Methodist Church appoints a new Head of Mission

The Methodist Church in Britain has appointed Jude Levermore to its newly-created Head of Mission role.

Jude has a strong professional background in leadership having worked in charity and faith-based organisations at a senior level for over 20 years. She has lead the Discipleship and Ministries team at the Methodist Church for the past 7 years and during that time has been instrumental in delivering the strengthening of the team towards evangelism.

The Head of Mission role plays a key role in supporting and managing work related to mission, evangelism, children and young people, public issues, global relationships, engagement and grants. At the core of the work will be Our Calling which sets out how the Methodist Church responds to the gospel of God's love in Christ and to live out its discipleship in worship and mission.

Speaking about her appointment Jude said: “I am thrilled and privileged to serve in this way. This is such an exciting time for the Church and my hope would be that working together with Methodists across the Connexion we can bring about transformational change that will build new ways of acting out the gospel and sharing God’s outgoing, all-embracing love for creation. One of the things that really excites me about the job is the possibility for continuing to strengthen Methodist thinking everywhere we serve and how we learn from our partner churches and mission partners.”

Connexional Secretary Doug Swanney said: “I’m delighted we have been able to appoint Jude into this role – she brings a wealth of experience to us and has worked tirelessly over the last few years in leading our Discipleship & Ministries Cluster. We are delighted to have a ‘mission team’ that brings together our work in these islands and around the world as we continue to use Our Calling as the lens with which we seek to respond to God’s call to the Methodist church to engage in God’s mission for the transformation of the world. It has been a privilege to work with Jude these last few years and I am confident she will be helping our teams work together in new ways that will help support the circuits and district of our Church.”

Notes to Editors:
Jude has previously chaired the board at Greenbelt Festivals and spent four years as head of a small NGO working with excluded young people.

She is the Chair of the Amos Trust and a non-executive Director of Love Welcomes a start-up Community Interest company working with refugee women. She a regular speaker at conferences across the UK, on a wide variety of topics that include various aspects of leadership and leadership development.

Jude is a member of the High Street Methodist Church, Witney and a local preacher in the Witney and Faringdon Circuit.