st gabriel’s weoley castle · weoley castle formed part of a massive council housing programme...

St Gabriel’s Weoley Castle

Welcoming • Generous • Growing

Parish Statement

July 2015

St Gabriel’s Weoley Castle ⎮ Parish Statement ⎮ July 2015 !1

Summary

1. Summary St Gabriel’s Church aspires to be a place that is welcoming, generous and growing. In many ways we are all these things already but we do not claim to be the finished article. A lot has happened over the last few years and we know that we are just at the beginning of re-finding our place within the heart of the community; serving Christ and making him known to all those who live and work in our parish.

Over the last four years, our numbers attending worship have remained steady, increasing a little over the last year, despite some changes amongst the attendance of some of our older members (due to ill health or relocation). Significantly though, the average age of our congregation has reduced. Through our experimental family congregation of Soul:Food, our Sunday morning congregation has grown with families to now support a monthly All Age service and a weekly Children’s Church, Amazing Space.

The current vacancy offers someone a fantastic opportunity to enter a small but growing community of Christians, centred around the Eucharist, who can genuinely say that we’re up for change because we’ve already started on the journey. We have the confidence to reach out in new ways into our parish as well as finding joy in our tradition.

Weoley Castle has a proud history; it was an award winning housing estate in the 1930s for its innovative planning and large green spaces. Despite high levels of unemployment in this part of the city, it remains a popular place to live for social housing tenants and first time buyer families. We are fortunate in having a ‘village square’, providing a focal point for shops and local activities.

For longstanding members of the community there are many precious memories surrounding St Gabriel’s but until fairly recently the church had somewhat ‘slipped off the radar’ within Weoley Castle. The church is now experiencing a period of growth and we have begun the journey of welcoming in, being amongst, and connecting with those around us with a range of initiatives, principally aimed at families and children in these early days.

Our church centre building has had a ‘face lift’ over recent years and has become a busy and vibrant hub of the community. St Gabriel’s Centre Weoley Castle, the charity which oversees


Summary

its work, runs an Ofsted inspected After School Club, summer playscheme, older people’s befriending scheme, and hosts activities run by other organisations in the wider community. The centre is also a key venue for church gatherings such as Knit and Natter and Soul:Food (our experimental congregation).

We are looking for an incumbent who loves Jesus and will love us too; leading us, nurturing us and stepping out in faith with us.

You would also oversee St Gabriel’s Centre and we anticipate some development and refurbishment of our church buildings in the near future. We are a congregation that recognises potential and are looking for enthusiasm and transferrable skills rather than direct experience of buildings or people management in churches. Furthermore, within the congregation we are blessed to have a number of very skilled and gifted individuals, looking forward to investing their gifts alongside our new incumbent.


About Weoley Castle

2. About Weoley Castle The parish of Weoley Castle has a proud history. This history is so important to us that we want to share some of it in this parish profile as it explains a lot of who we have been and who we aspire to be in the future.

Ancient History We are in the Doomsday book! We share this, as it is not always the experience of outer estates in cities to have such a rich heritage. Although there is no trace of any building put up by the Saxons, the name "Weoley" comes from the Old English WEOH-LEAH which means "a wood or clearing with a heathen temple" (a Saxon holy place). Perhaps there are remains of a heathen temple that have yet to be discovered.

As well as our ancient roots, we also have the ruins of our very own castle (well, we would like to think it’s a castle). Weoley ‘Castle’ is a Scheduled Ancient Monument though is not really a

castle, it is actually a moated manor house. The stream that fed the moat had its course altered in 1792 with the construction of the Dudley Canal and was diverted into a sewer in the 1930s when housing was being built so is now completely dry. The remains at the site today are the work of John de Somery during the late 13th Century; he also built the first chapel on the site.

Hundreds of years later, it is thought that Thomas Jervoise, a captain in Cromwell's army, retired to the area and lived in a farmhouse (which is now a local nursery) built from the stone from the neglected and ruined castle. The castle now has a fantastic visitor’s centre and the church works well with the curator there holding events within the castle grounds.

Proud Social History Weoley Castle formed part of a massive council housing programme between the wars. By 1939, Birmingham had built 50,000 council houses in 15 years, more than any other local authority. Neville Chamberlain formally opened the 40,000th house built by Birmingham Corporation in 1933 in the Weoley Castle estate. The estate was considered a landmark in


About Weoley Castle

council house building, with wide roads and spacious street layouts. We still have many residents who moved to the estate as children and remain very proud of the high quality social housing in our neighbourhood.

Recent History Like much of social housing in the UK, our estate has become a place of last resort rather than the proud place of community it once was. Our neighbourhood bears many of the symptoms of changes like these including: very high unemployment, low educational attainment amongst adults, child poverty and income poverty amongst our elderly. However, unlike our post-war estate equivalents, our history and the high quality of much of our housing means that the population is fairly stable and amongst social housing areas, this is still a desirable place to live.

It is not uncommon to see three, sometimes four, generations of a family walking to the local school together in the morning and this provides a solid foundation for our work and ministry amongst the community.

In addition, because Weoley Castle finds itself sandwiched between two comparatively affluent areas, Harborne and Bournville, we have seen a rise in young families buying their first homes in Weoley Castle in order to get on the housing ladder. Whilst some move on, others have stayed, appreciating our good schools, sense of community, and excellent local facilities.


About Weoley Castle

Community Mapping We have undertaken several pieces of work over recent years to get to know our neighbourhood and listen to the stories of the community. These have included Planning for Real (where we built a model of the estate and collected ideas for improvements and activities in several events around the summer, statistical research and a ‘Living in Weoley Castle Group’. This group was made up of residents of the estate across our church and another local church who collected stories from friends and neighbours, using the pastoral spiral to reflect theologically. Statistics, mapping and the community consultation all agree with several of the common themes that this group found to describe our parish:

1. Weoley Castle still has a sense of community, especially amongst its older residents but noticeable amongst family groups too, of which they are proud, although it has been noted that community has become more ‘doorstep’ of late.

• “We get on very well over our garden hedges but do not enter each other’s houses”.

• “I wanted to live in a Place, rather than just a street or a house. That’s why I moved to Weoley Castle”

2. Stories of isolated elderly people were common, with simple interventions, once the church had found them, making a huge difference. However, there are many people who still benefit from the connections of their childhood and these social networks that exist.


About Weoley Castle

3. It was felt that Weoley Castle was a ‘local’ place, with generations of families living here, children going to the same schools as their parents and grandparents. Mothers seem to particularly pass on this legacy of staying local to their daughters. People want to stay here, maintaining a level of pride in the area from its past.

4. A sense of past glories connects to a current feeling of being forgotten, once celebrated and now past its prime, and words like ‘almost green’ or ‘not as nice as Bournville’ (which is a neighbouring area) were used to describe improvements and nicer parts to the area.

5. The story of young people in the area seems to be one of past investment, lost opportunities and the current generation paying for past apathy. Positive stories around young people noted their enthusiasm for using their hands in making things and willingness to get involved to improve their environment.


About St Gabriel’s

3. About St Gabriel’s

This section describes things as they are now. As we explained in the summary, we recognise that in order to grow further, things will need to continue to develop and change. We have started on the journey and look forward to working alongside our new incumbent in our next season.

In recent years the church has moved from a more traditional style of Sunday worship, involving communion services at 8.30am (said) and 10am (sung) on Sundays and is now just one service on a Sunday, which varies with the seasons. We also have a mid-week communion service on a Wednesday morning. The reduction of numbers of services happened at first because of our last interregnum and the need to be practical about getting cover, and then continued as our last Priest in Charge was part time and had another church to serve on a Sunday.

The introduction of facilities for children to take part has enabled the most fundamental change in recent history in the church, with the establishment of an attractive crèche space, monthly all age services, and children’s church (Amazing Space).

During 2013/14 we followed the “Jesus-Shaped People” programme as part of our Sunday morning services. This has been important in shaping the way we see ourselves and our future aspirations.



Church Life Sundays

St Gabriel’s has a small, but growing, congregation. On a Sunday morning we number 23 to 33 adults and 8 to 12 children on average. The number of children and addition of several new families to our worshipping community is a recent phenomenon in the life of the church and has brought with it the welcome questioning of practice and style that a substantial change to a demographic brings.

Whilst Weoley Castle remains a predominately white working class neighbourhood, this demographic is shifting and the St Gabriel’s congregation is yet to fully represent the cultural and ethnic diversity now found within the parish.

We are blessed in having a church children’s worker who is very creative and has a very good relationship with schools and families across the parish. She has enabled parents to take a more active role in the service as well as enabling children to explore their faith in a way that suits them. Our children’s worker has trained a small group of volunteers from the church to work alongside her, and our children’s work is beginning to thrive.

Many of our church members are very longstanding members of the local community and remember a time when the church was ‘full to bursting’, at Christmas for example. This shared memory shapes much of how the church describes itself now and what it hopes for in the future.

Sunday morning and Wednesday morning worship are Eucharistically centred, use Common Worship and follow the liturgical seasons of the Church year. Our current pattern on Sundays means that we normally have robed servers, use vestments, and hear each of the week’s lectionary readings. Amazing Space, our Children’s church meets on the 1st, 3rd and

5th Sundays of the month. Our 4th Sunday is an All Age Eucharist, shorter and more informal by nature, and on the 2nd Sunday Soul:Food (details below) meets in the afternoon in addition to the morning service.

We have recently experimented with evening services, once a month, to offer space for a more contemplative worship style than Sunday mornings can now allow for. We have explored Wholeness and Healing, Celtic Prayer and Taize services.



Soul:Food

In addition to Sunday mornings and midweek communion the church has established Soul:Food, a congregation within a congregation. On Thursday mornings, Soul:Food’s origins, we are almost exclusively a women’s group with young children present. Influenced by Ignatian spirituality, Soul:Food seeks to provide a space for parents to meet with God where they are at, in the act of parenting. When we started to meet the group functioned in many ways as a separate church, with members on various stages of their faith journey. All of our original members have now chosen to also integrate with the Sunday morning congregation and Soul:Food is seeking discernment for its next stage as a community. Soul:Food on Thursdays remains a crucial place of support and reflection for its members.

Soul:Food also meets in the afternoon on the second Sunday of the month. There is a collective action for the first hour (sometimes prayerful, sometimes an action within the community) and then we eat together using a truncated liturgy of the Shabbat meal from the Northumbria community. This group varies in number from 12 to 30 adults and 8 to 15 children. It is often varied in age and gender, a good cross section of Weoley Castle community and St Gabriel’s Church members.

Lay Ministry

The ministry of laity being recognised as equal to ordained ministry is a recent change in thinking within St. Gabriel’s and is gradually beginning to take hold. Traditionally, from its roots within the higher end of church tradition, laity have supported the role and ministry of the Priest whereas over the last five years a culture of collaboration has begun to grow in its place. There is more work to be done to involve congregation members more fully in planning services, keeping oversight of church strategy and mission and recognizing those gifts within individuals.

We have a Reader, Carol, who regularly preaches and carries out a funeral ministry within the parish as well as having some pastoral responsibility.

St. Gabriel’s Centre’s Older People’s Development Worker (who is part funded by the Church Community Fund under its Church Growth theme) heads up our pastoral visiting team and



offers training and support through the befriending project that she also leads. Church members are a key resource of volunteers for this work.

Our church children’s worker heads up a team of volunteers who plan and run Amazing Space, our children’s church. She also plays a key role in helping to lead Soul:Food.

A recent initiative to share out the work of the church further has seen a new Welcome Team set up, as well as different people being trained in the roles of Sacristan and Server.

Many of our church members are very active in voluntary and community work outside of St Gabriel’s. We have volunteers at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, St Mary’s Hospice, a local youth and children’s group, local schools, Healing on the Streets and Childline.

Congregation members enjoy parish run quiet days and retreats. Several members are also Franciscan Companions and go to Glasshampton monastery a few times a year. In addition, for the last few years a small group have organised an annual pilgrimage to Walsingham.

Occasional Offices

We have good relationships with local funeral directors and over recent years have typically held between 20 and 25 funerals a year. It is usual for us to hold up to ten baptisms each year and we have the occasional wedding.

Mother’s Union

We have a small branch of Mother’s Union at the church, with 10 members. The Mother’s Union remains active in the church, particularly at our annual Christmas Fair, Weoley Festival and festivals within the church. Other groups within the church, like Knit and Natter, contribute to Mother’s Union projects.

Messy Church

Messy Church runs within the parish by an ecumenical team and meets at Weoley Castle Community Church once a half term. St Gabriel’s is a key part of the team in enabling Messy Church to function and we have a happy relationship with the Community Church (a URC) with resources and volunteers moving between the two places.



The Church and the Community St Gabriel’s Centre Weoley Castle

St Gabriel’s Centre runs as a separate Charitable Company to the rest of the church. It manages our church’s community centre under a lease with the PCC. The church’s incumbent has automatic membership to the company and onto the board of the charity and the church’s APCM retains nomination rights to the board. Whilst this divide has been necessary for governance and funding reasons, the centre and church are increasingly integrated, with the work of the centre being seen as part of the practical outworking of our response to the gospel.

The History of the Centre

Whilst the divide between the centre and the church is now fairly theoretical, there have been four years of significant change in the management of the centre. A day care centre was our main project until Local Authority grants were reduced and relationships with the project had deteriorated to such an extent that it was no longer viable and the church went through a painful process of closure and redundancies. There is still much more to do but we are now in the situation where our finances are in a much more stable position (with core funding in place until end of December 2016) and very able staff. There has been a big increase in the use of the centre in the last few years, with now between 300 and 600 visits a week. There is a need, along with the church building, to consider future vision and viability of the centre along with a potential rationalisation of the whole church site.



Current Work at the Centre

The centre employs an Older People’s Development Worker, Children and Families Development Worker and Operations Coordinator as well as 12 other part-time staff who work in the After School Club.

The purpose of each of the key roles in the centre is set out below: Children and Families Development Worker:

• Develop the range of services and activities offered to children and families at St Gabriel’s Centre in term time and in the holidays.

• Develop the After School Club’s potential for its parents, staff and children, enabling them each to flourish, reach potential and enjoy the possibilities that greater confidence, skills and support enable.

Older People’s Development Worker: • Develop a volunteer and activity base to promote the wellbeing of all older people

living in the local area, to help make later life a fulfilling and enjoyable experience. Operations Coordinator

• Help with day to day management of the centre. • Ensure the provision of clean and well maintained spaces and equipment. • Work as part of a team to develop St Gabriel’s Centre as a safe, vibrant and effective

hub for the local community, enabling our work to empower local people to see positive change within their neighbourhood and amongst their neighbours.



We are very fortunate to have three wonderful Christians fulfilling these roles, who are passionate about linking the work of the centre and the church together so well that the community does not see a divide between the two.

It would be part of a new incumbent’s role to provide oversight and support to these key staff, as well as the church’s children’s worker.

In addition, we currently employ a fundraising organisation who are responsible for seeking funding to maintain these posts so that our staff and board are freed up from much of the grind of seeking grants and gifts.

Our biggest project is the After School Club, which collects up to 40 children a day from six local primary schools via walking bus to our club. The club was inspected by Ofsted in 2014 and found to be ‘Good’. The latest report praises the work of our club very highly; this is a key resource for local families. In addition, the centre now also runs a summer playscheme, also Ofsted registered because of the longer hours that we offer to parents and carers.

In addition, the centre runs a befriending project for older people and hosts a wide variety of other activities including: • Soul:Food, • Place of Welcome, • A carer and toddler group, • Knit and Natter, • Zumba (includes an additional class for over 55’s),

• Fit Club, • Community events and activities, • Church social events, • A music group.

Ecumenical Relationships

St Gabriel’s is part of Weoley Castle Churches Together, along with the local URC (Weoley Castle Community Church) and Catholic Church (Our Lady and St. Rose of Lima). Leaders from these churches meet occasionally over a meal. We hold a few services a year together, the most regular of these being a Good Friday prayer walk, and ‘carols on the square’ with local schools, at Christmas. In the past we have also held an annual open-air service in what would have been the chapel in the castle ruins and have discussed a joint harvest festival within the castle ruins for the future.

In addition to the formal workings of Churches Together, St Gabriel’s has a very close working relationship with the Community Church. We plan and run Messy Church together, support each other’s events, pray together regularly at the midweek communion at St Gabriel’s, and coordinate other activities (like our summer playschemes) to complement one another.



St Gabriel’s within the Diocese of Birmingham

The Parish of St Gabriel’s is in the Deanery of Edgbaston, within the Archdeaconry of Birmingham, which forms part of the Diocese of Birmingham, within the Province of Canterbury.

The Deanery is divided into clusters, where clergy can provide support to one another. St Gabriel’s is clustered with St Michael’s Bartley Green and St Mary’s Selly Oak. Clergy meet regularly over lunch for mutual support and there are good supportive relationships for ministerial life, including the sharing of funerals as necessary.

The Church’s Buildings The church building, although less than beautiful from the outside, prompts ‘wows’ on entry and is well loved by the congregation.

The centre was built in the 1960s and although less structurally sound than the church, has had recent improvements which make it a flexible, safe and warm space for activities.

We also own a three-bedroom detached house adjacent to the site. This was traditionally the curate’s house but is currently rented privately.



The vicarage is an attractive and fully modernised four-bedroom detached house. Improvements to the house were carried out only four years ago and included a new central heating system, new double glazing, complete re-wiring, a new kitchen and a new bathroom.

The PCC has commissioned Apec Architects to prepare an options study to explore the potential for rationalisation of the church site. The aim of this is to make the buildings more attractive from the outside, functional for their full range of uses and more sustainable for the future. We have a church building which is able to be maintained financially year by year but which cannot attract external funding for the capital improvements needed (namely new heating, toilets, new roof, decoration). Conversely, it is possible to find funding for capital investment to the centre because of the nature of its work but it can sometimes be a struggle to pay day to day bills.

Apec will produce, in consultation with the congregation, two or three options for the rationalisation of our site. The report is due to be completed by the end of February. We are not expecting a major redevelopment but our new incumbent will be someone undaunted by the prospect of a refurbishment project in the medium term.

We are primarily exploring the demolition of our church centre and the reordering, with a small extension, of our church building, to become a multipurpose building. We have also engaged a quantity surveyor to give initial costs of the options and are aiming for a budget that can be met with the sale of our additional buildings and a little land; and an application to the Big Lottery Fund. As noted above, we have fundraisers engaged by the centre who have confirmed they would also be happy and able to lead on such an application.


Hopes and Aspirations

4. Hopes and Aspirations Our Parish Prayer acts as a vision statement:

‘Heavenly Father,

through St Gabriel you proclaimed your love for the world

in the gift of your Son.

Grant us the courage to use the gifts you have given us,

and the wisdom to give of ourselves,

that we may be a community of love and prayer.

Bless us that we may proclaim your love,

and make Jesus known to the people of Weoley Castle.

We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen’

The vision in our parish prayer is recognised as our job as a community, not just for our incumbent to undertake alone.

Over recent years we have taken part in the Diocese’s Transforming Church strategy and have agreed on three ‘value words’ that we feel describe us well already but that we also aspire to display even more.

Welcoming

We want to reflect what’s going on in heaven; a welcome and a space for everyone to be who God has created them to be.

We are already welcoming in many ways. We are open to everyone, are developing services to meet specific needs, offer a warm welcome to visitors, have made improvements to our centre to make it more welcoming, and have lots of activities outside of Sundays for the community to engage with each other.

• We aspire to be more welcoming in the future and our ideas to do this include:

• Developing our Place of Welcome,

• Developing our church building,

• Varying Sunday morning services further,

• Special services for the After School Club children and parents/carers,


Hopes and Aspirations

• Further developing our links to the centre,

• Helping Sundays to be more accessible to newcomers and those exploring faith,

• Modernising our audio-visual technology.

Generous

We want to demonstrate God’s generosity within the local community. We are called to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, to work with everyone, particularly the oppressed and the marginalised.

We are already generous financially and with our time. There is also a great deal of generosity in our worship these days as we vary our style and experiment with new ideas in order to meet the needs of our diverse congregation. Above all, there is a generosity in attitude at St Gabriel’s, where we seek to show the love of Christ to one another.

We aspire to be more generous in the future and our ideas to do this include:

• Faith sharing,

• Becoming more inclusive,

• Developing Soul:Food and other initiatives like it.

Growing

We want to grow in multiple ways – the way that we worship, our personal faith, our Christian fellowship and the way that we share good news.

We have seen the beginnings of growth over the last four years and there is real hope for the church. New families with children have joined us and whilst our numbers have remained relatively stable, we have grown younger on average. The number of volunteers within and outside the church has grown, for example through our befriending scheme. Significantly, the relationship between centre and church has also grown – they are knitting back together.

We aspire to be growing further in the future and our ideas to do this include:

• 3D group (Diocesan discipleship course), or similar, to run from St Gabriel’s,

• Growing Leaders course,

• New confirmation groups,

• More quiet days,

• A retreat, more than once a year, and perhaps closer than Walsingham so others can attend,

• Engaging more with men and with young people in Weoley Castle.


An Incumbent for St Gabriel’s

5. An Incumbent for St Gabriel’s “We dare to dream for a Weoley Castle, a place that grows from and celebrates its roots, that enables everyone to flourish and share community. To be a place where stories of transformation abound and where God's love through Jesus is revealed” 1

We are looking for a priest who desires to be shaped by Jesus, who will lead and work with us collaboratively to help make our dream, expressed above, a reality.

A man or a woman who:

• Is rooted in scripture and tradition, enabling them to be confident and creative in exploring new ideas.

• Is willing to facilitate the skills of the congregation, helping to unlock our potential.

• Is able to listen well.

• Recognises the pastoral importance of good administration for a community project and within a church.

• Is committed to the mission of the Church, in particular to the people of Weoley Castle.

• Is enthusiastic and energetic.

There is much potential within St Gabriel’s Church and St Gabriel’s Centre. A lot of groundwork has already been done and we are ready for the next step to take us further into our community, further into the heart of Christ and deeper into fellowship with one another.

Living in Weoley Castle Group vision statement: September 20121


st gabriel’s weoley castle · weoley castle formed part of a massive council housing programme...

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