The Media loves to portray the Church as being out of touch with the real world and in severe decline, as people turn away from the Church and the Secular Society claim with Richard Dawkins that God is dead! Unfortunately for them, God is NOT dead, and remains very much alive, and whatever problems the Church may be wrestling with currently, there remain some churches who buck all the trends and are growing, and Church Schools have never been more popular across the nation than now. Religion it seems will just simply not go away!

Here in the Minster we are seeing more and more people coming through our doors, whether it be for concerts, conferences, meetings, for worship, to pray, as the casual visitor/tourist. At the Annual Meeting held last month, we noted that the Electoral Role went up from 184 to 201 – was this a sign of the Minster community growing again? Four new people were elected to the Church Council!

On Sunday 13 May at the 10.30am Sung Eucharist, our new Consultant, The Venerable Cherry Vann, will be coming to help us launch our new Vision Groups for the coming few years. The Vision Group process has enabled collaborative ministry to flourish, with over 50 people actively engaged in taking the Minster forward, as we seek to discern God’s will for us and our community. Some of the work we set out to achieve three years ago has now been completed, and it’s time to move on again. The Church Council, at its residential weekend last October made some important decisions about finishing with some vision groups, and the need to build some new focus groups, providing new energy to address new concerns, as the Minster project continues to take shape.

Firstly, we want to retain three of the old groups, because they still have ongoing work and fulfil an important role in the Minster: Finance and General Purposes, Media and Communications, and Social Justice. This means we have now brought to an end the Music, Education, and Worship Groups. This doesn’t mean none of these things are important, or that we will stop doing any of them, we just need to re focus.

Two new groups will be launched: one looking at how we continue to grow our Fringe membership; the other exploring how we encourage people on the fringe to be drawn into a more engaged relationship with the Minster, and more importantly with God! This group will literally explore how we support the community of faith from birth to death, and everything in between!

Our prayer is that the increase in numbers on the Electoral role was not a blip, but the beginning of new exciting times, as the community begins to grow spiritually and numerically. We also have new staff on the way: Matthew Hunter coming as Curate, to be Ordained in the Minster on 30^th June, and Jordan Deakin, as Organ Scholar in September, from Keel University. This means the Minster will have more staff than ever before, and therefore the possibilities and the capability to deliver an effective Church to the town and the borough raises its game even more.

We have exciting times ahead!

Revd Canon Hilary Barber Vicar of Halifax