Date: 09 December 2021
The Revd Victoria Ashdown, joined the Mission Enabler team recently, with responsibility to work with churches and their communities.
The Mission Enabler team’s focus on helping every parish to reach its full potential under the Parish Needs Process.
“We’re very much bottom up, not top down,” says Victoria. “We’re here to walk alongside parishes and support them in whatever they are seeking to achieve. It’s the parishes telling us what they want to do and there’s a team of us who want to help,” she says.
“Covid has exhausted our ministry teams,” says Victoria. “They don’t need to be told what to do, they already know. But it’s not easy when you have so much to do, rebuilding.”
“My role is to encourage and enable parishes to look outside of their buildings and into their communities to see what God’s doing and how they can join in. It could be straightforward like collecting of the local food bank or setting up a community fridge to something that addresses social transformation,” says Victoria, who has already started work on a tool kit to support projects.
For twenty years Victoria was a parish priest and vicar’s wife in the Diocese of Winchester. “I’ve seen parish life from every direction.” She was involved in community work in parishes, setting up charities and social transformation projects.
In her first month Victoria’s been getting out and visiting parishes, looking at and celebrating what’s already happening.
“Every parish is different and just because a big parish down the road is doing something amazing, a small parish helping just one person through a difficult time and sharing God’s love with them, is one person helped and that’s amazing too,” says Victoria.