Last Saturday, Richard Springer inaugurated his ministry as Director of our Urban Leadership School and Assistant Priest at St George-in-the-East. Here he reflects on his first week with us…
It has been a long time coming getting to Shadwell. Not just because I was interviewed at the beginning of the year and licensed as Assistant Priest to the parish of St George-in-the-East some 8 months later – just last week in a wonderful service.
Having been one of its first participants, Selina Stone now co-ordinates CTC’s Buxton Leadership Programme. In this blog she introduces this year’s participants.
The Programme has kicked off its fourth year with energy and excitement! We have three brilliant interns who are going to be with us for the whole year practicing community organising in local communities while also working in Westminster.
On 10th September, the Revd Richard Springer (left) will begin his ministry as Director of our Urban Leadership School, and will licensed by the Bishop of Stepney as Assistant Priest at St George-in-the-East. It’s the next stage of CTC’s pioneering partnership with St George’s – the church in whose crypt we are now based. You are warmly invited to join us as we welcome Richard to the team.
Richard brings a wealth of experience of inner-city ministry, both as a lay person and as Curate of St Peter de Beauvoir in Hackney. In particular, Richard has experience of overseeing a residential Christian community, and more generally of working with young people in inner-city contexts. This provides a strong foundation for both of his new roles: an important part of the renewal of St George-in-the-East has been the establishment of a lay community of young Christians.
In this final in our series of blogs by our summer interns, Zoe Mathias writes about what she’s learned…
HOW THEN SHALL I LIVE? – By the end of my second year of university studying theology this question weighed heavily on my mind. I had many eloquent ideas about how the world should be and had repeatedly seen the stark contrast. It was this tension and the pressing question of how I should respond to it that drew me towards this internship.
Molly Kemp spent a month as part of our summer internship programme. In this latest in the series of reflections on what the interns learned, she blogs about her placement at St Johns, Hoxton…
While studying chemistry at Oxford, I became involved with an organisation called Just Love, which aims to get Christian students involved in seeking social justice. Eventually I ended up on the committee running the Just Living project, which focuses on how we can change our lifestyle, what we eat, where we buy our clothes and what we pray about so that it is more just. So although I had spent a lot of time thinking, reading and praying about social justice, it had been quite focused on the individual decisions, the impact of which was hard to trace. I wanted to explore the way relationships within a community could be used to bring about structural change – exactly what this internship (and community organising) does.
Here is another blog from one of our summer interns. This time, Laura MacFarlane talks about her time in Peckham, helping the church campaign for a better local park…
I was brought up in a village in a rural area of Portsmouth. Community was always very important to us, both as a church and as a family. We were deeply involved in the life of the village and I always enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life, working together with those from different churches and groups.
After finishing school, I went to Exeter University to study theology. I became more and more interested in the way that Jesus worked in communities, and also began to understand more fully the problems that existed beyond the boundaries of my little village. This led me to complete a project addressing the problems with the welfare state, following which my lecturer recommended the CTC summer internship to me.
Every summer at CTC we introduce a group of young people to church-based community organising. This year we had a fantastic group. Here, Rachel Cook blogs about her placement at Holy Trinity, Tottenham….
Having been involved in various voluntary projects and charity work, for example cooking meals for homeless people, mentoring school children, the main reason I wanted to do this internship was to better understand how to tackle poverty and injustice on a larger scale.
In this blog, our Development Director, Tim Thorlby outlines the challenges facing the new Prime Minister, and how things look from outside the Westminster bubble…
“I was the future once”
A rueful comment as another Prime Minister exits the political stage, knowing that his time is up. Such moments of transition are times of reflection. David Cameron’s time in Number 10 is already being analysed, with his initial hopes and dreams now being set against assessments of his actual legacy.
David Barclay, who’s spent the past four years developing our work on credit, debt and money blogs for us about the successful pilot of the Church Credit Champions Network…
The Church hasn’t always followed through on good intentions. But at a recent event in St Paul’s Cathedral, CTC brought together churches and credit unions to celebrate the way that Christians in London have been making good on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s famous ‘War on Wonga’ comments made back in 2013.
The Church Credit Champions Network was set up by CTC in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s intervention because we believe local churches have resources which, if unlocked, can increase the capacity of credit unions to provide access to savings and responsible credit. The Network has been become one of the major projects to come out of the Archbishop’s initiative, and we marked the end of its two year pilot in London with a special evaluation event.
Our Summer Internship (previously known as Jellicoe) is currently taking place here in east London. After three days of training with Citizens UK and CTC, the 11 interns are taking part in placements with local churches involved in community organising. Selina Stone blogs about what has been happening so far…
Our cohort of interns has arrived from different cities around the UK, with one flying in from the USA on his way home to the Ukraine! Each of them has a project brief explaining where they will be placed, who their supervisors will be and where they will be staying for the duration of the month. None of the interns have been trained in community organising before, and all of them are students or recent graduates, often discerning the way forward in their studies, careers and ministry. Some of them were involved in Citizens UK’s #NoPlaceForHate campaign at London transport hubs – offering stickers and leaflets for what to do in the event of witnessing a racist incident.
