The Compassionate Communities team exist to support & equip every church across the Diocese in serving their communities in a whole range of ways: the practical love of God in action.
What can we do to support your ministry?
We offer support in the following ways:
- We love to visit churches & chaplaincies to listen to what you are doing, learn, advise & connect with you.Get in touch to arrange a visit from our team to talk over what you are doing, or if you are considering starting a new community ministry.
- We build and maintain relationships with partner organisations & networks, who offer resources, ideas and support to our church communities. We can signpost you to a range of partners that exist to support churches, whatever your social action or social justice work.
- A range of our partner charities can be found under each “theme of work” below.
We offer training, events & resources, as well as signposting to other organisations’ trainings.
The aim of these is always to help churches grow in competence, confidence & courage in your social action and social justice ministries.
- Details of future events and training can be found here.
- We have a range of downloadable toolkits for various community ministry situations, which you find here.
- Resources and links related to specific ministries are available under each “Theme of Work” below.
- We also record talks & trainings we deliver and post them onto our YouTube channel for you to watch back later.
- We seek to encourage community ministry work in our parishes, underpinning it all with theology to envision and inspire.
- We share good practice, and tell stories of what God is doing in our churches, to celebrate and learn from what is already happening. We create maps to show the range of ministries across the Diocese. You can find a range of stories from churches and partner charities in our “Latest Stories” section below, and under each Theme of Work. If you have a great story to share – please get in touch!
- Where we can, we amplify the stories & experiences of churches to raise awareness of issues to Local Authorities, local and national government, and seek to inform policy & wider practice.
- We respond to the emerging needs & events affecting our communities in London to support our parishes in responding compassionately.
- We facilitate projects and schemes that can only happen at Diocesan scale or wider – for example, our Hosting scheme, or the Pieta Resource for churches responding to youth violence.
- We work wherever we can in collaboration with our neighbouring dioceses, charities and ecumenical partners to do this.
Our Themes of Work
Compassionate Ministries across the Diocese
We’ve put together maps of the compassion ministries of our churches across the Diocese, organised by theme (e.g. homelessness, food poverty, refugee response).
You can find these maps on each of our Themes of Work pages, or all in one place here.
Toolkits
We’ve created a number of downloadable Community Ministry Toolkits, based on various situations and settings, to help you in your Community Ministry. These are based on some of the most common questions that are asked.
You can find these in the relevant Themes of Work pages, or all in one place here.
We have the following toolkits:
- Running Safer Foodbanks (and other “Open Door” ministries such as warm spaces and drop ins) Part 1: Policies & Procedure & Part 2: People
- Supporting Refugees with eVisas
- Running a Memory Cafe
- Accrediting as a Living Wage Employer
Coming soon:
- Modern Slavery Part 1: Awareness in your community project
- Modern Slavery Part 2: Action to take in your church
- Dealing with those Rough Sleeping
- Helping someone with an asylum claim