Thirsk

Mary Rolls

revmaryrolls@gmail.com

June 2024 Update

Its been a busy and exciting time seeing where God is leading us here in Thirsk! I’ve got 2 stories to share, one of how God quite amazingly highlighted and opened new connections for us with postnatal mums and a tots bible study. Secondly and slightly unexpectedly, I was licensed 18 months ago as Area Dean for Mowbray, so want to share a bit about what a Multiply Area Dean looks like! 

Nurture! Post-natal group

Multiply works with a great model of mission from Laurence Singlehurst (author of ‘Sowing, reaping and keeping).

I’ve found this model really fruitful to be able to keep assessing where the work here is opening relationship connections with people in the community, such that we might start having conversations about faith. From this we want to intentionally nurture faith towards regular worship and lived out discipleship as part of the whole church community. The model works on having sowing stages, getting into relationship with people so that they trust us, reaping stages where we can fan faith into flame, and, keeping stages, where we are able to support ongoing discipleship.  

Its been precisely once in my time as a Multiply minister that Jesus has shown all the stages at once with a distinct group of people, and it happened all on the same day! (A very exciting Monday!) 

I had a WhatsApp message on a Monday morning from a young mum with twins in our Church, following up from the service I’d led the day before to say that she really wanted to go deeper in her bible study with others, but couldn’t do an evening home group. Would it be possible to do a day time bible study for mums with little ones? I could immediately think of 4 others in the same situation, in regular worship or in the orbit of the church. Yes! 

Monday afternoon I met up with Tracey, local midwife and our baptism + families volunteer minister. Tracey is an absolute gift to St Mary’s as she has delivered most of the babies in Thirsk, so is so well loved and trusted around the area! She mentioned that the midwives had been really struggling to restart any form of post natal provision after Covid - was there anything we could do?  

Yes!!! From our work with the Vine community, we’ve got great working relationships across the churches in town and have a well established pattern of rotating the venue of the Vine, so local churches are used to hosting us! It felt immediately obvious that we could advertise the same time each week to meet, but ask 4 churches to host once a month - not a big ask. Tracey has the support of her boss and so she and the local midwives invite mums to the group. The group pretty much runs itself, as peer support, with Tracey and a retired midwife Kim in attendance. It enables me, clergy colleagues and the churches to establish a relationship we may not otherwise have with local mums. We are able to invite people on to Christingle, mothers day services, church Ceilidhs, pub quizzes, coffee mornings etc.

18 months on Nurture is going strong, has a regularly flow through of mums and has created a connection with the churches (ecumenically) so that we are able to feed them into the local tots groups and hopefully continue the relationship with the families and church as the kids grow.  

We’ve confirmed one of the mums, had another exploring faith, baptised several of the babies and are about to marry 2 parents! Its a huge joy to see the community that has emerged with the mums regularly supporting each other, offering clothes and kit and advising each other on the WhatsApp group. 

Thank you Jesus for showing us the people to serve, the means of reaching this group and the path to lead them into discipleship, all in one day! 

What does a Multiply Area Dean look like?

I’m definitely still working this out! An expectation of the Multiply posts was set out from the beginning to tithe some of our time to the Deanery. This enabled me to grow good relationships wider than just the parish, which definitely helped in stepping up to be Area Dean and working with the wonderful people in the deanery here.  

I really respect that it was a step of faith for Bishop Paul and Archdeacon Amanda to license me into this role, and really hope to have brought a missional and creative perspective to this work. 

There is a big strategic element at the moment, working out with DLT how to fulfil our deanery plan. We are currently consulting PCCs on a deanery reorganisation which encompasses about 75% of the deanery. This will move us towards greater team working and more sustainable ministry into the future.  

Networking people around passion / interest areas feels obvious to me, we’ve set up: 

• Mission Network - meeting quarterly for all those passionate about reaching their community for Jesus. Worshipping and praying together, hopefully this is catalysing local mission where people are by encouraging each other with whats going on around the area.  

• Children, Family and Youth network - for all those engaged with our future generations. We have been sharing resources, exploring ways of supporting parents in developing their kids faith. We are piloting a ‘starting rite’ baby spirituality course, to set it up and hopefully repeat in another venue in the deanery.  

• Green team - we’ve met once but challenged all our PCCs this Lent to 3 green things - include climate care regularly in intercessions, rewilding an area of the churchyard and become single-use plastic free. Members of this group are registering with Arocha as eco churches and completing the C of E pathway to Net Zero. We hope to grow this expertise locally, so that we can become an ‘eco deanery’ with Arocha once all churches are registered! 

I’m definitely not bored! But happily the Multiply / Deanery work does seem to dovetail well and very much keep me seeking Jesus for his direction and wisdom!