Fit For Mission (FFM)  (from the Diocesan website)

Fit for Mission is a practical and creative missional response to the challenges we’ve been experiencing within the Church for some time. This includes a 65% decline in church attendance in the past 30 years, plus a 38% reduction in clergy while maintaining 94% of the buildings we had thirty years ago, making it hard to focus on mission and ministry.

On a practical level, this means legally becoming a larger parish so that it’s easier to work more closely together, benefitting from streamlined governance, increased administration capabilities, a clergy team approach that increases collegiality, accountability, and general well-being, and increased skill-sharing, providing more time and resources for mission and ministry.

At the heart of the programme is local decision making, supported and resourced by the Fit for Mission team, helping to empower local people to make decisions that best support their local context. There’s no agenda for everywhere to be the same, but instead, we hope and pray that we can embrace our diversity and difference, and the richness it brings, so we can work better together for a bigger church to make a bigger difference.

Huyton Deanery is part of 'cohort three' and PCC's in our deanery will be voting on whether or not to join Fit For Mission in the Autumn 2025. 

Members of PCC's are encouraged to attend this event being run by The Diocese of Liverpool and also to ask their synod reps and members of the deanery leadership who have also been engaging with these proposals for some time.

To help us in our discernment, we are also hoping to organise an event to hear from churches in the first two cohorts who either did not opt in to Fit For Mission or opted in to the 'as if' phase but voted out when it came to the confirmatory vote or before that time. We will be in a position to organise this event once the confirmatory voting of these churches in cohort 2 is made public.