What brilliant ideas do you have that you would like to share?
  8. Matters for caution. Traps and challenges?
  9. What are you optimistic about?