Are you a local church leader seeking to deepen the culture of discipleship in your congregation(s)? Are you seeking to encourage a different approach, and want to try it out/reflect upon it with a group of like-minded other church leaders and with input and support to learn from your experiences?
Eido Research and St Peter’s Saltley Trust are currently recruiting six local churches for a 1-yr learning community aimed at supporting local churches to build a culture and practice of discipleship, to start in January 2027.
Many churches and their leaders are realising the importance of a deep culture of on-going discipleship and spiritual growth within the life of their congregation. Yet many people find that off-the-peg, one-size-fits-all approaches to discipleship don’t always work in their context, or don’t find it easy to implement the literature on spiritual formation in practice. Our response to this is to facilitate an approach that encourages local ownership and experimentation, aided by learning from peers, and from existing wisdom from elsewhere, past and present.
This one year community offers to train churches in a specific and supportive process, in a low pressure environment, in which they can design their own way to facilitate discipleship, try it out, and reflect about whether it worked – all alongside other churches doing the same thing
It is open to Christian churches within the wider West Midlands region [1]
The learning community will particularly suit local churches who:
- Are seeking to deepen their culture of on-going discipleship and spiritual growth within their local church
- Are excited about some of the wider work on spiritual formation and want to explore how to apply it within their context
- Want to develop small and proportional ideas for their own context and try them out
- Have some time, energy and capacity (themselves and/or lay leadership colleagues) to commit to trying something new for 6-8 months
- Want to try out a new approach with the focus and support of a learning community
- Want the freedom to try things out without the pressure of needing it to produce ‘results’
The learning community will provide:
- Input on broad ideas and models of what promotes on-going discipleship in Christians
- A creative and enjoyable process by which to move from a barrier to discipleship to a specific idea to overcome it
- A safe, supportive environment to share honestly the fruits of experimentation
- Support to identify how you will see if your idea is working and to reflect on learning
- A creative process which you can take away and apply to other aspects of your church’s life and work
Commitment from participating churches:
- A commitment from the church’s leadership team to the process of identifying, developing, implementing, and learning from their experiment/chosen innovation.
- Identify 2-3 leaders from their church who will take part in the learning community (expected to run between January and November 2027).
- Those leaders take part in 3 in-person and 1 online learning community gatherings over this period (January, February, summer term and November), and 1-2 additional check-ins with each participating church to agree how capture the impact of their experiment and ask relevant learning questions.
- Willingness for their experience to be shared in a report on the learning community which will share the process for the benefit of other churches elsewhere.
- A participation fee of £40 per church as a contribution to lunch and venue hire for gatherings.
This Discipleship Innovation Community is a partnership project between St Peter’s Saltley Trust and Eido Research. To express interest, please contact Ian Jones (director[at]saltleytrust.org.uk)
[1] The area covered by Birmingham and the Black Country, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire.