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Home , Tring, Wilstone

Team Parish Profile for part time Team Vicar 2016

Tring Team Parish

General Information

Summary The Tring Team Parish consists of five churches on the edge of the Chilterns. Tring itself is a market town of 14,000 with the church of St Peter and St Paul, and there are four village churches: All Saints, Long Marston; St Cross, ; St Mary’s, Puttenham; and St John the Baptist, , all of which have a modern liberal outlook, but worship in a wide range of styles. As a parish we have been working with over a number of years as a central part of our mission. The school has 1,500 students of whom very few come from a worshipping background. This puts us in an interesting place where there is genuine crossover between the church and the secular world, with new insights and challenges coming from this dynamic. This is central to our mission and we are working out how to engage with new families whilst keeping faith with those who have grown up in the church.

We are located in the Chilterns in an area of outstanding natural beauty, where , and Bedfordshire meet as the merge into the Vale of . The A41 links to the M25 eleven minutes away and the frequent train service Tring Station to Euston making the area a very successful and extremely buoyant residential location.

There is much encouraging activity happening in our churches and many things to celebrate. We have some huge congregations across the Team (c6,500 attending all Christmas services, 800+ people in our churches on Remembrance Sunday); we have excellent lay leadership; we continue to foster vocations; our midweek service attendances are good; members of our congregations are involved in every area of civic life; we are good at supporting charities; many are involved in our local house groups; we are creating new ways of worshipping in our church schools; we have entered the virtual world in a small way with a presence on Facebook, Twitter and the web and we use electronic pewsheets; we are beginning to use Audio Visual Aids to enrich our worship; we have a clear liberal identity and enjoy high quality preaching from many ministers; communion before confirmation is helping to develop new disciples; we have a growing youth group; Worship for All is a strength; one of our churches reports that its regular congregation is made up of 1/3 under 16, 1/3 between 16 and 60 and 1/3 over 60; we are holding an increasing number of baptisms with the church becoming more often the place of choice for funerals, reflecting the fact that we carry out all occasional offices well.

Vision and direction We are actively questioning “What does it mean to be Church in the 21st Century?” recognising that we need to value the traditions of the church which have brought us to this place, and the people who hold onto these dearly. At the same time we need to engage with those who are new to faith. Particular areas for development are:

 our work with pre‐school aged children and engaging young parents in church life;  establishing an adult enquirers course (which is educated, liberal, and sceptical) and therefore suitable for engaging those new to church in our area.  to involve more members of the congregation in our shared ministry of pastoral care, and to develop wedding, baptism and funeral teams  to explore further how we engage people in our worship, especially through the appropriate use of music.

The licensed clergy, both stipendiary and self supporting, work as a team and share responsibility for looking after the churches and the liturgy, spirituality, mission / social outreach, pastoral care, and education. We have a portfolio approach to these, and responsibility changes according to our abilities and capacity. We all expect to grow and develop as we move the parish forwards.

Team Ministry

Introduction The Tring Team Parish functions well as a Team. Each church has a District Church Council which meets every other month. The PCC is responsible for the financial and strategic life of the parish, meeting every other month. The Tring Team functions more like a single parish with five worship centres and we are committed to working collaboratively both as clergy colleagues and with the laity. We are a Team that values working together and supporting each other. All clergy are licensed to the Team as a whole but have specific areas of responsibility. The things we do together are:

1. Parish Education  Book Group – meets monthly on 4th Sundays  Lent Films – in 2015 we had a series of films themed around the seven deadly sins  Bible Studies – one‐off courses and more regular courses in Lent and Advent  Adult Enquirers courses  One‐off study days – the last one was on the concept of “A Just War”  Confirmation/Communion before Confirmation

2. Transforming Communities The main missions we support are  The Children’s Society  Christian Aid  DENS (the local homeless shelter)  Foodbank (run from Tring Parish Church)  Habitat for Humanity – we send groups to Kyrgyzstan to build houses  Bible Society We also support local charities. Currently we are supporting the Tring Child Contact Centre.

3. Parish Groups  House Groups  Men’s Society  Mothers’ Union  Dads n Lads n Daughters camping  Young Adults  Youth Café  First Saturday Lunch for the bereaved

4. Worship, prayer and spirituality We use the same worship booklets across the parish. As well as these we have  A meditation group  A Prayer / Healing team – who meet with people after the service and pray with them  A monthly alternative communion  Prayer Union  Occasional quiet days

5. The Wider Community  Churches Together in Tring  ACTS Drama (an ecumenical Christian group)  Tring Justice and Peace Group  Tring Child Contact Centre  Fairtrade

District Churches & Tring School

St John the Baptist, Aldbury

The Team Vicar will live in Aldbury opposite St John the Baptist Church and will have responsibility for this District.

St John the Baptist Church is a church at the heart of the local community and open to all. It is an active village church, with the congregation and the wider village community playing a full and vital part in church life. The congregation cares about the building, the community, their faith, and each other. As a church community they are getting younger. They put a lot of effort into encouraging young families and young people with Worship for All being a real strength especially with the Junior Choir. It is an inclusive church in the liberal catholic tradition and uses both Common Worship and the Book of Common Prayer, with robed servers, and laity leading the intercessions and readings. The church is open daily throughout the year as a place of prayer for all people. A worship committee plans the services for special events and festivals. A fabric committee ensures that the church is maintained to a high standard. There are close links with Aldbury C of E School, which is a voluntary controlled Infants and Junior school. The Team Vicar is usually an ex‐officio governor at the school and members of the ministry team lead a weekly act of collective worship in the school (or church). A Chapter House is attached to the church.

St Peter & St Paul, Tring Tring Parish Church is a large and lively community fortunate enough to meet in a magnificent medieval building. We have around about 250 members and on a normal Sunday will have between 120 and 200 people coming along to the various services. We are a community of all ages from new‐borns to 100‐year‐olds with everyone in between. We are basically a thriving middle of the road Church of church with a liberal outlook. We are open every day. This open‐ness is more than being a church which is physically open. It is our whole mindset – we are open to God and to questions about God. We take seriously that God is working in the lives of all people and none of us has all of the answers but together we paint a picture of God. Our early Sunday morning community is largely BCP based; we have a lively and popular Worship for All once a month, with music led by a worship group; and our regular 10.00am service is Holy Communion with a robed choir. There is a Sunday Club and Junior Choir. The parish hall is next to the church. We have close links to Bishop Wood School which is a voluntary aided Junior school, and School which is a performing arts school. Students from Tring Park join us for Worship for All each month.

All Saints, Long Marston All Saints is a small village church with an open churchyard, a wonderful interior and an historic organ. Long Marston itself is a village of about 250 houses and a pub. Whilst our church can be a very cold place in winter, the warmth of welcome from the small congregation is wonderful. It is an unusual church in that it can be common for the whole congregation to be under the age of 50. There are close links with Long Marston School, which is a voluntary aided Infants and Junior school.

St Cross, Wilstone St Cross is at the heart of the Wilstone village community. St Cross has re‐imaged itself in the past five years, becoming more informal and at the same time more confident in its role of making God known and feeding the spiritual life of the village community. Our best attended services are often those which precede the Tuesday coffee mornings. We are really pleased that St Cross has just moved to having weekly Sunday services.

St Mary’s, Puttenham Puttenham is part of the small hamlet of Puttenham/ with an ancient church. There are only approximately 50 houses but St Mary’s has a comparatively good congregation. The worship is entirely from the BCP with an evensong once a month and an early morning Communion, also once a month. We have the excellent Cecilia hall next door to the church.

Ministry in our Schools Tring School is the largest church school within the Diocese of , with 1,500 students and 200 staff. Although it is a church school, it is genuinely a community school, being the only secondary school in the parish. The majority of children in the parish attend which gives it a genuinely comprehensive feel. In recent years we have helped the school reclaim its Christian identity. The school now says its values are Wisdom, Hope and Koinonia which translates to a mission statement of “creating successful learners, confident individuals in a comprehensive community.”

Chaplaincy at the school is defined as being: Liturgical: developing the collective worship of the school in a way which is appropriate for a comprehensive school and which engages teenagers; Incarnational: to provide a Christian presence within the school and to get alongside the students and staff where they are; Pastoral: to respond to the pastoral needs of all at the school; Prophetic: to be a counter‐cultural voice and to enable the school to be confident with its distinctive Christian ethos; Spiritual: to encourage the spiritual development of the whole school community. We work within the structures of the school and are sensitive to the concerns of non‐believers as we seek to build a church within the school.

As well as the secondary school we have 3 other church schools. The team clergy lead a weekly act of collective worship in each of these schools, and our ministry in these schools is very important. It means that we are leading worship for almost 1,000 children each week. There are a number of non church schools in the parish who hold services and visit the church regularly.

Other Information

Governance / Deanery / Ecumenical The DCCs are responsible for the worshipping and social life of each District as well as for the fabric of the church. They each meet five or six times a year. The PCC is responsible for our mission activities and education as well as the financial and strategic life of the parish. It meets every other month. There are two Parish Co‐ordinators who function as wardens for the whole parish. Each District church can also appoint two wardens who are technically wardens for the whole parish.

The Deanery is a small Deanery. Synod meets three times a year, one of the sessions often being a lecture. There are friendly relationships in the Deanery and Chapter meets every other month. There is a strong Ministers’ Group with Churches Together in Tring. Tring has three Baptist churches, one Roman Catholic, one Methodist and a Community church.

Team Staff Team Rector Huw Bellis Team Vicar (part time) Jane Banister Team Vicar (part time) Vacant Curate in Training Graham White (ordained deacon 5th July 2015) Associate Priest (self‐supporting) Didier Jaquet Reader Malcolm Nobbs Reader Jon Reynolds Reader Grahame Senior Diocesan Lay Minister Mike Watkin Parish Office / Admin Sally Smith and Liz Terrett (one day a week) There are also a number of retired priests in the parish: of these two are active.

Pattern of Sunday worship Tring 8.00am Communion usual congregation 25 10.00am Communion (weekly except 2nd Sunday) usual congregation 100 10.00am Worship for All (2nd Sunday) usual congregation 150 11.30am Communion (2nd Sunday) usual congregation 20 12 noon Baptism (monthly) various 30 ‐ 200

Aldbury 8.00am Communion (once a month) usual congregation 5 10.00am Communion (weekly except 1st Sunday) usual congregation 25 10.00am Worship for All (1st Sunday) usual congregation 40 Long Marston 10.00am Communion or Morning Prayer (weekly) usual congregation 12 6.00pm Evening Service (monthly) usual congregation 4 Wilstone 10.00am Communion (weekly – as of March 2015) usual congregation 11 6.00pm Evening Prayer (Monthly) usual congregation 11 Puttenham 8.15am Communion (Monthly) usual congregation 14 3.30pm Evensong (Monthly) usual congregation 24

Weekday services Tring Mondays 3.30pm Youth Café usual congregation 12 Tuesdays 9.15am Communion usual congregation 10 Thursdays 10.00am Communion usual congregation 8

Wilstone Tuesdays 10.00am Monthly Service usual congregation 11

2015 Electoral Roll 435 Occasional Offices (approx) Baptisms 50 Weddings 25 Funerals 65

Pattern of daily offices The clergy say Morning Prayer together in either Aldbury or Tring

More information To find out more please call Huw, the Team Rector on 01442 822170 or browse our website www.tringteamparish.org.uk We would be very pleased to answer any queries or questions you may have.

Map of the Parish

Aldbury Vicarage The vicarage was purpose built in the 1970s, and is situated immediately opposite St John the Baptist Church, Aldbury. On entering there is a large study, a downstairs toilet with a hallway separating access to the rest of the house. A light and spacious living room with an open fire opens onto a patio. In the centre of the house a dining room leads to the kitchen, larder and utility room. Stairs from the dining room lead to four large bedrooms, a bathroom and separate toilet. The original windows have been replaced with modern double glazing and the original oil fired central heating has been replaced with gas central heating. The house is surrounded by a magnificent garden. There is a garage attached to the house.