Here comes Five Year Plan!!
As we thought about our twentieth anniversary which is upon us this month, we all thought that it will be better to target a "silver anniversary" in five years time and then set some targets which we might achieve by 2015. Then we can have a real celebration! The process of developing the plan is working at two levels. Firstly we have asked every congregation, school, institution, guild or ministry to develop their own five-year plan and submit it to head quarters. This will take a little time especially as the vestry meetings (that is the Annual General Meetings of the congregations in our context) all take place in February and March. Once the information comes in, we hope to publish a prayer calendar of some sort with briefly summarized aims for each place and ministry, which can then be used as information and fuel for prayer across the diocese over the coming quinquennium. At diocesan level we have a major gathering on Saturday 13th February at which the diocesan-level plan should be developed. We have distributed all the background information we can think of surveying the past 20 years and reviving recent Synod resolutions which may not have been fully implemented to date. Delegates would naturally bring with them knowledge of the local-level discussions around parish plans. This would therefore take effectively the form of a goal-setting exercise which will be reduced to writing over the following couple of weeks and published as the next issue of Compass, diocesan magazine. This would naturally appear on the website as soon as we have it. It will then be launched publicly on Palm Sunday in a liturgical context and the prayer diary will follow when the material is available.
