What is Setting God’s People Free?
Setting God's People Free (SGPF) is a programme of change to enable the whole people of God to live out the Good News of Jesus confidently in all of life, Sunday to Saturday.
Our focus is to facilitate a shift in culture, not a narrow, centrally driven strategy. The programme seeks to implement proposals from the Setting God’s People Free report presented to General Synod in 2017. These proposals seek effective ways to build up the whole people of God, with a confident faith and vision for the Kingdom of God, which is lived out in homes, schools, communities and places of work.
- SGPF looks beyond and outside Church structures to the whole people of God at work in communities and wider society - not to 'fixing' the institutional Church.
- SGPF challenges a culture that over-emphasises a distinction between sacred and secular to a fuller vision of calling within the all-encompassing scope of the Gospel – not to limit vocation to church based roles.
- SGPF seeks to affirm and enable the complementary roles and vocations of clergy and of lay people, grounded in our common baptism - not to blur or undermine these distinctions.
- SGPF proposes imaginative steps to nourish, illuminate and connect what is working already in and through parishes and communities of faith - not to institute a top-down approach.
The Diocese of Chichester is a pilot diocese for the SGPF imitative and the diocesan core group has been working to roll out SGPF across the diocese. Every parish has been sent resources to assist with exploring how SGPF could work at a local level, and we have appointed nearly 50 lay champions and 10 pilot parishes to work on furthering this agenda.
For more info about SGPF please follow this link https://www.churchofengland.org/SGPF