An Article appearing in Latest Anabaptist News UK

After a few years exploring Anabaptist ideas and practices, Steve Jones is to be licensed as a Mennonite ‘Pioneering Pastor’ developing a Regional Church across the SW of England. Obviously, it’s currently a bit tricky to get licensed or credentialed as a Mennonite Pastor in the UK so we’re glad to announce that the Manitoba Conference of the Mennonite Church, Canada and the Grace Mennonite Church, Steinbach, also Canada, are happy to be involved in the process.

The new Regional Mennonite Church will start to gather in the autumn and focus around food, discussion, activism, prayer and more food. Being regional and mostly rural, the idea is to nurture open and inclusive small faith communities or ‘hubs’ across the peninsula; develop some more intense and focused ‘huddles’ (for leadership training/mentoring and personal peer accountability) and also gather everyone every now and then for larger ‘Open-Space’ style regional ‘gatherings’.

You can support the work by visiting www.facebook.com/simplyhubs or here https://goo.gl/2ikbSJ. Additionally, to help fund the work, Steve has spent the last 12 months developing a business around the idea of nurturing online movements and networks — a Digital Marketing & Media Agency with training and development at its core — www.clickmovements.com. On his blog www.steve-jones.org, he says of himself,

“I make home in Exeter in the beautiful SW of England, with my wife and 4 children; son in a 9-member multi-racial family, I spent some of my childhood in Africa. I regularly retreat to the wild spaces of South West England to camp, walk, run, swim, surf, cycle and recharge.

I’m daily immersed in a book or browser and have completed an Ironman triathlon. A trained coach and experienced speaker, lecturer and trainer, I have an MA in Leadership Development and as part of my ongoing development am a distance learning M.Phil/PhD Anabaptist Theology student. I have a background in developing businesses, charities, faith communities and social enterprises.”

There’ll be more updates on this exciting Mennonite initiative as the months go by…

Originally published at Steve Jones.