For 25 years churches and Christian leaders in York have been coming together to pray for the city every week. This incredible consistency and faithfulness has created a relational movement with strong relationships and trust in the city. So much so that the unity group, One Voice York, have launched a project this year with a God sized vision…
The Foundations: 25 years of Prayer and Relationships
Through the years of steadily coming together in prayer, One Voice York have launched various initiatives and city wide events, right from open-air baptisms and Pentecost celebrations to launching social action charities. There’s been an emphasis on welcoming church planters and church and charity leaders who are new to the city and on building up trusted relationships. More recently there has been a focus on social action and faith sharing, especially looking at what the churches can do together.
The New Season: A Calling to Social Transformation
Since COVID there has been a new season of younger leaders stepping in where others have retired and a greater calling towards social transformation has arisen. Three years ago One Voice York responded by forming a social action team and several collaborative initiatives emerged around mental health, poverty and refugees including a Welcome Cafe for refugees where a church hosts and collaborates with volunteers from other churches. Following that the team hosted several events around social action where different churches and ministries were able to gather and explore their passion for social action.
As they continued to collaborate and serve the city, they started to pray for God to use them for something bigger. God responded with a big opportunity…
No One Left Behind: Working together towards a poverty-free York
Gather Movement have been honoured to journey alongside One Voice York for many years. We’ve had the opportunity to learn from them at our Summits and share their inspirational story with other places too. The team have been open to us asking questions and challenging them from time to time and it’s been a joy to work with Alison Dawson, the Project Director for No One Left Behind who also works for St Michael Le Belfrey Church in York as their Social Transformation Programme Director. We caught up with her to tell us more about how the project is getting going.
At the time when we were praying for God to use us for something bigger, Gather Movement invited us to collaborate with them and with Christians Against Poverty on a new initiative around poverty and that has become our No One Left Behind project with its tagline, Working Together Towards a Poverty-Free York.
This project has an ambitious vision to see a significant reduction in poverty over the next 10 years through the social action ministry of churches and Christian charities, but working alongside civic authorities and other organisations in the city. We’re not doing it all on our own; we want to play our part in what’s already happening in the city, but step up into more.
We believe that churches have something unique to bring into that. So, it’s a partnership between One Voice York, who have the local knowledge and the network of churches, and Gather Movement, who are bringing their expertise on mapping needs, provision and civic engagement and strategy, then CAP are bringing expertise with their Church and Community Transformation journey which is equipping churches for social transformation and faith sharing as well. So I’m working on that full time and we’ve just started to lay the foundations for that work.
Year 1 of the Project: Mapping, Reviewing, Understanding
“We started the project with a launch event earlier in the year with 80 people from different churches and Christian charities in the city. After that we’re beginning our mapping exercise where we’re looking at all of the church-led support that currently exists around poverty, food banks, debt advice, early years support, toddler groups, mental health support etc. From that mapping exercise we’ll build up a picture of what churches are already doing, which is currently not well documented or well understood. The results and understanding we’ll gain from that will be a great conversation starter with the council and others to show what churches are already contributing to the city.
Alongside this we’re doing a place review called Understanding York, which is looking at the social and economic development of York with a particular emphasis on poverty, really asking the question “why is York like it is?” Both those things are being led for us by Gather Movement.
Then we’re beginning some Church and Community Transformation (CCT) courses with CAP. We’re hoping to run that in September with the first cohort of churches. CCT will equip churches to better understand poverty and the needs in their local area. They’ll also explore the theology of poverty – looking into questions like: What does the Bible say about poverty? And what does God call us to do to support people who are in poverty and help them to step out of poverty?
A big part of this project is also the communication and networking side where we’ll be inviting churches to become involved, both churches who are already part of the One Voice York network, but also churches that aren’t part of the network or that may be in the past but are less connected now. It really is about what we can do together that we couldn’t do on our own and making a bigger impact.”
And That’s Not All…
As the project continues, One Voice York will be training more churches in collaboration with CAP and looking to see poverty reducing initiatives started through many churches in the city. They also hope to gain more insight into the root causes of poverty to become more strategic and impactful in their work together.
Alongside this incredible project, One Voice York is seeing the church work together in a lot of other areas:
- There is a coordinated approach to Alpha and Christianity Explored 321 Courses where all the courses are advertised through a central point and choose to run at the same time of year so that there is a course for everyone in the city.
- Churches jointly host the Holy Spirit Day for the Alpha course so people attending get to join together in a larger group, with lots of testimonies emerging of people coming to faith through the courses
- Youth workers in the city regularly meet together and have a mini One Voice York network where they can collaborate and encourage one another, and Student workers do the same.
If you’d like to know more about the No One Left Behind project, please get in touch with Alison Dawson at or visit their website www.onevoiceyork.org.uk/nolb
