In June 2024, it was announced that the Diocese of Southwark would receive £29 million over nine years from the Church of England for its whole-diocese transformation programme. This programme – known as the Diocesan Investment Programme (DIP) will facilitate mission and growth projects throughout South London and East Surrey, none of which will be at the expense of core funding for our parishes.
What’s the aim of the Diocesan Investment Programme?
The Diocesan Investment Programme seeks to address the four main missional challenges that have been identified by our Diocesan Synod:
- Growing church attendance
- Doubling the number of churches with more than 25 children and young people
- Reaching and resourcing estates parishes
- Growing our pipelines to ministry (lay and ordained) and increase the diversity of our leadership
How are we going to address these challenges?
To address these challenges, we are developing an integrated programme with a number of workstreams that will resource and enable churches of varying sizes and kinds to flourish and grow - and then share their learning to benefit other parishes across our diocese. In planning this work, it has been vital to us as a diverse diocese to ensure that parishes of different traditions, contexts and socio-economic needs were included in our application.
The key elements of our successful bid application include:
Fresh Expressions grants
The national Church recognises our expertise and growth in this area and is doubling our ability to make grants to individual churches.
Innovation grants
We have a significant grant that we can award once every three years to a church that presents an innovative mission idea that they can develop and share with other churches to grow our parishes. More details about how any church can apply for this grant will be shared this autumn.
Parish Development and Renewal Programme
This new two-year learning initiative is for churches that feel ready to see how they can create the right environment for even more fruitful ministry in their own contexts. Groups will work with a number of other parishes to learn from one another – and the programme will be piloted in early 2025, with a view to rolling it out for many more churches to participate.
Apprenticeship-style training scheme
This aims to help address our need for more children and young people’s workers. We will train paid apprentices in CYP work to help them to develop and gain the qualifications and experience they need to pursue a vocation to this work – and to create a pathway for trained CYP workers.
Local CYP missional practitioners
We will be looking to identify experienced CYP workers who can be employed to come alongside parishes to help them develop and grow new ministry with children and young people in their parishes. This could be to help transition a particular age group or to help develop new CYP work in the parish.
Research on diversity in lay and ordained vocations
We want to consolidate work done in the past to encourage vocations amongst those of Global Majority Heritage and from culturally diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds to better identify and address the barriers to realising people’s vocations.
New Hub and Resourcing Churches
In terms of Hub Churches we are looking for churches who have developed something new that can be shared with other parishes to help them grow and thrive. Resourcing Churches will be those that, in generosity, can give to other churches to renew and develop for fruitful ministry.
The first tranche of these has already been identified:
Croydon Episcopal Area
- Springfield Church Wallington (Hub – estates focus)
- St Matthew Redhill, with St John’s Caterham Valley (Hub – Flourish initiative)
- St John Upper Norwood (Hub – children & young people focus)
- St Michael Croydon (Hub – Parish Nurse initiative)
Kingston Episcopal Area
- St Mary Putney (Hub Church – Youth Ministry in Communion)
- All Saints Kingston (with St Mary Newington) (Hub – creating fresh expressions of Church using choirs)
- St Mark’s Mitcham (resourced by Holy Trinity Clapham)
- St Andrew & St Michael Stockwell (resourced by King’s Cross Church)
Woolwich Episcopal Area
- St Giles Camberwell (supported by St John the Divine Kennington)
There will be capacity for more Hub and Resourcing Churches from 2027.
How can parishes get involved?
We are excited at all the opportunities that this new resourcing offers to help us to meet the missional challenges of our time – none of which will be at the expense of core funding for our parishes. We know that many of our parishes share this excitement and are keen to get involved. Over Summer, 2024, Ruth Martin (our Bishops Lead for Strategic Development) and the team at Trinity House have been working hard to get the structures and processes in place for these strands of work to begin to get underway and we will soon be offering opportunities for you to engage through Episcopal Area meetings and Roadshows with members of the team. The first of these will offer the opportunity to hear more about how churches can bid for Innovation Grant funding – more details will be shared on this page and through diocesan communication channels in due course.
If you have any questions about the Diocesan Investment Programme, and wish to express interest in these plans , please don’t hesitate to speak with your Archdeacon and Area Dean in the first instance.
