How we got here...
The most recent phase of our story probably begins in the early 1980’s when, under the leadership of Robert Warren, St. Thomas’ Parish Church, Crookes joined with Crookes Baptist Church to form a Local Ecumenical Project. The newly formed Anglican-Baptist church grew significantly through the 1980’s and became known for innovative strategies to enable growth through multiple congregations. During this time the church was also deeply impacted by the Charismatic renewal movement, through the ministry of John Wimber among others. The church was known too for the pioneering experiment of the Nine O’Clock Service, reaching out to un-churched students and young people with
contemporary worship and a post-modern cultural approach. The Nine O’Clock Service sadly fell into disrepute some years after it became independent from St Thomas’ and was shut down in 1995.
In 1994 Mike Breen became the Rector of St. Tom’s. Mike developed small groups, groups of people who live out their lives together in a visionary way. Small groups are based around people seeking to reach out to those outside the church rather than just doing ‘churchy’ activities. They also meet together in ‘Clusters’ of small groups, which are more like extended family (maybe 30-50 adults) and provide a place of belonging and shared vision within the larger church. Mike also introduced some significant discipleship tools which we now call ‘Lifeshapes’, and fostered a culture of ‘low control, high accountability’, where members of the church are encouraged to come up with their own ideas and sense of vision about how to live out their Christian life, holding each other accountable about how they put this into practice.
During this period, St Thomas’ increasingly felt a call to be a church for the whole of Sheffield, as well as its immediate parish. This resulted in two-thirds of the church membership moving out of the parish church in 1999, to the Ponds Forge Leisure Centre in the heart of Sheffield. After a year renting this centre on Sundays, the city centre church started to lease an old nightclub right in the centre of the city called the Roxy. This club had formerly been dubbed the ‘palace of sin’ by the local press, but after a remarkable clean-up involving 1,000s of litres of magnolia paint and a new carpet, the Roxy became St Thomas’ new city-home for the next two years. This was a very exciting time for us during which lots of people caught the vision and the church’s membership grew incredibly quickly until it numbered over 2,000 people, with 80% of these under the age of 40.
Meanwhile, the Parish Church was led by the Team Vicar, Revd Mick Woodhead, with a new vision to reach the local community. Mick developed a new team and vision, working to serve as a model of what excellence in parish ministry can be, through community involvement, mission and hospitality.
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After a year at the Roxy, Mike woke up one night and felt God say to him “What would you do if I take away your building?” He shared this with the leadership team of the church, and though this was a disturbing challenge, they all recognised that it was one that needed a response. Lay-led Clusters became increasingly important as we geared up for a possible season with no central home.
Almost exactly a year later, the church had to move out of the Roxy. Attempts to buy the building proved unsuccessful and the costs of repairs had become prohibitive, so with two months notice, four weeks before Christmas 2001, the church had to find a new home. On one remarkable Sunday in January 2002, St Thomas’ planted 17 new congregations (called ‘clusters’) in venues all across Sheffield. Some clusters met in homes, others in cinemas, bars, community centres, unused church buildings and even a pub. For a year, the city centre church had no regular weekly gathering, only meeting once a month in a hired venue to worship together. But for most weeks, the church met as clusters across Sheffield, working out what it means to be church without walls, meeting among the different communities of Sheffield.
However, at the end of 2002, God intervened again and an opportunity arose to purchase an industrial site in Sheffield to serve as the city church’s new home. This site, in the area of Sheffield historically known as Philadelphia, fulfilled a prophetic word spoken over the church some 8 years previously when Mike Breen had first arrived. Taken from the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-4, Mike had called the church to move from being like the church in Ephesus to being like the church in Philadelphia!
Negotiations were completed and in early 2003, just a year after leaving the Roxy, the church moved into its new home, the Philadelphia Campus. With multiple buildings, and even its own roads, the site was big enough to allow the church to keep growing for years to come.
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The commitment of St. Thomas’, Philadelphia is not to be an insular mega-church, but to live out our lives in and for the city of Sheffield, representing the love and call of Jesus. For this reason, though we now have our own campus of buildings, we continue to meet in Clusters, and continue to serve many different communities across the city.
When Mike Breen left in 2004, Mick Woodhead became the Rector of St. Thomas’ Crookes, and Paul Maconochie became the Senior Pastor of St. Thomas’ Philadelphia. Both churches remain Anglican-Baptist, and continue to work together in covenant, although they have now become separate churches. Mick is an Anglican Priest and Paul is a Baptist Minister.
As this was happening, the Philadelphia church was also in talks with the Kings Centre, about joining together. The King’s.jpg)
Centre was an independent Sheffield church based in Nether Edge and led at the time by Alex Absalom. This process was completed over the next eighteen months or so, and the two churches have now become one, though for now they keep their separate names. In keeping with the multi-denominational theme, this means that we are now Anglican-Baptist-Housechurch!
Since 2004 we have continued to develop our vision to be a church for the city and people of Sheffield. Particularly, we have sought to develop our work in some of the more deprived areas of the city. Children’s work based around ‘Kids Clubs’ have now been established in several areas and also groups of young adults have moved onto some of the more socially-deprived estates to serve and help the people there. This work is really about community transformation, seeking to build well-functioning communities where people feel safe and there is a sense of hope for the future. Our work with addicts and other marginalised people has continued to develop and we currently have a regular Sunday service on Campus called ‘Streetwise’ for this community. All of this work has grown dramatically over the last few years, so that we now have over 1,000 under-18’s meeting each week and more than 50 of these local outreach groups in place.
An extensive network of ministries has grown up around our church, working with students, families, children, youth, underprivileged groups and many others. The ‘Lifeshapes’ tools have also been increasingly used by other churches both in the U.K. and across the world, with thousands of people using them as a way of effectively engaging with the Christian life. The development of these networks, and of ‘3DMinistries’, the resource and training organisation associated with Lifeshapes, continues to grow at an incredible rate.
St. Thomas’ is the mother church of a missionary organisation called The Order of Mission (T.O.M.). The members of TOM are leaders of churches and other Christian communities of various denominations from all over the world. TOM is held accountable to the wider church by John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, David Coffey, President of the World Baptist Alliance, Eddie Gibbs, Professor of Church Growth, Fuller Seminary and Kent Hunter, President of Church Doctor Ministries.