Welcome to the Citizens UK Churches’ Community of Practice. Our purpose is to resource all those, across denominations, involved in Community Organising through their church institution. We aim to share stories, reflections, and practical ideas to make your organising effective and rooted in your faith tradition. We explore community organising as a spiritual practice, embracing themes of holistic missional theology: action for social justice, challenging unjust structures, discipleship, vocation, building relationships across difference, and strengthening our congregations from the outside in and the inside out!

Alison Webster
Mission Theologian in Residence, Citizens UK

There are four dates for your diary during 2025. Each meeting runs from 4 – 5.30pm. Please subscribe to the Community of Practice and you will receive further details of each session a week or so before it happens.

13th March, Congregational Life – how can Community Organising help us reconnect with the fundamental WHY of ‘being church’?
Churches can be good at the ‘how’ of supporting people in our communities, especially to mitigate hunger, loneliness and homelessness. But how often to do we re-examine the WHY of our activities? Organising strives for a realistic understanding of ‘the world as it is’, in order to work towards a vision of ‘the world as it should be’. This is deeply theological and prophetic. This session will explore what this means in our current context, replete as it is with multiple crises and existential threats. We will draw on traditions of lament, ‘staying with the trouble’, and enacting hope. We will hear stories of how Organising is enabling congregations to grow into who they are called to be, and think about actions we can take in our own institutions to increase our impact.

19th June, Called to Organise? – At the heart of Community Organising is the ‘story of self’ that we take into our 1-2-1 conversations with others.  It encompasses our passions, formative experiences, pivotal moments and institutional loyalties and commitments. As Christians, our sense of vocation, and our formation as disciples, will be crucial to our story of self. This session will be an opportunity to reflect on our sense of calling in the context of Community Organising. What is it that motivates us and draws us to it? How does organising feed (and how is it fed by) our understanding of God and how we embody our faith? Join us to hear stories from leaders around the UK of how Organising is interwoven in their spiritual journeys; share and reflect together, and be prepared to be inspired and renewed!

Speakers will include: Charnelle Barclay (Centre for Theology and Community); Chelsea Joseph (Organiser in Newham, East London) and Michael Thompson (Organiser in Tyne and Wear).

25th September, Integrity in Leadership – how can the Community Organising model of distributed leadership offer a corrective to ‘dot leadership’, which has had such tragic and unhealthy consequences for many Christian denominations?

6th November, Stories of Self and the power of lay leadership – organising as vocation and the call to a rich discipleship of contemplation and action.