New Year message from the Chair of Trustees

Happy New Year from Together in Sussex, we hope you had a joyful Christmas and are ready for whatever challenges 2022 will bring us. Together in Sussex continues to do all that we can to support churches across the diocese to meet the needs of their neighbourhoods, whatever those might be.

As part of that we are assisting the diocese to analyse the information that you have provided in the parish audit process so that we get a fuller picture of the challenges facing churches across East and West Sussex and can shape our work to provide you with the most appropriate help.

One of the tools that the Church Urban Fund has developed to help with mission and discipleship amongst community volunteers is the Growing Good course which we highly commend to all parishes. We hope to run a workshop about this for those who are interested – watch out for news of this.

We continue to work with the Roman Catholic diocese of Arundel & Brighton to combat Modern Slavery through our network of anti-modern slavery ambassadors who were commissioned in October last year and are now getting into their stride on this important hidden injustice.

We have also set up a partnership with Eastbourne Linking Lives to help them expand their work supporting those who are isolated and lonely and we’ll be sending out further news about this and how you might develop something similar later in the year.

Mental Health following the last 20 months of pandemic is a big issue and we are discussing a project to help churches support those who are struggling with their mental health.

Our work is currently being funded entirely from reserves and so a major focus for 2022 will be on fundraising and grant applications. We are part of a national bid to the Government to provide a series of levelling up discussion groups in some of the deprived coastal towns of our diocese and if this is successful will be able to fund some churches to deliver this project and we hope to do more of this kind of thing.

All of this is being achieved with a small team of volunteer trustees and if you like what we’re doing and have some time to help we are always on the lookout for new people to join in – just email us.