Mission Spotlight
As part of our ‘Riverside Story’ blog post series, this post will focus on a mission that Riverside is helping to facilitate here in Birmingham, the UK and around the world; supporting our vision to bring LIFE to every generation in every community. This month we are catching up with Nick & Lois Cuthbert and their work with Lead Academy.
Riverside’s legacy continues to impact churches around the UK, particularly through the work of Lead Academy. Nick’s contacts with other churches while leading Riverside Church helped to get the project started. He and others had become aware that many churches were struggling to reach people with the good news of Jesus, lacked a clear sense of purpose and had an unhealthy culture, preventing them being as effective as they could be. Many just needed outside help, challenge and encouragement.
This gave birth to a desire to equip church leadership teams across the country to understand why they were fighting an inward-looking culture and to discover a fresh impetus and new strategies for making and growing disciples.
Now, with over a decade of learning communities, and over 450 churches who have gone through four 2-day sessions, Lead Academy has repositioned its work to help churches recover from the pandemic and is building future partnerships with other organisations.
Every new vicar starting ministry in the Church of Wales is at present automatically enrolled into the programme, and work is underway to roll this out on a wider basis.
Key to success is helping church leaders understand the purpose and vision of the church, and to reshape and replicate leadership in mission. Different aspects of mission are considered, as well as a deep-dive into what it actually means to make disciples of Jesus (which isn’t just running Sunday services).
Feedback from participants highlights just how important this investment in churches is:
“We found Lead Academy to be an enormously worthwhile investment. Best of all is the combination of high quality input from the front with ample time with your leadership team to discuss the specific and practical application of that input in your church and parish. Highly recommended!”
“For us Lead Academy has proven to be invaluable. Of all the leadership events I have attended this is the one that has given us genuine traction and application back in our church. We have found that Lead Academy has been a real catalyst for bold action and has fired our missional imagination”.
Get Involved
If you would like to know more about the work Nick Cuthbert is doing through Lead Academy, drop him a line at nick@leadacademy.net
