Welcome to Appreciating Church
Appreciating Church is a Christian ecumenical project which aims to encourage the church at a local and national level to engage people in an inclusive way, listening to ‘all the voices’, building on our existing strengths and skills, counting our blessings and co-creating a resilient church as part of the kingdom of Heaven.
Appreciating Church seeks to develop a self-sustaining Appreciative Inquiry (AI) community of practice across the churches. The organisation was originally initiated by the United Reformed Church, in partnership with the Methodist Church, Quakers, and the Congregational Federation, with interest from individual dioceses of the Church of England and others.
The programme offers AI training and advice supported by the Appreciating Church resource book which is a source of practical understanding of AI theory and practice, theological insights, experiences of AI within the Church, and worship material.
This accompanying website offers supplementary exercises and content.
Our Story
This is the story of how Appreciating Church developed, and its outline plans for further development.
Your AI Stories
Emerging from lockdown: Using Appreciative Inquiry to re-envision the church
As a team vicar in a rural multi-parish benefice, Sarah Cawdell has used Appreciative Inquiry (AI) with churches emerging from the Covid-19 lockdown. She sees AI offering a more hopeful lexicon, and a way of reflecting forwards which ties in with the Christian hope of being transformed from one degree of glory to another.
