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Launching Our Strategy

Our vision is for Manchester Diocese to be a worshipping, growing, transforming Christian presence at the heart of every community.

Much of what we are doing in Manchester Diocese is already contributing to a culture of hope and an expectation of growth, working with our parishes, schools and chaplaincies. This includes many forms of inherited as well as fresh expressions of church. We serve in an area that has a rich history of culture and innovation, made up of diverse and vibrant communities, and a longstanding commitment to social justice. It is a wonderful place to engage in Gospel Ministry.

Our work together grows out of Jesus’s Great Commandment which is to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and love your neighbour as yourself’. (Matthew 22: 36-40)…

… and out of his Great Commission, ‘to go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28:19-20).

Our strategy is based on positive, inspiring and relevant plans for the future. It is enabling us to bring together the key areas of opportunity and challenge, building on our learning and experience from the significant changes and investments that are already underway. Many of these changes have focused on new ways of working together which are becoming embedded in the life of our diocese.

Building on these successes, we are shifting to the next level in setting our priorities and working out what we want to achieve next. Given the excellent start that has been made, we now have the opportunity to be even more creative and ambitious with our plans for the future living out our values of faith, hope and love.

Our strategy is based on the following distinct but interconnected themes:

Providing direct support for parish renewal is central to our work together. Our prayer and goal is to bring more people to faith in Jesus Christ and increase church attendance by a third over the next ten years. We are working closely with our parishes to understand the opportunities and challenges they face and secure their missional and financial future. Mission communities are key to this, enabling parishes to work together in serving their congregations and bringing new people to faith. Clergy deployment, parochial reorganisation and supporting our most fragile churches are important strands of this work. We are also strengthening the support we provide to church officers with training, resources and new technology.

We have been doing great work in the area of growing younger, to ensure there is a thriving children and young people’s ministry within reach of every young person and double the number of young active disciples in our churches. We have been trialling new approaches with the Children Changing Places project in Bolton, and Man Dio Growing Faith in the other six deaneries. We are now bringing this experience and learning together to develop a comprehensive approach to engaging with children and young people and their families across our diocese. Our particular focus is on how best to strengthen the links between our churches and our church schools supporting every parish and mission community with this.

We have had similar successes with church planting and revitalisation. Over the last seven years, we have set up four new resource churches and over ten church plants. We want to build on the experience of our existing resource churches at the same time as investing in new resource churches and new church plants, so that churches carrying a DNA of mission are established across our diocese, particularly in communities where attendance is low.

Developing missional leaders is a key priority for us so that we bring forward a new, diverse generation of mission-minded ordained and lay leaders. We recognise the importance of investing in our clergy so they are equipped to grow our churches, especially given the number of newly ordained clergy who are being appointed to stipendiary roles. As a diocese we continue to focus on developing our lay people, particularly through our Authorised Lay Ministry, Focal Ministry and Reader programmes. Supporting the vocations of clergy and lay people with the calling and skills to grow new faith communities, continues to be important to us.

In all of this we are deeply committed to championing racial justice and ensuring that our clergy, lay leaders and congregations represent the rich diversity of our diocese.

We are working towards the 2030 net zero carbon goal set by General Synod, by supporting our churches and schools with measuring their energy use and taking simple, practical steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

We will continue to provide a safe environment for all by promoting effective safeguarding.

Across our diocese, people hold diverse views and express their faith through different traditions, united in a passion for Jesus Christ and his Church. Our bishops honour these differences by inviting church communities from across our diocese to learn together, support one another and listen to God.

These priorities align with the Church of England’s overall vision which is to create a church of missionary disciples, where mixed ecology is the norm, and whose membership is becoming younger and more diverse.