Newsletter #2 - 3rd June 2022

Good Morning Everyone,

If you missed it last week, or you’ve joined us since, this is the new Faith in Later Life newsletter. We’ve simplified everything because we know that many of you like to print out emails like this to help inform your prayers and our old newsletter wasn’t fit for that purpose. What’s been really clear though since we’ve put this newsletter out is that our previous emails weren’t reaching many of you, and we’re really sorry for that. Thanks so much to those of you who reached out to let us know that, we really appreciate it. We believe that what may have happened is that at some point one of our emails was believed to have been spam, or junk mail, and therefore inboxes were filtering out our emails before you could have a chance to see them.

To make sure you don’t miss anything in future, we’ll be including notices and dates to look out for in these emails, and if at any point you stop receiving these emails for any reason, please do reach out and we’ll see what we can do to help. These emails will be coming out every Thursday from next week onwards.

With that said, we’d love to tell you about some exciting things we have coming up.

Church Champions Training

For those of you who aren’t aware, each month we have a guest speaker join us for the day to provide some training on some aspect of Faith in Later Life, whether that be ministry, going into care homes, intergenerational friendships, or a whole host of other topics.

These sessions are for our Church Champions, so if you’re not signed up as a Church Champion, but you’d love to become one, you can click this link to let us know and get access to all of our previous training sessions.

Our next session will be on Tuesday 14th June, with Andrew Wileman from The Salvation Army. This month's sessions are at 2pm and at 7.30pm, we know that as things have returned to normal, many of you who were previously able to attend morning or afternoon sessions are now missing out and so we’re keen to see whether an evening session would be better for you.

Andrew will speaking to us about Elder Abuse Awareness Day, which takes place on Wednesday 15th June. Andrew is the Assistant Director for the Salvation Army Older Peoples Ministries Team, and manages the team of Outreach Mission partners for older people working on a range of local and programme development projects across the UK and Ireland. He is a regular public speaker in Churches and Centres and on local and national media and has wide experience in Social Justice issues both here in the UK and overseas, particularly his focus on the Salvation Army’s work in Older People, social care, Human Trafficking and on Eastern Europe where he has visited many times. Andrew originally hails from Yorkshire, but now lives on the South Coast and has been an active member of the Winton Salvation Army Corps in Bournemouth for the past 24 years. He is married to Karen, and has a son and 2 daughters.

Salvation Army Seminar

The Salvation Army will also be running two Zoom events for Elder Abuse Awareness Day - see 'Dates For Your Diary' below for more information. We'd love to encourage you to make as many of these events as you are able, so that we can gather in prayer for this important topic.

Tuesday 14th June - 11am - Elder Abuse Awareness Session
Thursday 16th June - 7pm - A Call to Prayer
To attend either of the sessions, simply join the Zoom on the day using the following details:
Zoom ID: 824 859 6234
Passcode: 128359

Courses Early Sign-Up

Last week we mentioned that we’ve begun work on a system of courses on a variety of different issues, ministries, and areas of interest which we hope will help to equip the church. If you’re looking forward to these courses and you want to make sure you don’t miss out, you can click here to sign up for specific updates. These courses will be in the Church Champion Hub, and so you’ll need to be signed up as a Church Champion to access them.

We will also be providing a workbook for each course which you can use either on your own, or as a group. If you’d like to know how you can set up a group for these courses, reply to this email or sign up for updates above for more info.

Prayer Points

• We have an upcoming board meeting, would you pray for wisdom, clarity, and unity

• We’re currently in the planning stages for our September conference

• If you know any other Church Champions, why don’t you reach out to them and ask what they would like prayer for?

• That the Church Champion Network would grow

• For older people struggling with the cost of living and not sure how they’ll make it through

Also, we would like to run some prayer sessions over the next few weeks. We haven’t got set dates for these yet, but we’d like to know how many of you would be interested.

That’s all from us today!

Grace and Peace,

Adsum Try Ravenhill

Ministry Support Executive
Faith in Later Life