Dear friends,

Our church community comprises four parishes, each connected together into the Benefice of Middle ESK Moor. We have four Parochial Church Councils (PCCs), one Churchwarden, one Interim Minister (here for at least the next two years), and an overall Advisory Council that was established last year to collaboratively oversee our development. Over the next six months our Community Forum will continue to meet to work out together the best way of reconfiguring our parishes. We are seeking to make our work more enjoyable, giving everyone the opportunity to contribute their passions and skills to help build and grow a more sustainable presence in this place.

Over the next month our APCMs are coming up. At those meetings Churchwardens are normally elected, and PCC members appointed to each parish. Whilst we have to hold the Churchwardens’ elections as part of the APCMs, this year we won’t be actively seeking to appoint any Churchwardens. Instead, we will be developing new ways of fairly distributing the Churchwardens’ responsibilities amongst those in our community willing to undertake aspects of the Churchwardens’ role. A similar approach will apply to the administration parts of the Interim Minister’s role, as we continue to build a more centralised and systematic approach to the day-to-day running of the parishes and their church buildings. We will be using the responses to our recent survey alongside our community forum discussions, and our involvement with John Day and the ‘Revitalise’ team from the Diocese, to begin to re-design our approach to how our parishes are managed.

Thanks to everyone currently involved in the many aspects of running out church community – all your work is very much appreciated!

Please do come along to one of our APCMs if you can. There will be opportunities to become elected to one of our PCCs or to help one or more of our PCCs to develop our work across the benefice. The meetings will take place straight after our Sunday morning 10:45 services, and they will be as follows:

Midday Sunday 14th April, St Thomas, Glaisdale and Lealholm

Midday Sunday 21st April, St Hilda, Egton

Midday Sunday 28th April, St Matthew, Grosmont

Midday Sunday 5th May, St Mary, Goathland

With love and all good wishes,

Anthony

---

The Reverend Anthony Bennett

Interim Minister – the Benefice of Middle ESK Moor