CCM:Levenshulme

"We want to entrepreneur sites in a broad range of communities and locations so we can see the gospel taken into our city."

So the Simmonds family have been in Manchester for two years. This two years has gone at lightning pace. When we turned up in Manchester we had a 1 month old baby and a toddler, now we have a child about to start full time school and a toddler who likes picking fights with people twice her size (she usually wins).

Our time so far has been a ride that we never imagined but secretly hoped for. We started a church meeting in a vodka bar with about 8 people that morphed into a fully fledged site of Christ Church Manchester. We have made a bunch of new friends and seen people added to the church. All of these experiences are deeply humbling and happen with our involvement and despite our involvement because God is bigger, cleverer and more graceful than I am.

In recent times Christ Church Manchester has been growing and taking shape across the board. So CCM:East has moved into a school in Gorton and has started seeing visitors come along as well as a number of our Gorton initiatives get moving and see some fruit. The venue move was a strategic decision that has tied the two sites together and will hopefully strengthen us to go into the next stage of CCM.

CCM:City has seen a good flow of visitors and the mission groups have gone from zero to four in less than a year. It really seems like the CCM Community has deepened and our mission has become clearer.

Over recent months we have realised that we want to be a church that is city wide and hyper local. So we want to keep planting sites of CCM across Manchester. We want to entrepreneur sites in a broad range of communities and locations so we can see the gospel taken into our city.

This is all a very long way round of telling you that we are going to start a new site based in Levenshulme.

I remember when we started the Chapel back in September 2009 I always felt slightly ridiculous describing it as a church or a church meeting because we averaged about 12 people on a Sunday night and the home group I led on a wednesday night could get 20 people, and so I nervously describe this as a “site” because currently it only exists in mine and Vicki’s imagination! Having said that, I believe that for CCM this is the right way to do things. We are going to network, innovate and cook our way to a brand new CCM church in Levenshulme. Then we shall start another one.

In the coming days, weeks and months I am going to write about our hopes, dreams and plans for the next CCM site.