Walk Church – Feed back from our survey and meeting
We are very grateful to everyone who completed the Walk Church questionnaire, all your submissions have been very useful; they give us an objective profile of the congregation. For instance one important detail, it tells us most of you (65%) take part in other churches, but significantly 35% of you for whom Walk Church is your principle or only contact with the church.
As to what’s most important to you about Walk Church, ranked equal, are the variety of walks and venues, and our Christian fellowship. Another much appreciated feature of Walk Church is the opportunity to respond and talk about the Bible readings and our faith.
In the meeting back in July, we discussed responses to the survey and ideas for developing Walk Church, and how we can could address things that were not working.
In our meeting:
- There was enthusiasm to create a WhatsApp Walk Church prayer group. This will enable greater support and communication between members. If you want to be included in this group please contact Alex Bienfait.
- There are often children and families who regularly take part, but we want to do more to encourage them, this will include developing our publicity, and may be creating shorter walks at different times.
- We acknowledged that Walk Church works less well when the group gets too large, ie larger than 20. We’ll try various ideas to meet that challenge including encouraging people to let us know when they are planning to join us for a walk, and then splitting the group if we think the numbers will be too large.
- We will encourage financial support of Walk Church initially to cover our costs and support then to support the wider church. How we set this up we will discuss with the Ashford Team ministry, with whom we are registered as a “Fresh expression” congregation.
- We will experiment with more variety of walks; some longer, others shorter, may be a long distance pilgrimage route over several days.