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ANNUAL REPORT 2018 What a fruitful year we have enjoyed! Thank God for the many, many people who make City Church all that we are together. Thank you! During the year we clarified these vital questions: Q. Who are we? A. We are City Church - enjoying God, making friends, changing lives. Q. Where are we going? A. We are gathering thousands to Jesus. Q. How are we going to get there? A. We’ll gather thousands to Jesus by:
Deeply encountering God together
Helping each other to follow Christ’s purpose
Being amazing stewards of our resources
Working with others to transform the world
This report highlights something of what God has done among us this year in these directions. Enjoy!
CONTENTS Deeply encountering God together
3-5
Helping each other to follow Christ’s purpose
6-8
Being amazing stewards of our resources
9 - 12
Working with others to transform the world
13 - 14
Written by Simon Warren & Ian Galloway Designed by Tom Norrington Printed by Bang-On Print, May 2019
Deeply encountering God together
CC
2018
Launching the Prophetic Team Anne Fothergill has become our Prophetic Pastor working with the leadership team of Nathan Davies and Kate Kahn. The Prophetic team is responsible for nurturing, releasing, shaping and leading the prophetic gift in our church. Over a dozen people are now equipping the whole church in hearing God. They have already been very fruitful in serving City Group leaders, elders, trustees, students and the healing prayer team. God is leading our church. The first word should always be God’s. It is so exciting to see this team flourishing.
20 days of prayer and fasting In response to prophetic words, the Elders team called the Church to twenty days of prayer and fasting twice in the year. Ian Galloway led on shaping, communicating and engaging the church. Naomi Longfield and Ellie Hatton did most of the hard work in getting everything ready. Over one hundred people signed up to fast and pray. Everyone received an email and text the day before their chosen day to help them to pray & fast. There were prayer meetings every day alongside worship nights and prophetci evenings, creating a wonderful space for people to seek God and hear from Him. We implemented a twenty-day special email sent out every five days with prayer topics for City Church, the North East, women, peace and justice, and the lost coming to Christ.
Prayer App Pilot Our Donkey prayer team now has 101 people committed to praying regularly through the week. We send out a weekly prayer letter by email which is written by one of the team. We have been trialling the use of PrayerMate, a prayer App available on all Apple and Android phones. The App delivers the prayer content for that day. You can also set reminders and add in your own personal prayers. This has been very successful and we plan to roll it out to the whole church in due course. 3
Deeply encountering God together
CC
2018
Re-shaping Healing Prayer Ian Galloway and Simon Warren worked with team leader Heather Galloway and her team to support them in reviewing and re-shaping the way we offer prayer for healing to people. Out of this the teamhas now moved from Sunday evening meetings to a more mobile model where teams will go out and pray with people on request, either at City Church or in homes. They will continue to use the four-week structure developed by Heather that creates the space to bring people to Jesus and their faith to grow. Heather has also started adding new people to the team by creating a discipleship group.
Turbine Hall improvements The Turbine Hall is a really exciting space to gather as a church. However, its layout and size present many challenges for creating a sense of being together to encounter God. Ken Riley identified that one of these challenges was that the low height of the stage. People sitting towards the back of the hall had much less visibility and were less engaged. Ken led a brilliant project that involved designing, sourcing and costing materials, communicating to everyone why the work was being done and finally collaborating with David Longfield who did the building work. Presentable and comfortable chairs are so important! Next time you take a seat in the Turbine Hall take a moment to give thanks for faithful and painstaking work done by Philippa Pugh who spent many hours re-covering many of the hundreds of chairs that we use every Sunday.
Strengthening our Sunday Welcome First impressions matter! The welcome we give to our guests on a Sunday really influences how they feel about God and the church. The welcome and hospitality teams have been strengthened and made much more visible thanks to new team T-shirts. Our aim is to create an atmosphere of joy and warm hospitality which expresses the welcoming heart of God from the moment people first step inside the building. 4
Deeply encountering God together
CC
2018
Sundays+ Andy Bramhall and Ken Riley have developed a series of special Sundays with extra creative and community elements, such as breakfast before the service, guest speakers, use of media, etc. So far we have had Vision Sunday, Big Worship Sunday & Alpha Sunday; they have all been very engaging and inspiring! Tom Norrington has been profiling these more widely to the city with Facebook Ads, use of personal invitations, etc. This means that thousands of people have heard about us! The aim is that we gather a larger group of people on these Sundays with the hope of them finding Christ and getting connected to our church. Please do all you can to support these Sundays by inviting people along and talking to guests.
Review of Kid’s Ministry In response to helpful feedback, the Elders commissioned Adrian Smith to undertake a full review of our Kid’s ministry. Our Kids team work incredibly hard serving our children. It is a vital area of church life and key to our growth. We wanted to listen. We needed to look at ways we might improve and strengthen all we are doing. The Kids leaders, team members and parents were all consulted. Adrian has written a very thorough report and recommendations which Andy Bramhall and the teams are now turning into an action plan, which we will implement over the next year. # 5
Helping each other to follow Christ’s purpose
CC
2018
Leaders Learning Communities Ian Galloway, Andy Bramhall and Bobbie Pearson ran two Leaders Learning Community Days for our City Group leaders, student leaders and youth leaders. These are fast-moving days of worship, prophetic ministry, focused teaching and time for reflection; what a winning combination! There is also space for reviewing progress since the last learning community and to make plans to set the focus for the next six months. These have been a brilliant vehicle for strengthening our community life, mission and discipleship, and have become a feature of our year.
Leadership Pathway We are very blessed in City Church with the number of strong, gifted leaders who are part of the family. We wanted to make our leadership development more systematic and planned. All leadership is built on a mix of God-given gifts, character, theology and leadership skills. We want to help leaders develop in all of these areas so Andy Bramhall set up the Leadership Pathway. As a pilot, over a dozen leaders are currently involved in a mix of training, personal input and clear responsibilities that will develop them into being more effective and fruitful leaders.
New City Groups - Micah 6 A new City Group began led by Rob Johnson. The vision of the group is to help serve the poor and bring justice to the world. The group has started by building good friendships & supporting one another in ways that they are already engaged in social action projects. They have also begun exploring how they might best serve in a specific way together. Welcome Churches, a new initiative to help churches welcome asylum seekers, gave some very encouraging input.
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Helping each other to follow Christ’s purpose
CC
2018
Alpha Course Matt George gathered an outstanding team that ran the Alpha Course in the Autumn. Twenty-one guests enjoyed a lovely meal provided by Steve and Lynn Oxley, watched the brilliant Alpha videos and then engaged in deep discussion about life and faith. Everyone continued attending and many people came to faith, hallelujah! Such was the interest that the guests requested we continue it after Christmas & made plans for a Spring Alpha too!
Acts of Courage One of our core values as a church is courage: being passionate enough to take bold steps. In one of our preaching series we were all encouraged to step out in small acts of courageous love. These were things like praying every day for friends, having fun with them, meeting a need, talking about Jesus, offering to pray and inviting them to something at church. To make that real - and give some gentle accountability and encouragement to each other we set up a Facebook group where we all shared stories of what we had been up to. There were hundreds of posts showing ways we had shown love to people in our community!
Curry & Comedy Night We were thrilled to have comedian & evangelist Mark Ritchie back for another Curry & Comedy evening. Mark Attwood was the event manager and 150 people very much enjoyed the evening. These events are an easy invite and give our friends a good glimpse into our church. This will hopefully lead to other things such as coming on a Sunday or going to Alpha.
Family Nativity Rachel Harrison led a team that produced a third Christmas event. This was a family service for everyone, accessible to those with additional needs such as autism. A mix of carols, video, puppetry and telling the nativity story captivated everyone. This will become a feature of our Christmas season. 7
Helping each other to God together Deeply encountering CC follow Christ’s purpose 2018 The Great Escape Almost a hundred people enjoyed this weekend away together again this year! In our busy lives, building closer friendships can be challenging. The Great Escape is a super place to get time together and deepen relationships. The Hub City Group did a lot of the organising and were greatly blessed by Mark and Camilla Hall providing the catering. We are hoping to have two of these ‘Escapes’ every year in the future so that even more people can benefit from these special times.
Carols in The City Our flagship guest event was, again, held twice over two days because of the numbers of people attending. Devised and produced by Ken Riley, 626 people enjoyed an inspiring blend of traditional carols with the Felling Brass Band, hilarious and thought-provoking dramatic action, moving performance pieces and creative elements all designed to draw us closer to Jesus.
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Being amazing stewards of our resources
CC
2018
Closing CastleGate Conference Services and establishing the Facilities Team Duncan Podbury undertook an amazing piece of work, greatly helped by Simon Warren and Phil Fothergill. For many years we have been running a Conference Services business, with many clients hiring the building for training and events. However, when Duncan and the team reviewed everything, it became apparent that it was an awful lot of work for no real gain to the church. Duncan led us to reprioritise the use of the building for the church and four charity tenants. These are Action Foundation, Blue Sky Trust, International China Concern and The Friendly Development Company. The feedback from our new tenants is very positive and they all love sharing our CastleGate building. A new Facilities Team has been established with Sally Hill as Facilities Manager and David Longfield responsible for maintenance. With the help of the other Facilities Team members, they are doing a brilliant job of looking after the CastleGate. The safety, appearance and facilities of the building have all been massively enhanced.
Weekly Scrum We have started a weekly meeting for key leaders called Scrum. Simon Warren leads this in his role as Exec Pastor. Each leader has seven minutes to share on (a) what they did last week (b) what they are going to do this week and (c) where they need help from others on the team. This has proved to be a very fruitful means of building team work, togetherness cohesion and action.
Staff Away Days We have begun to hold staff away days once a term for training, encouragement and team building. We have held two of these at Shepherds Dene Retreat House and they have been very inspring & productive! With fourteen staff and key volunteers and lots happening, these days have been essential for creating unity and imparting vision.
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Being amazing stewards of our resources
CC
2018
Staffing Strategy The Exec Team, with the Elders and Trustees, worked together to establish a staffing strategy. They looked in detail at the staffing needs that the church has and investigated what staff other churches have who gather a larger number in comparison to us. They were able to see clearly where staffing gaps lie and have begun to make progress to fill those roles. Simon Warren has written a recruitment policy that governs how we will recruit staff in the future.
Based on financial capacity and our strategic priorities we have appointed the following new staff: Executive Assistant to the Lead Pastor After a trial period we have been able to employ Linda Ogg for 3.5 days as Ian’s Executive Assistant. Linda also generously volunteers 1.5 days, so Ian has a full-time assistant. Linda manages Ian’s diary and workload, does all his communication, writes up the notes from meetings and manages all the planning and practical arrangements for Ian. Linda does an amazing job & the role really has freed Ian up to focus more on his key role of Lead Pastor in a very productive way!
Finance Assistant To increase our capacity in managing the finances, we have employed Sarah Davies one day a week to assist Peter Young, our Finance Officer. Peter has been able to reduce his hours to two days a week. This gives us holiday cover and more consistency in looking after our finances.
Communications Pastor Communications are a vital part of church life. It requires a lot of creativity, hard work and time for them to be done well. Following his FP year, Tom Norrington was volunteering in this role. We now employ Tom three days a week as Communications Pastor. The quality and reach of all our communications have been massively improved. Tom is still volunteering two days a week, one day as Student Team leader and one day working with Andy Bramhall on our Get Connected process.
10
Being amazing stewards of our resources
CC
2018
Becky Underwood and Bobbie Pearson Becky Underwood has been a valued member of staff for many years serving in the Conference Services team. She went on maternity leave whilst all the changes occurred and the Facilities Team was launched. Becky and her husband Alex have recently moved further north to be closer to her parents, so we, sadly, said goodbye to Becky. She has been wonderfully replaced by Bobbie Pearson who has joined our Facilities Team as a receptionist with some additional Event Management responsibilities.
Duncan Podbury After many years of fruitful service on the staff, following completion of his MA at Durham and an excellent year transforming the CastleGate, the elders team reviewed what was next for Duncan as part of our wider review of staffing needs. As they did this, it became clear that there was no longer a staff role suitable for someone of Duncan’s maturity and gift. Marvellously, he secured a position working for the Diocese of Durham equipping churches in mission! Duncan is continuing to serve in a voluntary capacity as a valued member of the Elders team.
IT Overhaul Good IT is essential for organisations like ours. For some time our IT has been somewhat unreliable, out-of-date and difficult to manage and support. Simon Warren was giving a lot of his time in keeping it going. We took the strategic decision to substantially upgrade the system. We have out-sourced support, monitoring and management of network and computers to CircleCloud, a professional IT support company. We installed a new Wi-Fi network that can be remotely managed and monitored. We did upgrades to all laptops and desktops to improve reliability and security. We moved email, online document storage and software support to Office365. As well as providing more facilities it saved us money! Thanks to Sam Lyall and Richard Hubbard who helped with this extensive project.
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Being amazing stewards of our resources
CC
2018
ChurchSuite We launched ChurchSuite as our administration and communication system. There are 395 people signed up in the address book. Of these there are 261 people in 17 City groups, 86 people in leadership training and leadership huddles and 201 people serving on 20 different ministry teams. We use ChurchSuite to mange our church diary, publicise all our events which then links to the website, communicate with everyone, record all our giving and use it for event sign-up. It has been a transformative system for greatly improving our administration and communication. Thanks to Sarah Davies for volunteering to help with managing Churchsuite. Our next task is to add all our children to ChurchSuite and explore using it for safely signing children into the Kids Ministry. If you are not signed-up, please do so on a Sunday as soon as you can! Once signed up you will be sent an email to download the Churchsuite App and set up your own log-in details. If you have any issues or queries send the across to Tom at comms@city-church.co.uk This will allow you to keep your data up-to-date, manage your communication preferences, see what is going on, listen to all the talks and connect to other people in the church.
Data Protection/GDPR Simon Warren wrote a new policy on data protection following the introduction of the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). The IT overhaul was a huge step towards compliance. The church has begun to develop new staff and volunteer processes and culture to ensure that we protect and care for peoples’ data. James Faraday, one of our Trustees has become our Senior Information Risk Owner and Simon Warren is our Data Protection Lead. Our next task is to conduct a full audit of all our data and ensure we comply with the regulations in keeping all data safe.
12
Working with others to transform the world
CC
2018
Shaping our Catalyst Apostolic Hub of Churches For over thirty years we have belonged to the NewFrontiers family of churches. In the last few years several new teams have been created that serve the churches worldwide. We are part of the Catalyst team, led by Simon Holley from the Kings Arms Church Bedford. Catalyst is organised into a series of Hubs, churches linking and working together through relationship. We are part of the Hub led by Matt Hatch from Mosaic Church in Leeds. The churches in our Hub are River City Church Hull, Mosaic Church Leeds, the Oak Church Leeds, Hope Church Bedlington, Kings Church Christchurch NZ, Kings Church Nelson NZ, NewSpring Church Ossett in Yorkshire. We are launching our first church plant together into Wakefield and we also have links in Zambia, North America and South Africa. Simon Warren and Ian Galloway worked with Matt Hatch to help shape the strategy of the Hub using the Natural Planning tool that has been found to be extremely useful. Simon, Ian and Andy Bramhall also worked at delivering two Learning Communities for the Hub church leadership teams.
Catalyst Festival In May, over 150 of us enjoyed attending the Catalyst Festival held at Stoneleigh Agricultural Centre. It is a vibrant mix of arts, worship, teaching, and fun. David Lyall, Duncan Podbury and Bobbie Pearson organised everything for our church site. Ian and Heather Galloway, Janice Warren and Cat Morrow led the Sparks team serving over a hundred three-yearolds.
Kate Howorth’s trip to Malawi It was a privilege to be able to partner financially and prayerfully with Kate Howorth as she gave up time between jobs to travel to Malawi in order to support the charity Ndi Moyo Palliative Care Trust ndimoyo.org/ in delivering care to patients suffering from HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-limiting illnesses.
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Working with others to transform the world
CC
2018
North East Youth For Christ We have begun to partner with North East Youth for Christ and we regularly host their big event for young people called Ask 7:7. The Turbine Hall has proved to be a great venue for this event & supporting what they are doing to serve the young people of our region.
Foundations for Farming We continue our strong relationship with Ben and Cat Frampton who lead Foundations Zambia. This is a ministry that equips and disciples people in farming, family life and finances and the results of the project are extraordinary! Through Jesus-centred discipleship and agricultural expertise, yields for subsistence farmers in Zambia are growing dramatically.
Leaders Discipleship Group Ian Galloway continued to serve other church leaders in leading a discipleship group. These leaders are Mike Duff from Cornerstone Church, James Shepherd from Hope Church, Sam Douthwaite from Gateway Church, Andy Gibson from Regent Chapel and Ali Scott from Emmanuel Church Chester-le-Street. Everyone in this group considers it an essential ingredient to sustaining and growing their leadership, skills & knowledge.
Leeds School of Theology Ian Galloway teaches two modules on this outstanding course that serves over 100 leaders from churches across the North.
GLS After nine years we sadly decided to withdraw from hosting the Global Leadership Summit. During the year some serious malpractice came to light regarding the leader of the Summit, Bill Hybels. After keeping the situation under close review, we and other church leaders in the region, decided the best course of action was not to host the Summit. Jesus often uses pruning as a way of producing fruitful further growth. We are still completely committed to leadership development and are hopeful of finding good ways of continuing to deliver that in the future
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And Finally Church life is always a mixture of joys and sorrows. It was such a moving occasion to give thanks for the life of Huw Evans, a founding member of this church and our longest serving Trustee. He will be greatly missed especially by Ruth, John, Simon, Sarah and Ellen. For the last two years of his life Huw gave himself to his two priorities: his family and his creativity. He did so much for Sputnik, the Arts Collective of Catalyst. Thank God for his example of faithful devotion to Jesus and practical action to see his kingdom rule come. Huw, we salute you!