Launching in September
We are thrilled to announce the launch of two church plants: St Nicholas Bristol & St Mary’s Southampton. These City Centre Resource Churches will be hubs for Alpha, social action programmes and for further planting within the diocese, bringing transformation to their cities and communities. St Nicholas Bristol and St Mary’s Southampton will be launching this September. Click on their respective links below to find out more about them!
St Nicholas Bristol
Toby and Gill’s vision is to play their part in the evangelisation of the nation, the revitalisation of the Church and the transformation of society in Bristol. The St Nicholas building was closed to worship but instead used as offices and storage for a large Hogarth triptych. After receiving an invitation from the Bishop of Bristol, Toby, Gill and their team were able to begin work on transforming the building to be fit for purpose and work towards their launch in September where they can reopen St Nicholas as a centre for worship, mission and social engagement.
St Mary's Southampton
Jon and Hannah’s vision for St Mary’s is to be a church for the un-churched, a place where they can share the gospel with those who have never heard it before. With the location of St. Mary’s being at the heart of Southampton and with a thriving student population, Jon and Hannah want to shape a ministry that is championing the young people of the city and creating space for them to explore faith. Since receiving their invitation by the Bishop of Southampton, Jon and Hannah have been recruiting their team, developing relationships with other church leaders in the area and transforming the building to be ready for 21st century mission.
Revitalising the church in our nation
Sarah Jackson, CRT’s CEO, gave an inspiring talk on the revitalisation of the Church at HTB on the 22nd April 2018.
Leadership conference '18 highlights
We were so blessed to be able to be a part of the Leadership Conference this year. If you are anything like us, we are still processing the inspirational words of Bryan Stevenson and Immaculée Ilibagiza to name a few! The idea of the Leadership Conference is to ‘unite people from every corner of the world for two days of world class speakers, worship and encouragement’ and for us, it did exactly that!
Bishop's Tea
We were delighted to be able to welcome several bishops to an afternoon of tea and cake during the conference. Hosting the tea was the first female bishop and 133rd Bishop of London, the Rt Revd and Rt Hon Dame Sarah Mullally, who warmly welcomed the bishops and spoke passionately and enthusiastically about her priorities for the coming years. There was a great atmosphere in the room as bishops spent time away from their everyday duties to enjoy some downtime alongside the CRT team.
Bishop Sandy Millar, former vicar of HTB, together with Sarah Jackson, also shared a few words about the vision of CRT and the way in which we hope to be a blessing to each diocese that we are invited to plant into. We want to say a huge thank you to the bishops for their ongoing support and to those who were able to attend the event.
HTB network Leaders Event
CRT were thrilled to be able to co-host the GLeN/HTB Network morning, an event designed to create a space for the next generation of global church leaders to meet, inspire and learn from one another.
The buzz of providing a space that combined young emerging American leaders with our own network meant for a great time of learning, sharing and encouragement. Some of the international guests included Steve Carter from Willow, Bobby Gruenewald from Lifechurch/YouVersion and Josh Surratt from Seacoast/ARC.
From the home turf, we heard inspiring interviews from Tim and Debi Matthews (St Swithun’s Bournemouth), Alex Wood (Harbour Church Portsmouth) and Archie Coates (Head of the HTB Network and Vicar of St Peter’s Brighton) on the reality of church planting.
It was an honour to hear Ken Costa speak to the leaders on Genesis 32, the chapter where Jacob wrestled with God. He delivered a challenging yet inspirational message and ended with a time of prayer, ministry and networking. We hope that this time together enabled the leaders to get inspired in order to go back to their own church communities revitalised and nourished.
Upcoming events Focus
We want to greatly encourage you to come along to Focus 2018! We can’t think of a better way to spend a week of the summer than with the church family and the wider church network.
As we heard in Sarah’s talk, we are part of something so much bigger and Focus is a wonderful opportunity to be reignited for the mission that we are called to play our small part in. But Focus is also a time to spend quality time together, to pitch in as a family, sharing food, having fun and receiving and praying for one another all whilst enjoying a jam-packed programme of events!
So if you want to have a time of fun with friends and family where we are expectant and excited to see the spirit of God move in people’s lives, we would say: Book on to Focus!
Other Notices
School of Theology Streamed
School of Theology Streamed is a way for local churches to provide introductory teaching on the Bible, Christian doctrine and Christian ethics.
School of Theology is an 8 week introductory course, that runs twice a year in London. It has 3 tracks: BibleTrack, FaithTrack and LifeTrack. Each term we film and make available one of our tracks from here in London, for churches to watch in their context at a time and place convenient for them. The videos are an hour long, with regular discussion questions and handouts for students. Each track is £500 (applications for bursaries can be made).
This year we have BibleTrack and LifeTrack available now for churches to host. To find out more about streaming tracks please visit sptc.htb.org/sotstreamed, email sot@htb.org, or feel free to call SPTC to discuss it further.
The Kingdom Come App
The 10th May marks the beginning of Thy Kingdom Come 2018, an app is launched so that people would be able to access all the materials for the 11 days with ease of access on their mobile phones.
The app includes:
Daily reflection videos from inspirational leaders
Novena
Daily Bible readings
Podcasts
The app is now available in 7 languages – English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Korean and Welsh.
It is available to download from the App store and will soon be ready from Google Play.
Meet the team
In every issue, we like to take the time to introduce members of our CRT staff. In this issue, we get to learn more about the brilliant Andrew Parsons!
Andrew Parsons
Andrew Parsons joined the CRT team in May 2017 as the Building Project Manager and is responsible for ‘all things buildings’. This can include identifying suitable buildings, instructing structural and valuation surveys, assessing the costs of refurbishment, drafting provisional budgets, instructing architects and managing the tender process. Andrew’s role is to work with church leaders to deliver a building that is suitable for 21st century worship and mission. A former Army Officer, Andrew’s background is in project management across a variety of business sectors, including financial services, education and construction. Andrew enjoys a challenge – including motorcycling from London to Sydney – and has lived in Germany, Canada and South Africa. He is married to Jacky and they have two boys and a Labrador.
