James Barnett is Pioneer Minister to New Communities in Leeds. As titles go this is a fairly hefty one, but what does it mean? Well, the ‘new communities’ mentioned are the recently built blocks of flats at 
Clarence dock, Brewery Warf, Granary Warf and so on, which house about twelve thousand people. A lot of these people are however, in the words of James himself, “frustratingly transient”.
Many of these apartment complexes are also gated communities. James explains that people who choose to live in such places often feel frightened or vulnerable, so they cut themselves off from potential dangers with high levels of security. Such isolation however is unhealthy, leading to loneliness and emotional distress. James seeks to counter this isolation by reaching out to the individuals who live in these places by setting up community projects for them to participate in and through church planting.
This is a long job: James is being funded by the Anglican and Methodist churches –making this an official ecumenical project– on a five year contract. He admits however that is it likely to take far longer to see any kind of measurable progress. Not that this discourages him: Every single individual brought to Christ matters, so service attendance figures don’t matter all that much to him.
James believes that it is normal for human beings to form groups and create communities: we need them, need to spend time with one another and do things together. He hopes to be able to buy or rent an empty shop space near the flats to convert into a community centre to create communal space, like the old idea of a village hall so people have somewhere to do things together.
Of course, since his ‘parishioners’ are highly mobile and transient people, a strictly geographically based church just wouldn’t work. Instead James is working to create a network of missional communities that keep in touch with one-another through the internet and various social networking sites. While setting up this network James sees his duties as being to go out and meet new people, build relationships and ask any questions about faith, community or indeed anything else.
The people involved in setting up this new community with him have been meeting for the past five or six months and are from all over Leeds; the first official church service was on the 25th of September at 4pm in the armouries. Their mission statement is ‘live by faith, illustrate hope, known by love’.
James’ vision for the project is for it to meet people’s spiritual, emotional and physical needs through Christ Jesus and grow into an expanding network of missional communities where everyone is taking responsibility for their own discipleship and to see community transformation. This network of communities is still in its early stages, so what matters is “putting the right things in place and doing the small things well.” As it says in Zechariah 4 v 10: ‘do not despise these small beginnings, for the LORD rejoices to see the work begun’ (NLT).
This is something James has felt a calling for and he is happy to meet with anyone from anywhere in Leeds who wants to get in touch with him.
