Growing Faith

The Growing Faith Adventure is a call for the renewal of hearts and minds so that it becomes second nature to include and value children, young people and households in every aspect of church life for the lifelong formation of faith in the whole of life.

Growing Faith promotes a partnership between the three communities of church, school and household to enable the discovery, exploration and growth for all in those communities. The partnership is imagined as intersections of a set of overlapping spheres to find and promote ways to help faith to grow with children, young people and households.

Each 'sphere' might already be interacting with one of the others, but very few contexts demonstrate clear and fruitful interaction between all three - the 'central intersection'. The intersections encourage a joint venture or activity seeking opportunities for developing prayer and gathering for worship, leading to conversations about Christian faith being normalised. The question Growing Faith is asking of worshipping communities is whether our doing has helped us become the whole people of God.

Growing Faith Principles

Three principles are shaping our approach to Growing Faith:

Connected Communities - looking for the meaningful connected community of faith in the intersection between church, school and households

Spiritual Encounters - engaging in conversations about and expressing faith as people encounter God as individuals and together

Imaginative Practices - searching for 'a new way of being church' and creating new thinking and new doing in relation to children, young people and households.

Assessing any activity, vision or attitude through the three Growing Faith principles helps to draw the thinking toward that central intersection where all three communities are operating in partnership.

The vision is a call to aim for the central intersection of the three spheres, so that our communities of faith might include and value children and young people as fellow pilgrims.