Food and Faith at Five is a new initiative happening out in Wakefield, designed to be a place of invitation for the community.

The food is a key part of invitation and getting people to be comfortable inviting people for a meal. I’m drawing inspiration from what Paul Milson does out at Brightwater with round table discussions. We have a specific topic each time and we focus on discussion. So far we’ve also finished with some worship and prayer.

It’s a simple format, and we’ve only done a couple of them so far, but it’s gone pretty well. We’re trying to build a core group that will invite others, be a place that welcomes non-Christians, and grow from there.

Wakefield reached out to me because they recognised the need for change. After the City to City reports and all that, the congregation there had a realisation that something new was required. A similar thing happened in Brightwater before Paul Milson started there – they had a vacancy between vicars and an opportunity to start something fresh, so I got involved.

I’m not doing it alone. We’ve got 10 or so parishioners from St Barnabas coming out, effectively turning Food and Faith into their life group. They were eager to encourage another parish, so we’re walking alongside them in a partnership between St Barnabas and Wakefield.

When you're struggling as a church, there’s the potential to spend a lot of energy simply struggling, and your whole narrative becomes about the struggle for survival. Sometimes you need something or someone from the outside to be a catalyst to get your head out of your own struggle.

This is a way of testing the water. 

My prayer is that it will help change the foundation of the parish itself, and there will be some new life. Then hopefully out of that, they’ll be able to appoint some new people into roles to grow the parish in a new way. They’re really open to trying new things.

It might be as simple as a couple of new families showing up and bringing that new energy. You hear this across the diocese – two or three new families can transform the atmosphere and suddenly there's this whole new energy. That's really the hope for Wakefield: to get those key families, and for us to walk alongside the parish as we experiment and try new things.

So the plan at the moment is to keep doing what we’re doing, meeting fortnightly until the end of the year. My hope is that this partnership will continue at least for the next year or so, with St Barnabas supporting where we can. 

It’s great to have that freedom and support from our bishop to try things, and permission to explore new initiatives. If you're thinking about partnering up or doing something new together, just go for it.

My philosophy is: let's give it a try and see how it goes.