What is Fit for Mission?
Fit for Mission is a practical and creative missional response to the challenges we’ve been experiencing within the Church for some time. This includes a 65% decline in church attendance in the past 30 years, plus a 38% reduction in clergy while maintaining 94% of the buildings we had thirty years ago, making it hard to focus on mission and ministry.
On a practical level, this means legally becoming a larger parish so that it’s easier to work more closely together, benefitting from streamlined governance, increased administration capabilities, a clergy team approach that increases collegiality, accountability, and general well-being, and increased skill-sharing, providing more time and resources for mission and ministry.
At the heart of the programme is local decision making, supported and resourced by the Fit for Mission team, helping to empower local people to make decisions that best support their local context. There’s no agenda for everywhere to be the same, but instead, we hope and pray that we can embrace our diversity and difference, and the richness it brings, so we can work better together for a bigger church to make a bigger difference.
(Source: Liverpool Diocese Website)
To find out more about Fit for Mission and what it could mean for St Michael’s, please click the link here to go to the Diocese website.