Introduce the stream, give background of who's in the group, what the remit is etc

Our areas of responsibility

In many ways there is more specific detail in this workstream than the others, and our role is to ensure that the different activities and programmes work together to create a coherent response to the mission challenge - if things are not interconnecting there is the danger of the cogs spinning and not turning together to maximise our impact

Feels like a mechanical metaphor is not really sufficient to try and capture the ways we are trying to facilitate and release imaginative mission - it's too mechanical

So instead we're using an organic metaphor, which feels appropriate both to build on the committed to growth commitment but also in an agricultural place like Norfolk.

There are lots of ways to grow crops, on a large scale and smaller scale, and there is no one way that will meet the challenge of releasing the growth of the church across the diverse communities of the diocese.

Our understanding is that our job is to release the creativity and imagination of church groups and individuals and ministry teams and lay people in towns, villages, suburbs and Newhousing areas in this county. We aren't bringing the seed necessarily, as many churches will have ideas for how they would like to connect with their communities, so we're aiming to create ways for resources, experience, skills, training and much more to enable those people to plant, nurture and harvest the growth in their neighbourhoods.

We are drawing on resource churches to enable this sharing of skills, experience and people - we are asking large, growing, healthy churches of all traditions to offer to small churches the resources they need.

We're wanting to encourage diversity of traditions, recognising that not all our churches are called to become large resource churches, but to live out their service and worship in their communities, we aim to develop teams of mission accompaniers, mission enablers and hopefully the Church Army evangelists to work alongside churches to undertake mission audits and make plans for engaging their communities and sharing their faith.

We recognise that we are in 'the day of small things' in the words of a recent Church Army research report, having studied Fresh Expressions across 21 diocese including our own. We have a Fresh Expressions team offering training, in conjunction with St Thomas' church, and developing a Licensed Lay Pioneer scheme. Blah blah.

We also recognise we have unprecedented levels of development across the county with new housing areas attached to villages, suburbs, towns and hamlets. We are in the process of setting up a New housing working group who will research good practice in other parts of the country with similar demographics to ours, sharing experience of our own efforts to connect and pioneer new ways of developing Christian community in these areas, in order for the diocese to develop a framework for deploying people and teams to work effectively in these areas going forward.

Say something about the things that fall under this heading but are in progress - the Church Army evangelist recruitment process, bringing anew member onto the imagine team.

Talk about things that aren't in progress yet

We began with the issue of making sure we weren't using a scattered approach - thinking of cogs initially but preferring a growing image - we are wanting to ensure we have asked the questions what are we aiming to achieve, what is our motivation for wanting that outcome, what is the best way to achieve the outcome and what timescale are we working towards. Holding these in our minds we will make our work have more impact and coherence.

But we also recognise that our best laid plans and strategies need to be given space to change, evolve, fail and stretch, so we are allowing ourselves to be led by the Spirit and cherishing diversity in the body of Christ.