Revd Tim Coates shares the story of the growth of the church plant The Mount, St Helens. Part of the first Fit For Mission cohort, Tim describes the journey that the congregation and local community have been on, the challenges and opportunities that have arisen.
"The Mount is a church plant in the historic Holy Trinity Parr Mount in St Helens. In St Helens, only 1% of people go to church, and not many are young people. During the last few months of lockdown, working with a small team and the 10 remaining faithful members, we began gathering local people with a big vision to see renewal and revival in our town. We sensed God reminding us of the radical love we'd all been shown, and the need to reveal that to others regardless of the tough exterior or any pushback we'd get - love through. From growing online meetings, plenty of time spent in prayer and a creative and willing team, we launched in-person services aimed at 'the missing generation', maintained a clear focus on helping and supporting people locally through Foodbank, community events and Christmas meals and prioritised relationships and opportunities in the community through schools, the college and local businesses.
As part of planting, we'd been given a grant towards helping us get going. But given the scale of work required to fully sort the church building, and the key requirement of the building for it to be an environment young people felt at home, we decided to think outside the box and build a marquee inside the church, put couches, chairs and tables out and upcycle shipping containers on our outside area to create a cafe, event space and community garden called The Mount Garden. We have also cleared previously unused rooms to create space for Foodbank, office space for the team and are working on a recording studio.
Key to this project's success has been the connection with our incredible local community. Over the past three years, we have worked with local businesses to provide hundreds of Christmas meals and toys to Foodbank users across St Helens. Each month we hold a free breakfast which anyone is invited to and we have run many other free events for all ages from Games Days and Escape Rooms to Little Adventurers (our toddler group) and holiday clubs. Our cafe also offers a free lunch to children and young people every half term - with a brilliant team of local volunteers. We feel this generosity, this radical love, not only enables us to love and support our community but also reveals the loving, fun and alive God we worship.
While we have tried lots of things along the way (some of which worked and others certainly didn't!), our Sundays have grown excitingly, with a pool of around 160 people now part of our community. We've been really blessed by those God has called to join us through lots of different paths, particularly word of mouth, social media and justice-based initiatives, and now also run a second service on a Sunday, a 12 step recovery based service each Tuesday evening called Journey's, a children's missional community in one of our local primary schools and an exciting new congregation in an over 55s living complex which is run by a local lay team of people who live there and have just completed the first St Helens Cultivate Course. We also had exciting opportunities at St Helens College and Hope Academy, where we are working with chaplains and staff to offer faith-based outreach.
After our first year of planting on the back of lockdown, we started engaging with Fit For Mission. This has certainly had its challenges as we attempt to work closer with other churches in our town. In the beginning, it felt as though this new idea was an interesting restructure but lacked direction for us on the ground and, if I'm honest this was extremely frustrating. But the more we engaged with the process, the more we found that the answers to many of our questions and vision for how life will look for us as Church St Helens, were left for us to prayerfully figure out together as a new team and journey towards. The potential is exciting, and though there have been many difficult decisions to make, we have committed as a team to helping make it work with our ordained and lay members involved in many aspects from the Growth and Navigation Teams to new portfolios and Cultivate. We are growing together, drawing on and finding ways to express each other's differences within our shared communion, and exploring ways to use the strengths and gifts across the churches to see more people experience the love of Jesus. We are certainly not there yet, and a lot of what we have done as Church St Helens to this point has been somewhat unseen - praying, forming teams, mentoring leaders, and building strong relationships, but we believe this time is priceless in empowering us to form a strong foundation for the coming years of ministry."