Suggestions
Practical suggestions for Churches Together groups
Churches Together groups can help churches to:
1. Understand each other
- Invite representatives of other churches to attend ordinary services
- Invite members of other churches to ongoing denominational fellowship groups
- Hold Council meetings on different approaches to common issues, including divisive ones such as intercommunion
- Worship and pray together
- Use the opportunity of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity for united worship and daily prayer
- Arrange a prayer weekend
- Organise prayer walks going from church to church
- Have a prayer pilgrimage to a place of prayer (eg monastery, shrine)
- Mark the Women’s World Day of Prayer
- Learn together
- Hold study groups for Lent and at other times of the year
- Train preachers, youth leaders, women’s group leaders etc together
- Keep business to a minimum at meetings and use the time to address a theme
- Compile a common list of speakers for women’s groups
- Evangelise together
- Hold a day of witness in your town/neighbourhood
- Have a walk of witness on Good Friday
- Have a day of celebration at Pentecost
- Arrange carol-singing in a pub
- Publish a list of local churches cor circulation in your area and putting in libraries
- Have a churches together website
- Have a day of celebration at Pentecost
- Serve the locality together
- Be aware of local needs and work together to meet them eg homeless, unemployed, those facing redundancy, recently bereaved
- Meet the spiritual needs of people in residential homes
- Set up a Street Pastor scheme
- Support prison chaplaincy and hospital chaplaincy
- Relate to the local authority together
- Support ecumenical borough deans
- Invite local authority officials to meetings
- Address justice, peace and environmental issues together
- Become eco-congregations together
- Support your local town twinning or form a new international link
- Organise Christian Aid Week
- Enjoy life together
- Have a Shrove Tuesday pancake evening before the Lent groups
- Have a joint choir festival
- Have a barn dance
- Go on an outing to somewhere not specially holy!
Contact us for more suggestions