The Mint Leadership Team met most recently on 2 September 2024. The choice of date allowed our new minister with pastoral charge for the Mint, Rev Simon Leigh, to join our meeting. The focus of our meeting was to introduce Simon to the reasons for choosing to create a leadership team, our priorities and how we work with other groups. The focus of the group is implementing the priorities identified by the 5 years forward group and the report they produced. As we are now 3 years into this period (the report being published at the general Church Meeting in November 2021), we also took this opportunity to review progress against each of the priorities. Here is a summary of the progress and next steps on each of these.
Priority Themes
● Worship
○ Service coordinator role that started during 2020 COVID lockdown has continued to enrich our worship. It has also enabled broader participation in the leading of worship.
○ New Life Worship is broadening the worship life of the church
○ Service as part of church camp was another example of different worship
● Discipleship and Fellowship
○ Although some of the long running “traditional” house groups have stopped meeting, a number of other groups have started up and after a thorough review of all the groups, we concluded that the small group life of the church is healthier than we first thought
○ We have also identified gaps where new groups could be formed, partly resulting from discussion at a General Church Meeting.
○ Stephen Mosedale has started a group for exploring faith.
○ We have identified a lack of coordinating role as something needed to nurture this part of church life. Previously this was a committee, we decided a person would be more suitable. Someone has volunteered to take on this role and we hope will be able to start soon.
● Mission and Service
○ With the departure of Foodbank from the Mint premises, although we will be continuing a strong relationship with Foodbank, it will be different in nature and so we are now looking for a new major partner or project to support as an “anchor” in our mission and service.
○ We continue to engage with partners through our charity of the year.
Cross-cutting themes
● Communication
○ We continue to review how we communicate effectively with all parts of the Mint community
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○ We have increased our activity on social media to reach out to people in a new way, focused on people who use the building or are in our geographic area
● Reducing overhead / succession
○ We have identified a number of roles as needing successors in the next year or so (church council secretary, senior steward, treasurer and others), but have not yet identified successors. We’re currently looking for people who are able to serve in some capacity to help fill these gaps.
● City Centre cooperation.
○ After initial activity, this stalled somewhat in the ministerial transition over the past 18 months, as the regular meeting of city centre clergy was an important part of this. We’re hoping Simon can pick up this initiative
○ City Centre united services, and other activities together continue to build links.
Group membership: Simon Leigh, Sue Cordery, Roger Day, Barbara Easton,
Paul Grimes, Stephen Haddad,Stephen Lea, Mike Pillidge.
