Fr. Dave, parish priest of Blessed James Bell and Dean of the Warrington and Widnes Deanery, has requested for a representative from SS Peter and Michael, to join the Deanery Synodal Council. The Council meetings will begin in September, be run on a bi-monthly basis and will run for 12 months, so six meetings in all.

The meetings will not be like parish council meetings, rather they will be like the meetings that took place in preparation for Synod 2020 - prayer, food, listening and discernment.

Mary Hallam has kindly accepted the role of our representative on the Deanery Synodal Council.

Many thanks to Mary for volunteering.

Deanery Synodal Council Update – 6/7 July 2024 - Mary Hallam

Good morning – I’m one of the representatives for the parish on the Deanery Synodal Council.  I would like to update you on the progress  made by the council so far.

About 12 months ago, we were invited by Archbishop Malcolm to look at how Families of Parishes could be formed in the Warrington and Widnes Deanery, and this led to the establishment of 3 families of parishes – East Warrington (us), West Warrington, and Widnes with Cronton.  Our family of parishes consists of Blessed James Bell, St Stephen’s, and St Peter’s and St Michael’s.

Our Family of Parishes have had several meet-ups during the past year to get to know each other – an exciting candle-lit Christingle service at St Benedict’s, a beautiful Stations of the Cross service at St. Stephen’s and an invigorating Spring walk from St. Oswald’s to St. Peter’s.  All have involved plenty of chat, tea and cake afterwards – vital ingredients for making new friendships!  Everybody was made to feel so welcome in each of the churches and those who have attended have all enjoyed the occasion. Maybe you would like to come to a future event?

Moving on, we hope to begin to build on and strengthen these new relationships within our Family of Parishes.  For instance, we need to look at how best to coordinate sacramental preparation for baptism and first holy communion across the parishes by combining our resources.

We would also like to undertake a larger project involving everyone in our Family during the coming year, by working towards the CAFOD Live Simply award.  This would also tie in well with the Liverpool Archdiocese Care for Creation plan which is a commitment to environmental action and sustainable living across the Archdiocese.  Look out for more information about this in the future.

We hope that as many of you as possible will join us in this endeavour.  We don’t know what the future may hold for all the parishes in Warrington, but working together as a larger team with our new friends is an excellent way to prepare both for future change and allowing us to ‘become the Church God wants us to be’.

If you have any questions, thoughts or ideas on this, I’m available after Mass.   Thank you.

Update 19th November 2022 - Deanery Synodal Council Letter

The first communication from the DSC was communicated by Mary Hallam on the weekend of the 19/20th of November and where we were informed that the deaneries were being asked to comment, provide ideas and thoughts as to the deanery operations, taking into consideration:

• Falling attendees
• Ageing parishioners
• Ageing clergy
• Reductions in clergy numbers

The initial communication has been provided in the form of the letter below: 

 ... and which asks for comment, ideas and solutions with regard to the structural form that the deanery should / must take as a result of the 4 considerations outlined above. Simply put,  we are being asked to consider how to use our resources (physical, human and potentially financial) to best strengthen and spread our Christian faith. The preferred solution at the moment is Families of Parishes which is shown in a diagram on our Pastoral Plan page and which is discussed at a high level in the document above. It's really all about consolidation and making sure we continue to make best use of the resources we have, whilst potentially re-using some of the resources which may become surplus as a result of said consolidation.

We request that you take some time to think about the issues at hand, think about other possible solutions and also potential hurdles that will need to be overcome, in order to set us up for the next generation.

In trying to give some guidelines to you, some examples of the type of questions we should be asking ourselves and providing insight and ideas to are:

• How can we structure our deanery to further enhance the Families of Parishes (FoP) solution?
• what do you understand FoP responsibilities to be?
• What do you think or the FoP suggestions?
• How do you think it will work?
• What ideas do you have that will work to help the archdiocese / deanery to bring FoP to fruition?
• How can we improve on some of the issues mentioned in the letter?
• For some people transport will be a a problem  in the  FOP model but are there any other losses and gains you envisage in this model? 

There are certainly other questions and we hope you will feel free to send us your honest thoughts and ideas about how to create a structure for our resources as mentioned above, making better use of them all and allow us to respond positively to what is actually recommendation #4 from the Pastoral Plan. We hope that the work we do will then be adopted across the other deaneries in the archdiocese. Similarly, we hope to benefit from the work that they are doing on other recommendations from the Pastoral Plan.

Please feel free to contact Deacon Jim or Mary Hallam directly or, in order that we can more easily consolidate views and thoughts, use the parish email to collect and transfer your thoughts and ideas which Mary can then use in her discussions / meetings with the Deanery. 

A summary of our input will be published here when known.

Many thanks in advance for your help.