Community engagement at Newcraigs Evangelical Church

Pastor Kevan Leckie outlines how using Tearfund's Church, Community and Change process (now been superceded by Discovery, ) helped the church to integrate their community engagement rather than just run social action projects.

Newcraigs is an independent Evangelical Church with a membership of around 160 including children and young people. We serve an immediate community of 1500 homes and growing. In 2006 the Lord clearly led us to adopt and utilise Tearfund's Church Community and Change process (CCC)* to help us engage more effectively with our community and become better equipped to be 'salt and light' to those around us. We deeply wanted our community engagement to truly express the person and ministry of the Lord Jesus in both word and deed and to help us better meet our community's material, emotional and spiritual needs. Our heart was to see lives transformed through the Gospel of Jesus Christ rather than simply to become involved in social action initiatives.

CCC provided us with the teaching and tools necessary to become a more effective missional church. Internally we learned to model ourselves on the example of the Lord Jesus and externally we learned how to understand and meet the real needs of our community. We built strong partnerships with our key community stakeholders: local councillors, MSP, police, social work, health, education, local business, residents etc, and through a robust and rigorous process of consultation we defined and agreed the key needs of our community and formulated an action plan to help us achieve our goals.

The main outcome from the process was to establish the Newcraigs Community Forum (NCF) where we meet quarterly with all our stakeholders to discuss and action community issues and seek ways to show God's love to those around us. The NCF is now a fully constituted body which is underpinned by Christian values and makes every decision within the framework, ethos and teachings of the Christian faith.

Another outcome from our community consultation process was to become involved in supporting a youth homeless centre located within 1/2 mile of our church. We now have a committed team of over 20 people who regularly visit the centre to provide practical support to the young people in areas such as cooking, job interviews, arts and crafts, finance and personal health. These interactions provide the opportunity for relationships to develop and grow and we've been able on a number of occasions to share our faith with the residents and even see some of them come along to special events in the church.

We are indebted to Tearfund for the CCC process and for their excellent support and facilitation of it throughout. We praise God for all that's been accomplished so far but we know there's so much more to be done....

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Kevan Leckie, the pastor of Newcraigs, March 2010

For more information on the church, visit www.newcraigs.co.uk

Watch a video of Kevan talking about the church from September 2009.

*CCC has now been replaced by Discovery, a process very similar to Church, Community and Change, which could help your church too....