Children's Festival

Stephen Derges is Pastor of Bridgnorth Baptist Church in Shropshire. He came to the Engage conference in Nottingham, together with his wife Rosalyn (the church’s pastoral care leader) and 14 members of their leadership team and church activities leaders, because he says “we want to improve what we’re doing. There are areas that we want to explore - such as finance (we’re considering Quidz In to start with), marriage preparation, and the Drug Proofing your Kids programme. We will definitely look at new areas - but before we launch something new, I want us to find out what more we can do with what we are already doing.”

And what is it that they’re already doing?

• A twice-weekly toddler group, which currently has a waiting list.
• A childminders’ group, which meets fortnightly. This grew out of the toddler group. A church member who is involved with toddlers – and who has become a childminder herself - started building relationships, and it has grown.
• A handicraft group in the church once a week. The age range is 60plus, and those who attend are a mixture of church and non-church people; some are people the church has contact with originally via Social Services.
• ‘Open House’ in the church one morning a week and occasionally on Saturdays. A mixture of people come in, including the childminders and children from the fortnightly group, and the local community police officers and traffic wardens (“for the free coffee!” says Stephen). There is no charge for coffee/cakes/biscuits, but people make donations. Books, CDs, Traidcraft goods and cards are on sale. The person who runs this also has a stall in the Friday High Street market.
• A number of church members are involved with a programme called ‘Open the Book’ a three-year Bible storytelling activity being run weekly in three of the four primary schools in the town, and which other local churches run in a couple of nearby village schools
• A team of people visit the local hospital, some local residential and care homes, and individuals in their own homes, to offer friendship, prayer and practical support. This work is done in conjunction with other local churches including the Anglican chaplain to the hospital. This year at the church’s harvest thanksgiving they are preparing individual hampers not just of fruit and vegetable produce but of useful items such as toiletries and other essentials.
• The church financially supports a local drug rehabilitation centre run by Christians, which also offers skills retraining in a safe environment. Each year they provide small Christmas gifts for the young men involved – many of whom who don’t have families locally and who normally receive no presents.
• The Bridge Bar is a “dry bar” run on Mondays and Fridays in a town centre location, primarily to provide a safe environment for teenagers whose parents may be in one of the local pubs or restaurants. It isn’t a church activity as such but is run by people from the church. Operated as an independent charity they provide sex education and drug awareness activities, and offer the facility for one-to-one conversations. It is not an overt evangelistic outreach activity, although the young people are aware the bar is run by Christians.
• The Children’s Festival is an annual festival held over the August Bank Holiday; last year over 4,500 attended. Again, it is not technically a church activity, but without the people from church it wouldn’t happen. It is run by a charitable company which Stephen chairs, and all the other directors go to Bridgnorth Baptist, as do some of the other organising team members. They are beginning to have some success in involving others from the community and last year over 70 people from across the community gave their time as volunteers to help make the Festival a great success.

Stephen is also involved in a variety of ways with other churches.

• He was joint founder of Lifting Jesus Higher, which builds relationships with and facilitates activities for other local church leaders. They organise events and speakers, but one of their main aims is to meet regularly in small groups and organise larger dinners to share what’s happening so they can pray for one another.
• For the last two years he has led the organising group for the inter-denominational Shropshire Prayer Breakfast – an annual gathering of Christians from across the county.
• Six years ago he had the vision to go to the local newspaper (Bridgnorth Journal) and ask them to publish free of charge a ‘prayer for the week’, written by a church leader. He has co-ordinated this for over five years and also written a column every six weeks called Focus on Faith. The articles and prayers are on the resources page of the Lifting Jesus Higher website. About 50 difference church leaders have written prayers, and they have had great response – leaders have been approached in the street and it has led to many conversations with people who aren’t churchgoers.

Why is it important to Stephen that the church engages with the community?

“People don’t volunteer to come to church so we (the church) have to develop appropriate relationships with them,” he says. “Offering community services and activities is a means of developing those relationships and demonstrating faith in action. It’s not about finding an ulterior motive here – it’s practical love and concern. We aim to be a link in the chain of someone’s faith journey.

“It doesn’t matter to me if people become Christians elsewhere – we may plant and someone else may reap – that’s fine. Naturally I believe that every church should have numerical growth as a key objective, but we shouldn’t see the people we contact through community activities merely as ‘salvation fodder’. Jesus said, ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another’ (John 15:35), so we want to demonstrate our love by loving. Loving one another includes our neighbours too – helping the poor, disenfranchised and others in need in our communities.”

Stephen explains how ideas for engagement are encouraged in the church, and how steps are taken to put these ideas into action:

We knew there were needs in the community that we weren’t addressing, but we didn’t do any formal research. We’ve found that research questionnaires can give the impression to people that you’ll do what they say is needed - but that might not be possible. We’d rather have informal discussions born out of relationships with people, and then decide what, if anything, we can do about it. I guess we didn’t want to even give the impression of over-promising and then under-delivering. But for the next phase we will be more systematic in our approach to finding out needs rather than going about it in an ad hoc manner.

We are in regular conversation with various people in the community – the wife of the previous minister is now a town councillor and we have excellent relationships with various town, district and county councillors as well as police, so we try and keep our ear to the ground.

I’ve been teaching on community involvement for some time, and because I’ve been actively involved in some of the newer activities, the ideas are often ‘bounced off’ me first. We have tried to create a climate where people with a heart and vision for a particular need come and discuss it with us so that the implications can be considered.

We see our role as facilitators of people’s dreams and providers of resources. It goes back to the verses in Ephesians 4 that talk about leaders equipping congregations for the works of service they are going to do rather than leaders having to do it all themselves (but then I’m lazy!). I guess our role is to provide a framework and then try and make sure people don’t burn themselves out by taking on too much. Also we have to have a process for stopping an activity if necessary, and many people find that difficult.

Click here to see an Activity Proposal form (PDF) Stephen developed to help people in the congregation articulate why and what they want to do. This is completed by those with the vision and then submitted to the leadership team for consideration.

Last Updated 03 December 2010