St Peter’s Church in Formby launched an initiative to add an in-person home visit to their ‘afternoon tea box’ delivery service, to help tackle social isolation in Formby, after attending the Sefton North Learning Community with Together Liverpool.
The social action planning exercise at the start of the Learning Community highlighted social isolation as an area for concern locally, in an area with a high proportion of both older people and single parents.
The church is also preparing to team up with neighbouring Holy Trinity church in Formby to launch an after school after-school Bible club for local primary school children this autumn.
The church has also changed their approach, to improve how they make other activities more accessible for single parents.
Revd Canon Anne Taylor of St Peter’s is also Area Dean for Sefton North and Associate Archdeacon. She said: “One of the things that has come out of this is before Covid we had an after-school kids Bible club, and it’s never taken off again.
“It’s not the easiest thing to find leaders for, but because of the Learning Community, we landed on conversation about it, and want to launch it as a joint effort in the autumn.
“The primary school is a shared one between St Peters and Holy Trinity, so we want to deliver this together, and that really is because of the Learning Community conversations.”
“The Learning Community was something we all believed in, because it was to do with social action and pastoral care. It was something as a deanery we all wanted to invest in and then out of that have come conversations that I don’t think would have necessarily been had otherwise.
“In the first session most people were quite surprised at some of the demographics of their area, when Together Liverpool gave us the stats, we hadn’t appreciated just how many single parents we had in Formby, and how that impinges on what we run.
“Certain things we knew, like in Formby we have an older population and we knew we have quite a few people living on their own, but there were other stats we hadn’t fully appreciated.
“So therefore if you have single parents, that impinges on things like babysitting, there might only be one salary in the house. Things like that made us re-think some of the fun events that we do, and are we actually reaching everybody.
“We have also upped our game on social isolation, whereas we had been delivering afternoon tea boxes since Covid, we now put this together with a visit, so it’s not just somebody dropping in the afternoon tea box, it’s offering the potential for conversation.
“Between about 25 and 40 boxes go out in January on what’s known as Blue Monday. And then out of that comes those who want further contact so it’s a very easy non-threatening, non-committal way of doing it, so we can meet someone and if they want someone to call back then we can.
“Learning Community has heightened our awareness of some of the things that we were doing anyway, but how we can do them better, and with more sensitivity.
“It heightened awareness of where the gaps were in what we were doing, such as for our church just the level of single parents that we have in our area.
“The sessions were presented very well, there was enough space for conversation and a very good balance of input and conversation.
“It was especially useful if a couple of people came together from their own church, they could talk about how does this start fitting in with what we are doing.”
Rev Canon Anne said she would recommend for other churches and deaneries to take part in the Learning Community programme.
“I’d say definitely do this, because this is something that unites us all. You can’t argue with social action. This makes us more effective as churches in our communities.
“Between this and Eco Church work we have been doing as a deanery, it makes churches think beyond themselves, both of these programmes give an outward focus for parishes, to reach out to people in the communities.
“Firstly it gives encouragement by doing this together, and then secondly it highlights what you are capable of doing.
“It has made us more sensitive to the bigger possibilities of everything we do. Even in relation to an activity we were doing before Network of Kindness, it’s improved the quality of how we do it and who we reach.”