PLANS to establish “music missioners” at Sheffield Cathedral are among the components of a bid from Sheffield diocese that has secured £14.3 million in Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment (SMMI) from the Archbishops’ Council. The positions build on the established Schools Singing programme.
A £2.6-million Strategic Development Fund (SDF) grant awarded in 2018 was partly used to create a resourcing church at Rotherham Minster, helping to fund its Choral Outreach initiative working with primary schools (News, 25 January 2019). The senior musical director of the mission area, Ian Wilcock, has described an aim to “draw more people into the relational fringe of the church and then more people into the body of the church, with hopefully some help for those who haven’t encountered faith before to start their own faith journey”.
In 2023, Sheffield Cathedral appointed Tom Daggett, formerly the OBE Organ Outreach Fellow of St Paul’s Cathedral, as its director of music. The Dean of Sheffield, the Very Revd Abi Thompson, is a music graduate who sang with the girls choir Cantamu, and then professionally before ordination; she has described coming to faith through music. The funding will also be used for a digital evangelist, and to support a new religious community focused on mission and evangelisation and new congregations in the modern Catholic tradition.
The SMMI funding will build on parish revitalisation and mission work in both Rotherham and St John the Evangelist, Goole, part of the New Wine network. Goals included the creation of 23 new congregations and 36 new activities. The diocese’s latest annual report (2023) records growth as “slower than expected”, but “solid foundations being built on”. The diocese reported this week that the worshipping communities of both had doubled since 2019.
There are now plans to designate Doncaster Minster and St James’s, Doncaster (currently in interregnum), as centres of mission, with support for clergy and team costs among the allocations.
Money will also be allocated to expanding the Centenary Project: a ten-year plan launched in 2015 with £1 million of the diocese’s reserve funds, and supported by monies from SDF, to employ children, youth, and family workers, targeted in the most economically disadvantaged areas (News, 14 December 2017). One of the goals included “active ongoing engagement with at least an additional 2000 children, young people, and families, many unchurched, leading to 300 moving into discipleship groups”.
A Church Army Research Unit evaluation published in 2022, said that, by January 2022, an estimated 2966 children and young people had been “regularly engaged”, while 761 individuals were in “regular discipleship groups”. Through the project, 54 parishes had been enabled to share or appoint a worker, and these churches had a higher proportion of under-18s in their worshipping community than those without: a “dramatic difference”. Data for average weekly attendance was “less pronounced and not statistically significant”.
A briefing note for other dioceses advised that “where parishes, deaneries and dioceses find themselves with ageing attendance and more thinly-stretched resources, this project ensures quality children, youth and families ministry.” The diocese said this week that provisional data for 2024 showed an increase in child Sunday attendance higher than the national average: five, as opposed to two per cent.
In a presidential address to a meeting of the diocesan synod in 2023, the Bishop of Sheffield, Dr Pete Wilcox, suggested that, when it came to the reform of the Church Commissioners’ funding distributions, including the establishment of SDF, “few dioceses have benefited as much as this one”. In addition to £5.4 million of SDF, the diocese received £5.7 million from the Strategic Transformation Fund in 2019, for plans including a shift to oversight and focal ministry (Features, 10 September 2021). About 60 per cent of stipendiary clergy in the diocese are now licensed in oversight positions, while a total of 109 lay people (out of a target of 150) have been commissioned as focal ministers in eleven out of twelve deaneries.
In April 2023, the SMMI Board allocated £4.7 million via the Diocesan Investment Programme to fund five new “graft” teams focusing on highly deprived areas, with a target of 300 to 500 new disciples. A grants scheme, “Small Sparks”, for lay-led congregations, has also been launched. The diocese, which is among the poorest in the Church of England, has a budgeted deficit of £2 million and £10 million of reserves with which to meet this deficit. In 2023, Dr Wilcox spoke of being “well aware that our planting and grafting story is still too Sheffield-focused, and too much led by white male Evangelicals — but we are beginning to diversify in each of those categories”.
Last month, another £2.7 million funding of SMMI was awarded to the diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich to support new congregations in rural areas, mission to people on newly built estates, and outreach through music. Under the SDF programme, dioceses were discouraged from submitting projects in rural areas, and the Chote review noted that they felt “undervalued” (News, 10 March 2022). It diagnosed an “urgent need to identify sustainable models of rural ministry”.
In 2018, the diocese secured a £4.95-million SDF grant for its “Growing in God” programme (News, 25 January 2019). The “Growing God in the Countryside” strand aimed to “develop fresh-expression communities and enable cultural transformation for rural mission”. Goals included the creation of 1500 new disciples over five years, measured by those who had not previously engaged with any form of discipleship, who, by the end of the project would be engaging at least monthly in some form.
The diocese’s 2023 annual report lists 40 active “Lightwave” groups (designed to reach people who have no previous experience of church), and more than 500 people attending these, fresh expressions, and mission initiatives. In total, it records 514 new disciples since the beginning of the project.
The Inspiring Ipswich strand sought to establish 25 new worshipping communities and to make 15,000 “new contacts”, with 7500 exploring faith and 1500 defined as new disciples. A 2023 report recorded that more than 18,000 contacts had been made, and more than 40 new worshipping communities established, with almost 1000 disciples counted. The exploration of faith had been harder to both track and achieve.
The then Archdeacon of Ipswich, now Bishop of Southampton, Dr Rhiannon King, who led the project (and previously the diocese of Birmingham’s SDF-backed Growing Younger programme), wrote that the diocese had specified in all job descriptions for new clergy a request to “help start two new congregations in their first five years. . . We often find that they have started one or two before their first anniversary.”
