When the Revd Nicholas Pye was recently installed as the Vicar of St Mary’s, Chessington after a long vacancy, it was very important to him to get the relationship with St Mary’s CofE Primary School off to a strong start.
Nicholas has a strong education background, providing freelance education consultancy to Church of England schools, and he has been a school governor for over 20 years. He understood how fruitful the church/school link can be in growing faith and ministry to children and young people.
He worked with Diocesan colleagues in the Mission Enabler Team and the Education Team to create a bespoke resource that would enable St Mary’s Primary School to officially welcome their new vicar and give a public platform to their collaborative approach.
As a vicar, and now governor of the school, Nicholas leads collective worship, he is an important resource for Religious Education, and provides pastoral care to the teachers, pupils and parents.
Nicholas worked with Emma Coy and Jane Whittington in the Diocesan team to produce an outline for him and St Mary’s School to use as a welcome service. The service was centred around the theme of ‘Calling’ and Mary hearing God’s call through the angel Gabriel in Luke 1, which linked to Nicholas accepting his call from God to become vicar at St Mary’s. He encouraged the children to think about what God is asking of them and how they might respond. He then took questions from the pupils and was also presented with Bob Hartman’s, Rhyming Bible by the Year 6 school captains.
He added: “The welcome service, was an opportunity for the school to bless me and my arrival and welcome my ministry. In turn I made a public commitment to fully support the school in my various roles.
“I would recommend all new incumbents consider working with their local church school on a welcome service to establish that strong relationship from the start. However, even if you’ve been an incumbent for a while, a similar service held at the start of the new school year can be used to reinvigorate and re-set the relationship. This template welcome service can be used flexibly and adapted depending on the local context, but it will hopefully save people time and encourage more collaboration between church and schools.”
The Headteacher of St Mary’s C of E Primary School, Emmeline Lawlor led the school in welcoming Revd Nicholas. She said: “The experience of the welcome service was affirming and it shared with our whole school community, the aims of Revd Nicholas’ role as incumbent at St Mary’s Church, and how he hoped to work with us as a community of learners, staff and family on a variety of areas, including to support the development of a Christian vision which enables pupils and adults to flourish and to offer everyone an encounter with Jesus Christ and with Christian faith, so that we can all flourish spiritually.
“We are grateful for Reverend Nicholas’ commitment to our school community and look forward to the journey ahead of us.”
Emma Coy from the Diocesan Mission Enabler Team was involved in the welcome service and noted that, “strong partnerships can be hugely beneficial on many levels for both the church and the school, with those benefits also extending out to local community. We hope that these new resources will be useful to many in starting or reinvigorating their joint working.”
Jane Whittington is in the Diocesan Education Team and leads on school/church partnerships including developing resources to be used for collective worship.
She said: “Both school and church serve the families that live in the parish, both seeking to enable children and adults to flourish in body, mind and spirit.
“A strong relationship between the church and the local school benefits both the school and the church communities, bringing all ages together to explore faith and often join together on community projects.”
You can access a template for a welcome service.
You can access more resources for school and church partnerships on our dedicated page.