25 July 2024
It all started a few years ago when a Girls' Brigade company and a Boys' Brigade company had to find a new home. As Mark ‘Tizz’ Tizzard, the Intergenerational Mission Enabler of the Southampton District explains, "They found a home in a Methodist Church, but it became apparent to the church’s minister that the church was not able to create the spiritual welcome for those families they needed."
This realisation prompted conversations between the minister, Revd John Mills, and Tizz about how to better connect with these families. By 2020, with funding from New Places for New People, a core team began to take shape, including Tizz, Revd John Mills, Catherine from the Girls' Brigade and Danny, an experienced church planter. Their main question was: what could they bring to the families and how?
The team settled on staying in the Copnor area of Portsmouth where the Girls' Brigade met. “It is a young area with many young families and a lot of on-road parking,” explains Tizz.
The vision is to start with the existing Girls' Brigade families, who largely do not attend Church.
"How can we intentionally create a new space for them to grow into an awareness that there are people who believe in God? And that there is an invitation to join in that kind of exploration and worship."
Mark ‘Tizz’ Tizzard, Intergenerational Mission EnablerWhile still in the early stages, the project has been named Compass and the team is hiring a Project Pioneer to help move things forward. "We want this person to explore what might work and what sort of topics people are interested in," says Tizz, envisioning potential parenting courses or youth-focused discussions. “We want to listen to what people are interested in and find space where we can have these conversations.”
But Compass is not just about Portsmouth. It is part of a district-wide strategy to help circuits across to listen, test and explore new approaches to mission and outreach. As Tizz explains, "We want to help circuits to do community audits and community listening. That means talking to politicians, to the police and to health care professionals, to find out where the issues are. The last phase is to listen to the existing church to see if there are people willing to be involved in this."
This includes listening to God, the community, and the existing church, then testing ideas with the support of district resources such as researchers and pioneer evangelists. The goal is for circuits to explore what might work, even if it involves some failure along the way.
With its focus on intergenerational connection, prayerful discernment and a willingness to try new approaches, the Compass project is charting an innovative course for church engagement in Portsmouth and beyond.
