This is how our work makes a difference
With contributions from people from Irvine and Kilmarnock Presbytery, our report "The Trellis and the Vine" traces the progress of the presbytery as they introduce pioneer ministry teams through Presbytery Planning. We evaluate the contribution of the Cairn Movement as they supported people in missional awareness, training and implementation.
An introduction and discussion from Liam Jerrold Fraser, Brendan Research Associate and author of "Mission in Contemporary Scotland" complements the case study.
As the Dioceses of the Church in Wales formed new Ministry Area structures, Brendan Research provided dashboards to help congregations, priests and diocesan staff understand their new areas.
In both Welsh and English, the dashboards contain the latest information on deprivation and population as well as Census data. Church in Wales area statistics are also included. This work included modelling ministry-area-level statistics and generating maps, charts and tables to display data in helpful ways for each ministry area.
Brendan Research is helping the Church of England listen to its parishioners who have engaged with the "Living in Love and Faith" course - a five week course discussing questions about identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage, and asking what it means to live in love and faith together as a church.
We assisted with the design of a questionnaire to gather quantitative and qualitative responses, and are analysing the thousands of submissions, presenting the results in graphs, maps and thematic analyses. Our work will join with others and be published in summer 2022.
Our report, '"Adapt and be Flexible - the Mission Doesn't Stop" The Scottish Church and the COVID-19 Pandemic' was published in April 2021. Over 350 clergy from 27 denominations took part in this research, revealing the scale of the service to communities and congregations in the months around lockdown.
Working across five denominations and thirteen ecclesiastical areas, we mapped the location of all places of worship in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority Area. We then turned back the clock, locating the places where places of worship existed in 2010 but had since closed.
Finding places that no longer exist needed a creative response, with methods including searching local newspaper archives, social media, physical copies of denominational Year Books and contact with diocesan staff.
We modelled Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation and 2020 Population Estimates for parishes in Scotland. Brendan Research produced dashboards for over 1,200 parishes with maps, charts and tables to allow local Christians to understand the changes in their communities since Census 2011. Spreadsheets at a presbytery level were also provided to aid presbytery planning. The dashboards are available through the ChurchFinder on the Church of Scotland web pages.
