The Myriad Pathway has concluded its second year of training, with 10 hubs equipping lay planters across the nation with the tools needed to plant and establish new church communities. Myriad Lead John McGinley reflects on what Myriad has witnessed in 2024, the joys of growing relationships and Myriad's role in what God is doing across the nation.
By John McGinleyJanuary 2025
Presented by Myriad
The Listening to the Voice of the Lay Planters research findings gave us three clear priorities to best support those ordinary people called by God to start something new. As we listened, we heard that lay planters were seeking:
We designed the Myriad Pathway on the basis of those three priorities. As Myriad completes our second year of training lay planters in Myriad Hubs across the country, the real encouragement I have taken is that the Pathway is really working – it has resonated with lay planters and has fitted with the pattern of their lives.
I wanted to share the value that we’re seeing emerge in those three priorities:
The champion
Myriad enables the role of the champion to be fulfilled by two different figures, who we support in turn; a mentor and an oversight minister
The mentor meets with lay planters once every six-to-eight weeks. There’s been great feedback on the significance of mentoring, bringing insight and an external perspective to lay planters. People are being deeply strengthened just by the experience of having somebody who is walking with them and praying for them.
Mentors provide a loving challenge, the kind that comes when you have confidence in that relationship and the sense of a growing recognition that this person understands the lay planter. We’ve had feedback from lay planters about being helped to make difficult decisions that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to make and the emergence of great ideas thanks to the way their mentors have lovingly challenged them. One person said, ‘I don’t think we’d still be doing this without you.’ I have increasingly said of the Myriad Pathway, I think the aspect that brings the most value is the relationships.
The second champion we’ve helped enable is that of the oversight minister. This role brings a level of practical support, enabling the sending church and the new worshipping community to work well together. Oversight ministers provide covering of safeguarding, governance, the policies, the finance – aspects that have all been really important.
One of the areas of challenge we’ve encountered this year is a growing recognition of clergy feeling ill equipped for, or burdened by, this role of oversight. Many clergy we are working with have really felt a pinch point that I think has emerged because of the transitional time we’re in as the wider Church, as they look to maintain all that’s required of them as parish priests alongside encouraging these new forms of church.
Myriad’s work has revealed the vital role of the parish priest in supporting the formation of new worshipping communities. We’ve found that it’s vital to build a partnership between the ordained leadership and the lay leaders. In response to this, Myriad has developed the Oversight Pathway, an oversight minister’s course, to help equip clergy in this new role.
A key point of learning has been a strengthening of the relationship between the Myriad Hub Leader and the oversight minister which has helped the oversight minister to go on their own journey alongside that of the lay leaders they have oversight of.
The community
A true honour for Myriad this year has been watching cohorts of lay planters progress together on the journey of the Myriad Pathway. They start as strangers, but they become friends for life. Some of our groups visit each other in between gatherings, taking great joy in sharing their experiences and praying for each other.
What we’ve come to notice across the two-and-a-half years of the Pathway is the increased depth of community during the journey. At the year one mark, there’s a sense of growing appreciation of one another in a cohort. By year two, there is a real sense of love, that these are brothers and sisters in Christ. They look forward to being together.
We’re delighted that the rhythm of hub gatherings has helped encourage this. Gatherings provide three monthly opportunities for the teams to come together, alongside on-going WhatsApp groups for prayer and testimony. People really appreciate that we’re not offering a course, but a community they’ll journey with. It gives them space, and permission to travel at the right pace for them rather than being formulaic.
Training that fits the calling
One of the biggest challenges we have faced in our second year has been in establishing a learning platform, enabling busy, time-poor people to access what they need when they need it. We’ve been working closely with those on the Myriad Pathway, learning and adapting to their needs. All our material is now delivered to Myriad Hubs online, giving them access to learning material on an ‘as needed’ basis.
Another key point of development this year has been around the importance of prayer. We have a prayer champion in each of our Myriad Hubs – it’s a core part of our practice. During this second year we have received testimonies from a number of teams who said the intervention of somebody praying for them has been the decisive moment of the year. This has increased our conviction on the importance of having both the mentor and the prayer champion pray for the lay teams.
This year has also seen us recognise the importance of Myriad’s activity being part of something bigger, part of a wider picture of what God is doing across the nation. We’ve been able to feed stories in from across the hubs, organising a hub leaders gathering every six months, all helping to build a picture of a national network coming together. Our Myriad Hub leaders are really learning from one another as they share their experiences, building a sense that what they’re doing is not just delivering something in their locality, but is part of something God is doing across the nation.
Clock House Café Church
One of the many fruitful stories Myriad has witnessed this year is that of Sammy and Shaun in the Clock House Café Church in Southampton. They’ve been living in their new housing estate for a number of years. They were seeking to live intentionally, connecting with lots of different people. The real shift came for them when they began to do something tangible once a month on a Sunday afternoon in a community centre. It gave them a place where people could begin to go on a journey and respond to God, enabling others to take steps of faith.
What I think is so key to Sammy and Shaun’s story is that it’s very difficult for us to build disciples on our own, but a community enabled those people to do that. Sammy and Shaun have now seen many, many people come to know Jesus. They have two midweek discipleship groups alongside the Sunday afternoon café church. They’ve even got a blow-up hot tub for baptisms.
The Clock House Café Church is gloriously ordinary; it’s all age, intergenerational and it’s food-based, as almost all of our new worshiping communities are. While simple to look at, the formation of this community has enabled there to be a place where people can come to faith and then become disciples of Jesus Christ.
Learnings from Myriad’s second year
I believe that this year, we’ve seen how needed the structure of Myriad is in establishing lay-led new worshipping communities. Starting something new can be a tough, slow process, so journeying with others on the same pathway over two-and-a-half years is really key. We don’t just set them up and abandon them, we believe these people are worth supporting. They are the superstars of the Kingdom of God, willing to hold a set of people who they long to see come to know Jesus, to start something that can reach them.
Across the country, increasingly, we see that God is on the move. We don’t have to push to gather a community around a Myriad Hub. Once the call has gone out and the vision for it is there, there are always people who feel called to do this, wherever we have started something. It’s almost like Myriad is acting as a sign that this is what God is doing at this time in his Church. We aren’t generating these lay-led groups, we’re just articulating their desire, gathering and enabling that to happen.
I believe there is a real need to continue to help the wider Church realise the joy of this mixed ecology, the partnership between parish and new worshipping community. I would suggest that we know how to allow different things to co-exist, but we don’t know how to see the partnership of these things blossom together, or fully recognise and receive the gifts we each hold across the Church. There’s often still a sense of threat, of uncertainty, of feeling ill-equipped to do this – but I believe the work of Myriad is helping to address and sooth this tension, when doors are opened.
