Wonder of Wellbeing project celebrates £750k grant

A project connecting people to a sense of God’s peace and presence around Gower and its historic churches has been awarded more than £750k after a successful pilot year.

The Wonder of Wellbeing Gower project was launched last February and it has proved popular, with activities ranging from Wild Church and working with local schools to partnering with Faith in Families to provide wellbeing sessions during the summer holidays.

It has now been awarded a £763,278 grant from the Church in Wales Growth Fund over the next five years, to expand both its work and its growing congregation.

Rev'd Peter Lewis, Gower Ministry Area leader, said: “There was a positive response to our bid from the Church in Wales and this is a very exciting time for us. I think Gower will be a different place in five years if everything works well.”

The grant will cover three full-time posts – a project lead, a chaplain and a creative practitioner – and follows a £2.8m award for St Mary’s Church in Swansea as it becomes Wales’ first minster.

“We’ve got 16 medieval church buildings in our ministry area and a lot of the chaplain’s work will be spiritual tourism, connecting with pilgrims and also developing an online community of people who connect to the project, but live further away. So there’ll be an opportunity to grow people's faith and disciple people online,” Peter said.

“The project lead will co-ordinate everything on a day-to-day basis and the other post is for a creative practitioner, to plan and deliver wellbeing sessions based on creativity and the outdoors.”

Chloe Thomas will remain as creative practitioner, having joining the project from the outset, and it is hoped the other members of the team will be in place in May.

“For the first 11 months Chloe held all three roles combined,” Peter said. “We've had a good long think about what is needed to develop the project in a sustainable way and that's why we've ended up with these three distinct roles. We realised we needed to give equal time to everything.”

During the past year, the project has worked with local schools on projects aimed at boosting pupils’ wellbeing and hosted sessions on Oxwich beach for Faith in Families holiday clubs.

“Chloe created a resource called Shine Bright, which is a seven session wellbeing course. We were asked by Knelston Primary School if we could put something together to help children feel more of their self worth and we've been delivering that now in school. Chloe’s also trained up eight other people, and some of them are from the Swansea area, for them to deliver that in their local school.

“We’ll also be growing our connections with Faith in Families, and this year we’ll be developing sessions for them in Swansea, as well as bringing them down to Gower.”

It has also started Wild Church which, Peter said, is becoming a congregation of its own.

“Wild Church has become almost a new worship in congregation. They meet every month now and we're beginning to see like a pattern of how we're doing things.

“A lot of these folk are not churchgoers, so it's developing a new congregation.”