St Mary Redcliffe A Year at Redcliffe Magazine 2022

Leadership
Letter from Kat
What has been going well and why?
2021 saw me taking on some different areas
of responsibility at SMR as Aggy developed
her experience by taking on the community
and outreach work I had been leading. It
was sad to let it go but amazing to see how
much it had developed since I started
here in 2014. My new responsibilities are
around “a thriving, inclusive Christian
community” – so about what is happening
inside the church rather than beyond.
This has been such an important and
complex task as we slowly emerged from
the pandemic over 2021. A particular
highlight of the year was our Lenten focus
on prayer. We offered a “school of prayer”
with spiritual accompaniment, and an allage
Prayer Laboratory, all on Zoom. It was
very precious to explore prayer with so
many and deepen our prayer life together. It
was also a real joy to start doing our All Age
services in the churchyard, starting at Easter,
while numbers in church were restricted.
Worshipping with the restrictions of covid
has been challenging but has also given us
opportunities to do things we would never
have thought of before and I’ve enjoyed the
chance to be more creative.
As restrictions on what we could do in our
services changed over the summer and
autumn, and in response to our liturgy
survey, I led the work on developing our
services into their post-covid pattern. We
didn’t want to lose the gifts and opportunities
that the changes due to covid had brought
about. We embraced both our own vision
statement and the Church of England values
of “simpler, humbler, bolder” to make our
services more accessible and inclusive while
retaining the essence of who we are and
what our worship says about God and about
us as a worshipping community.
2021 was a tough year for me personally
with the death of my brother, but I felt
such a wave of support and care from
congregation and colleagues, and I would
like to thank you all for that. I have felt very
loved through some difficult times.
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