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Warrington is situated between Liverpool and Manchester, adjacent to the intersections of the M62, M56 and M6 and straddling the River Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal. Warrington is on the West Coast main line between London Euston and Glasgow and also has good train links to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, the North East and North Wales. The Lake District, Yorkshire Dales, North Wales and the Cheshire countryside are all within easy reach.

Warrington has a population of 190,000 (and growing). It has been a Unitary Authority since 1998. Many of its traditional heavy industries have disappeared but it has maintained its prosperity by attracting high-tech companies to new business parks. Warrington was a designated New Town area and significant new housing, business and retail development is still taking place and is planned well into this century. The town has a pleasant, mainly pedestrianised centre plus several “out of town” retail centres and is only about 30 minutes from larger retail developments such as the Trafford Centre and MacArthur Glen Cheshire Oaks.

The Circuit is in the process of implementing a radical vision accepted by the Circuit Meeting in September 2005. This has involved re-organising the Circuit of 11 churches into 5 Partnerships (Central, North, South, East and West) one Church Council per partnership. This also included the appointment of Partnership Enablers, who are Lay folk committed to changing the face of the Methodist circuit. Their first task has been to enable the churches within their Partnership to move towards acting as a single body.

It is intended that each partnership should be cared for by a team of lay workers and ministers with the ministers, enabled by the appointment of the lay team, being able to concentrate on making a fresh impact on unexplored areas of community ministry and develop fresh expressions of worship and mission within their partnership.

We are now year four in implementing the vision. Mapping A Way Forward (MAWF/RFM) as deferred and slowed down our move to ‘Partnership’