Teams and Tasks

Local decision-making is at the heart of Fit for Mission. With each church and community existing in its unique context, local people like you must be the ones who are exploring, navigating and deciding the future path for your local parish.

Once the churches in each deanery have decided if they’d like to begin ‘acting as if’ they are a larger parish, a change facilitator and change leader will be appointed. The change leader will work with a local Navigation team to coordinate the change and make sure communication is effective. The Navigation team will begin developing a range of teams who will work on the detail of how churches will work in the future.

We know that different people have different gifts, skills and talents, so we hope that if you’d like to be part of shaping your local parish's future, you may consider joining a team, as a mix of both clergy and lay people is important.

You can find out more about the different teams, and tasks they’ll handle below:

Permanent teams:

PCC
Clergy leadership team
Portfolio ministry team

Central Fit for Mission Teams

Project Management, Communication and Administration
Cultivate and Justice
Change Facilitators
Buildings and Fundraising
Support Services and Deanery Administration
Missional and Coaching

Change teams

The Navigation Team

Together, team members co-ordinate and oversee the transition from individual, smaller parishes to the new, larger parish. They ensure that good communication is taking place, in the early days from this team, and later from a Comms team. The Navigation team prays together, listens to all stakeholders in the current parishes, discusses and ensures the project moves forward.

The Communications Team

This team develops, creates and distributes all comms to update on the transition, publicise events and develop communication across our community. With our diverse rural and urban communities in mind, we’d love to see some innovative ideas developed along with traditional comms. this team needs a variety of skill sets, creativity and the ability to communicate with care and accuracy.

The Buildings Team

With support from a building’s specialist, this team co-ordinates a process of gathering soft and hard data, building inspections, workshops and vision conversations. It aims to fully consider the buildings in each participating parish, how they are currently used and other ways in which they could be used. It also looks at their sustainability.

The process takes time and requires input from people in each current parish. Team members should understand buildings, their relationship to the opportunity and needs of the local community and worshipping communities and be able to understand and make recommendations from large quantities of different types of data.

The Finance Team

This team oversees the transition to centralised finances, with support and guidance from the FfM team. This team will be trained in using specific systems and software, to understand and adhere to the legal compliance involved and will also be aware of individual church and congregations’ needs.

The Finance Team Leader should have finance oversight experience and knowledge. Team members might have book-keeping / treasurer experience. Together, they will make proposals and create processes that make the financial and practical running of our worshipping communities and new parish more streamlined.

The Cultivate Team

Passionate about mission, justice and reaching our local communities, the team work closely with the Fit for Mission Cultivate Team to train and release others into their potential. This includes organising and eventually facilitating ongoing Pyramid Reviews, Shape Courses and Cultivate Programmes.

The Growth Team

This team develops the mission plan each year, looking for ways to reach out more into our community and grow the church. They will consider the community, justice and missional activities already happening in our communities and look at how we can work together to develop these further as well as propose and develop new growth activities. The Growth Team leader will be a strategic, missional thinker and enabler. Team members will be passionate about community, justice and missional activity and understand the diversity of our local communities.

The Support Services Development Team

This team will initially develop a proposal for a single support services function for the larger Parish. Alongside the day to day administrative support, there are statutory services and important compliance activities and checks that need to be enacted. This team will cover a large array of significant activity. The Support Services Change Leader will have change and administrative process experience. Team members will have administrative and process understanding and skills.

Permanent Teams:

PCC

The larger Parish PCC will operate under current Church Representation Rules as normal.
However, because of the size of the Parish, the nature of PCC meetings will feel different to the smaller Parish PCCs that we are used to. The meetings will focus on governance (employment, finance, safeguarding and buildings) and may feel more akin to a medium sized charity trustees meeting, rather than dealing with matters to do with the day-to-day activities in local worshipping communities.

The PCC members will be responsible for governance of the whole Parish, for working for the good of all churches / worshipping communities, and for resourcing ministry across the whole Parish. They will take this wider responsibility seriously and will not be representing the church / worshipping community that they attend. The new PCC will be particularly concerned to champion diversity of forms of worship, ecclesiology and justice in all parts of the larger Parish.

Clergy Leadership Team

This team will work with the Rector to deliver structured and purposeful priestly leadership for the development of the mission and ministry of the larger parish. For week-by-week activity the CLT will be accountable to each other and to the Rector. The Rector will be accountable to the Archdeacon. The CLT will be accountable to and liaise with the PCC, through the Rector and two other clergy members of the PCC.

Membership and roles

All the stipendiary clergy of the larger parish will be members of the CLT.
Other clergy (SSMs) may be invited at the discretion of the Rector and in reference to their working agreement.
Retired clergy will not be members of the CLT, but will engage in specific areas of ministry through the work of other teams and by agreement.
The CLT will be led by the Rector.

Portfolio teams

Ministry portfolios teams will facilitate a new, collaborative approach across the larger parish; they will share expertise and resource to enable more ministry to happen in more places.
With a focus on the four priorities, specific areas of ministry will be identified by local leadership (i.e. clergy leadership teams and FfM Navigation Teams) to be co-ordinated parish-wide; obvious examples could be discipleship, youth work, children’s work, and chaplaincy.

Portfolio Teams will function in one of two ways:

They may be tasked with both developing strategy and the actual delivery of an area of ministry across the larger parish. An example could be a ‘youth portfolio’ where activities were planned and delivered by a team operating parish-wide; or
They might focus on developing a strategy, overseeing and resourcing local volunteers to deliver ministry in local settings. An example of this might be ‘toddler groups’, where the portfolio team would ensure the ministry is resourced across the larger parish, but delivered locally by members of individual of the worshipping communities.

Fit for Mission project delivery teams

Project Management, Communication and Administration


Richard Gedge - Diocesan Programme Manager	Darran Draper - Transformation Manager	David Banbury - Engagement Manager

Emma Potter - Data and Reporting Analyst	Gill Dottie - Programme Administrator	Jess Corcoran - Communications Manager

Cultivate and Justice


Frank Hinds - Cultivate Lead	Kate Eaglestone - Cultivate and Justice Coach	Penny Stradling - Cultivate Coach

James Green - Together Liverpool Executive Director

Change Facilitators


Suzanne Matthews - Lead Change Facilitator and Director of Vocations	Lisa Gilligan - Change Facilitator	Andrea Urquhart - Change Facilitator

Ann Cheung - Change Facilitator	Clayton Rowe - Change Facilitator

Buildings and Fundraising


Craig Walker - Buildings Strategy Manager	Norman Bilsborough - Buildings Release Officer	Richard Bennett - Fundraising Coordinator

Support Services and Deanery Administration


Rachel Patterson - Support Services IT Development Officer	Victoria Allen - West Derby Administrator	Andrew Thurston - Finance Transition Lead

Missional and Coaching


Tim Montgomery - Missional Lead Development Officer	Anthony Clowes - Leadership Coach	Nic Harding - Leadership Coach

Alan Taylor - Leadership Coach

Programme Accountability

The Bishops of Liverpool and Warrington have the authority and episcopal oversight of Fit for Mission. The Diocesan Secretary is the Programme Lead responsible for oversight of implementation and coordination with Archdeacons. The Bishop of Warrington chairs the Fit for Mission board, The Diocesan Programme Manager has responsibility for delivery and coordination, supported by the programme’s Transformation Manager.

How can I find out more?

Contact fitformission@liverpool.anglican.org for more information about Fit for Mission

Together we can be Fit for Mission