Harrogate – all in for young people.
When you don’t have enough, you can share.
Amazing things can happen when churches start working together! The Harrogate unity group has a powerful, common-sense approach to pooling resources for greater impact as they serve the youth in their city.
Harrogate was established in Victorian times as a spa town and for decades God has been drawing local church leaders together to pray, encourage one another and for joint action, all of which has built up towards this exciting chapter in God’s work.
The church leaders in the town felt called to reach out to young people who are not already connected with a church. They knew they didn’t have the resources to do this alone and so decided to work together, sharing their volunteers and finances to create something significant together. This unity movement is called Netmakers, and was formed in 2015. It is led by Sam Corderoy (who is also our Regional Connector for Yorkshire). Netmakers exists to help churches work together on local mission. “We know that we’ve got really limited resources in terms of money, time, volunteers, and so we believe that by working together, eliminating competition and duplication and sharing what we have got with one another, we’ll be able to have the biggest impact in our place.” says Sam.
And that’s exactly the solution they found…
Joint misson for youth = greater impact for youth
Netmakers decided to hire an experienced missionary who felt called from Brazil to Harrogate to support youth work and youth workers across the city. She’s doing this in 4 ways:
- Gathering churches to pray for and with young people for spiritual transformation
- Developing, equipping and building confidence in volunteers to work with young people
- Developing young leaders from the churches who are excited about God and want to share the gospel
- Helping churches start new collaborative mission initiatives together
Some of those initiatives so far have been: Drop-in teen spaces across the town, carol singing, a summer festival and a monthly youth worship night now has 50-60 young people not only attending but also leading, preaching, and praying. This has led to young people taking their own initiatives like starting a Christian Union, Youth Alpha, even giving out Gospels on the street!
Netmakers has found a lot of inspiration and encouragement from attending the Gather Movement Summits where they’ve been able to hear other cities’ stories. The equipping and training from those gatherings has helped them to come up with collaborative solutions for joint mission across churches and get spurred on to do more together.
As they look ahead to extending their work to young adults and more exciting prayer initiatives in the next season, we celebrate with the Harrogate churches all the incredible impact they are seeing among the youth.
God is working powerfully through their unity in prayer and mission.
wakefield – focus on families
when you’re not sure what’s next, you can pray
Wakefield are commonsense pioneers. They are demonstrating that when you’re not sure of your next move, you watch (or research) and pray! Building on a legacy of prayer, mission and serving together through Churches Together in Wakefield and Vision Wakefield, Gather Movement was invited to help them pilot social action mapping.
Sam Corderoy and Mark Cowling have been working with the church leaders in the city over the last 12 months in their latest unified project. After inviting Gather Movement to help in initiating conversations with the local Mayor, they started mapping the children and families work of churches and mosques in the city. This was followed by a special celebration event at Wakefield Cathedral recognising all of the great work happening.
sharing in strengths, discerning in gaps
The work of 100 churches has been mapped which has allowed Wakefield to identify strengths and gaps. As churches are now able to see all the amazing things that God’s already doing across the city, it means they don’t necessarily feel like they have to start something new to make a difference, they can simply signpost people to the help they need. Equally, as the gaps have been identified, it is helping the churches know where they need to pray and discern together what God might be asking them to do in the future.
It was such a privilege to be invited to come alongside the Wakefield churches in this pioneering work and we are prayerfully waiting on God with them as they discern their next steps for the transformation of the city.
