Table Communities
Leader Resource Page
Click the links below to find what you’re after …
Getting Started
Recruitment Process
As you start out as a leader it’s important that you go through the safe recruitment process outlined below. Any questions get in touch with the team at serving@stbasils.church.
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Give us the contact details for two referees using this form and we’ll get in touch with them to obtain references.
If you already serve on a team at St Basil’s and we have obtained two references from you before, there is no need to provide references again. -
Please create account on the CofE training portal, complete Basic Awareness, Foundation, and Domestic Abuse training modules, then email certificates to serving@stbasils.church.
If you have in date certificates from having completed these courses within the last 3 years you can send us those.
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We’ll send you an agreement to sign once you’ve complete the above!
Creating a Safe Environment
As your group gets going, you should adopt our template risk assessment, get familiar with making safeguarding disclosures and share safeguarding best practice with the group.
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We’re creating a brief guide to share with your group so that everyone can contribute to ensuring your Table Community is a safe environment. We’ll let you know once this is ready!
A key thing parents need to be aware of is that children should remain their responsibility at all times when the group gathers.
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As leaders offering pastoral care to people in our community it’s important you feel equipped and confident to raise safeguarding concerns. Whether there is an obvious problem or you just have a cause of concern it is important to let our Safeguarding Coordinators know.
Please read the short guide below for more information, and get in touch at safeguarding@stbasils.church.
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We want to work with you to help make sure that your group stays safe when it gathers. Many of the groups will meet in similar ways and have similar risks so we’re making a template risk assessment that we’d like you to adopt by reading, actioning any recommendations, and letting us know of any other risks unique to your group/setting and what you’re doing about them. We’ll let you know once this is ready for completion!
Get in touch at tables@stbasils.church if you have any questions.
Family Around The Table
Jesus chose to convey his message not by writing a book but by instituting a family that would embody it. And more often than not, the place where he initiated people into his family and showed them how to inhabit it, was around the table. The biblical describes a God who longs to adopt his wayward children back into family; it’s the primary metaphor used to describe the church in the New Testament, which culminates in a huge reunion feast! When we practise being family around the table we witness to Jesus’ in-breaking kingdom and invite others to participate in it with us.
Some practices to help you grow as family together:
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Organic as well as organised
Make a plan
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The Community Practise from Practising The Way is a four session course …
Pursuing His Healing Love and Saving Power
When we invite the hungry and hurting to join us at the table, we want to offer them the presence of Jesus. We learn to host and feast on his presence together through confession and repentance, through prayer, worship and fasting. As we come to him in our weakness and make room for his leadership, we grow in freedom and authority as he works in power to redeem us. As we set aside our masks and choose to be real with one another in God’s presence, we experience healing as we discover that we can be both fully known and deeply loved.
Practices to help you pursue his presence together:
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Cultivating Missional Hearts
Jesus taught his disciples that they would be fruitful when they chose to stay close to him and the things that were important to him, and he had a reputation for eating and drinking with sinners, for prioritising the last, the least and the lost. As our own hearts and minds are transformed by his love and power, we want to cultivate a desire to share it with our neighbours in this hurting world out of overflow. Through prayer and discipline we want to grow into those who would seek his kingdom above all else, always asking how he wants us to participate in his movement of love towards a hurting world.
Practices to help your group to cultivate missional hearts:
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prayer walking
the list of people
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The Witness Practise from Practising The Way is a four session course …
Being Sent Together
Jesus made and matured disciples around the table and he sent them to go and do the same. As disciples, we are placed in God’s family, yet we are also sent out—to serve the least and seek the lost with sacrificial love. Together, we want to prayerfully discern who God is sending us to, then to hold them in our hearts in prayer, to invest time, resource and creativity into befriending and serving them, and to invite them to join us at the table so that they might also experience his love and power.
Practices to help as you’re sent together:
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Keep Exploring …
These organisations all provide resources to equip families of missional disciples:
And here’s a few more books that could spark inspiration and act as a guide:
