Designed By St Matthias Church Plymouth
Plymouth
Project Type: Single Church
Project Area: West
Project Address:
St Matthias, North Hill,
Postcode: PL4 8HF
Website: http://www.stmatthias.biz
Project History & Affiliations:
St Matts is an evangelical Anglican family church. It might best be described as gently renewed/charismatic but with a range of churchmanship in the congregation. It has a long history of evangelical churchmanship and has placed a good deal of time and energy into children and young people’s groups for many years. The church is multi age and draws people from the surrounding parish area, further afield, and a small core of University students. The average attendance is 75 adults with a small but committed Sunday school of 10 across all ages. Our wider youth and children’s work is better attended but still not as much as we would hope.
Structure & Vision of the Project:
The Vicar Paul was appointed before Easter and is committed to seeing our children and young peoples ministry grow and to providing proper time for training and reflection. The church mission plan is attached to give an idea of our priorities, and we have a strong leadership team made up of the Vicar, Churchwardens and Readers, as well as the wider PCC and other ministry leadership teams. The new worker would be responsible to the Vicar and would meet weekly for training and reflection.
About the location of the Project:
St Matts is located in North Hill Plymouth, just off Mutley Plain. The church is therefore really city centre, and based in the main student residence area for Plymouth University. We have two small private housing estates within the parish which many young families live on, and a smaller number of other family housing. The church is a ten minute walk to the main shopping area of Plymouth and the University.
About the youth work of the Project:
Our children and young peoples work happens at three levels, firstly church specific groups, secondly more general Christian outreach, and thirdly general contact with children and young people in the community. The focus currently for the work would be church based, supplemented with schools contact. Plymouth High School is directly opposite the church and has become much more open to contact in the last few years, as has our closest primary school Mount Street. We would hope that these would feed into our church based activities. Messy Church which began around 7 months ago is now a major gateway into the church for many unchurched families and supplemented by our annual holiday club a major part of our overall strategy. Plymouth has an active wider youth ministry (South West Youth Mission) which we are part of and there are great opportunities for growth in the city.