CEYC

Present

• Peter Ball (National Youth Adviser)
• Rachel Camp (Chair)
• Philippa Cox
• Yvonne Criddle (National Youth Adviser)
• Adam Gundry (Secretary in Ellie's absence)
• Kurtis Saddler
• Richard Whitmill

Apologies

• Elinor Kitson (Secretary)
• Tom Pugh (Official Synod Observer)
• Emily Walshe

Final details for November's meeting

Motions

Topics

We have had no full response to the call for motions; one group indicated they had a topic but didn't send it in. We had previously identified two possible topics:

• Faith schools
• Islam (including feedback from Helen)

Yvonne read out the planned issues to be raised at next February's Synod, but none were identified as being suitable for CEYC to discuss in November. She has a contact who is willing to talk about Israel/Palestine if we do a follow up session on that topic, but we decided against doing so in November.

Baptism and Confirmation

After some discussion about a possible third topic, it was eventually agreed that we should discuss the twin issues of infant baptism and the confirmation of young people. We will consider the history of baptism and confirmation, and ask what their places should be in the modern Church. This will take place during the afternoon slot. One issue to be raised is the existence of parishes who require young people but not adults to be confirmed before taking communion.

The discussion will be followed up with the presentation of a statement from the chair of CEYC about the issue, rather than a motion. We will make clear from the beginning that this is the case.
Rachel will introduce the discussion, and Rich will help by preparing background material. The briefing material could include a question for reflection along the lines of “what do baptism and confirmation mean to you personally and in your church?”

Part of the time will be spent in small group discussion with comments being recorded on paper; these will be highlighted at the end of the session and used to inform action group follow up work.

Faith Schools

Since Emily is not able to attend the November meeting, Philippa agreed to take over preparing for the debate on faith schools. She intends to move a motion along the lines of “as England is moving to be a multicultural society, CEYC would question whether there is a place for faith schools”. Opposition is expected.
The text of the motion and all background material for the debates and discussions must be sent to Rachel by Friday 3rd November, so she can collate it and pass it to Julia on the 6th for a mailing by the 10th.

Islam

The evening session is going to be a discussion on Islam, led by Helen. We are not sure what stage she is at in preparing for this, and will ask her to send details within a week. The issue of veils is likely to come up given recent media interest, we do not expect this to cause problems.

Tour of the Venue

We looked around the facilities provided by High Leigh, and are generally happy with them. We have access to one main room (the Yew Tree Hall) and three smaller rooms. A substantial amount of work has been done on the front of the building since the Being a Part conference was held at the centre several years ago.

Final details for November's meeting (continued)

Worship

Due to John Hall's new appointment, he is only able to attend CEYC on Saturday but not Sunday. We decided to move the Eucharist to Saturday afternoon and rearrange the schedule to fit, by shortening the chill-out time by 15 minutes and moving everything forward. Currently the faith schools debate is planned to be in the morning, but we could always swap it to the afternoon so that he could be present.

Those who will be asked to lead worship during the weekend are as follows:

• Friday evening opening worship: Kurtis and Rachel
• Early Saturday morning: Carlisle Diocese
• Late Saturday morning: Adam
• Saturday evening Eucharist: Yvonne and Core Group
• Early Sunday morning: York Diocese
• Sunday closing worship: Gloucester Diocese

The dioceses mentioned above have not yet been approached; we need to contact them relatively soon to ensure they are happy to participate.

Yvonne will draft an order of service for the Eucharist once we have confirmed the arrangements for Saturday with John. This should then be circulated to the Core Group for comments. We will decide on songs during the weekend and project words on screen.

Workshops

We have previously agreed on the following workshops:

• Vocations: Rich may prepare some material, but this is primarily a chat/discussion session. It should be made clear that vocations are about more than ordination. Peter has some background information which he will send to Rich.
• Church and depression: this is being organised by Helen, who was not present at the meeting. We need to check progress with this.
• Creating a Christian presence in schools: Kurtis is planning to run this as a discussion with flip chart. It will be specifically focussed on schools, as we have previously had a University-related workshop.
• Creative/arty thing: Rachel is going to run a session about being creative about different ways of praying (i.e. making things) as opposed to creative prayer (praying in unusual ways). Activities she has planned include making mobiles from CDs, icing biscuits, painting, collage, clay modelling (we have non-firing clay left over from a previous event), and so forth. We discussed possible locations: the Book Room is quite flexible but a little small, and while the Chapel would be excellent it is probably not available to us.
• Will my cat go to heaven: discussion of various random questions led by Philippa. Some questions will be prepared in advance to start things off, and we will put a suggestion box out for further questions before the workshop. We may invite someone born earlier to take part as long as they don't take over. The session will not intend to provide all the answers to questions. Philippa has written text for use in the background mailing.

Evaluation

Some of the debate structures are experimental, so we need to evaluate how successful they are. We should also find out if there are any big issues that CEYC members want to be discussed in the future, and record them for the next Core Group. We will distributed evaluation sheets and ask small groups to discuss them before members individually assign a numbered score for or write a comment under each heading. Questions could include:

• What worked well?
• What could be improved?
• What would you like to have seen included?
• What are you going to take away with you?
• Any other comments

Publicity

The Church House communications staff and Dee from Young People Now have been in touch about publicity issues. We agreed to invite Dee to attend part of the event, in order to inform writing an article about CEYC. We will issue a press release as soon as possible (this should have happened already, but has been neglected). Rich will write a release, circulate it on the Core Group list and then forward it to Ben Wilson.

Future meetings and core group meetings

There will be a handover day meeting on Saturday 6th January 2007 for both the old and new Core Groups at Elizabeth House. Future meeting dates will need to be agreed by the new group, but we suggest a residential meeting on 3rd -4th or 10th-11th February. Peter will try to book the Lancaster Hall Hotel.
We need to identify a venue for the April meeting before the November meeting. Church House is not available on a Saturday, and in any case is very expensive. We are still waiting to find out about Methodist Central Hall, but it will probably be equally expensive. Peter is also considering venue options in Birmingham.

How do we choose people to go on trips?

CEYC has been receiving a number of invites to events, and we need to clarify our policy of when should trips be open to everyone, and when should they be restricted to Core Group members. We also need to consider how we advertise them, and whether we provide financial support. We don't think it fair that the Core Group can potentially just go to what they fancy and leave the rest to others.

While a number of Core Group members were not present at this meeting, we decided that the issue of how we choose people to attend trips should be discussed as otherwise it would be left until January.

Yvonne proposed that invitations be divided into three categories:

• Those involving official representation of CEYC (for example, when someone is invited to speak on behalf of the Council, and the Core Group is contacted directly). These should generally be attended by a Core Group member, but may be someone else at the discretion of the Core Group.
• Those organised by other denominations, and similar events where representation of the Church is required and CEYC wishes to receive feedback. If two or more people are invited, then at least one could be a member of the Core Group; for one-person events it depends on the nature of the event and the role the participant would play.
• Those with a wide appeal, i.e. opportunities that are not directly related to CEYC, should be advertised generally to CEYC members, and selection handled by the organising body rather than CEYC.

For events that involve representing CEYC, we should try to fund reasonable expenses if the organising body doesn't. For other events, we will consider creating some kind of bursary application process, possibly on a means-tested basis, to provide financial support, and will recommend that interested individuals seek funding from the parish and diocese.

Peter will write guidelines on this issue, including a set of examples to clarify things, and bring them to the CEYC meeting in November and ask the Council to affirm the guidelines. This will help the future Core Groups justify their decisions regarding CEYC representation at events.

A specific case: Richard is planning to meet Archbishop Matta from the Syrian Orthodox Church to find out more about the Syria trip that Edward has contacted us about. His general impression is that this is a wide appeal event in the third category, which we should advertise to CEYC members but not necessarily support financially.

AOB

Ecumenical business

Philippa has written letters to FURY, Methodists and the ACC Youth Representative inviting them to the November meeting, which have been passed to Ellie. We need to check these have been sent out, and note that we require responses by 3rd November at the latest.

The ecumenical meeting of youth councils that we had planned for 4th November has so far only received a positive response from FURY. The Methodists are heavily reviewing their youth work and can't attend. It was agreed that we would postpone the meeting until next year to give other groups a chance to attend.

Have the old invites been sent out by mistake?

Yvonne was concerned that material about an old meeting may have been sent out instead of invitations to the November meeting. However, Peter has had responses indicating this is not the case. Adam was asked to check what had been sent by email to ensure it was correct. (Ed: I did, and it was.)

Handbook

Philippa and Adam have revised and edited the handbook. The Core Group should check the revised version (Adam has distributed it for comments).