Thank Your Vicar 2024/5

There are many fun and engaging ways your school may decide to fundraise. You’re welcome to use one of our team’s ideas or come up with your own!

• Hold a bake sale
• Wear non-school uniform or silly socks or costumes to school
• Sponsored sports challenge – why not get children/staff/parents involved in a fun run or sponsored race!
• Sponsored clean/tidy up – clean up around the school, church and/or local community (maybe create a bit of competition between the classes!)
• Organise a raffle
• Collect donations at a Christmas concert/carol service/carol singing
• Host a coffee morning to ‘Thank Your Vicar’ and invite parents and community members – classes can make and sell small crafts or baked goods

We’re looking forward to hearing how you fundraised for St Luke’s.

We’ve put together some resources to support your school in raising funds and thanking your vicar. Once you have signed up and pledged your school’s involvement, we will send you a link (within 48 hours) to our resource page where you can download:

• Fundraising ideas list
• Poster for TYV2024/25
• Vicar invitation
• Prayer templates
• TYV2024/25 Assembly plan
• St Luke’s Thank Your Vicar card

We encourage the pupil Worship Leaders or School Council members to get involved with running TYV2024/25!

On this web-page you can click the TYV2024/25 donate button to send us your donation.

TYV2024/25 Donation

Alternatively, you can write a cheque to St Luke’s for Clergy Wellbeing, with a note “TYV2024/25”, and post it to:

St Luke’s for Clergy Well-being, Church House, Great Smith Street, London, SW1P3AZ

We LOVE seeing all the wonderful ways in which our supporters raise money to support our work.

To share with us on socials, you can tag social media content with our hashtag #ThankYourVicar2024/25

Alternatively, your school can email or write to us (our contact details are at the bottom of this web-page).

Trying to ‘do good’ and spread love in today’s society is becoming increasingly challenging.

For those outside the church it can be surprising to learn support is even needed.  The clergy have well and truly put their heads above the parapet and often take the role of dealing with highly challenging situations.

The efforts they make are staggering. Not only do they hold church services, weddings and funerals, they provide practical support to the community – those of all faith and none, as they organise and help at food banks, homeless shelters, appeal drives, coffee mornings and supper evenings for those wanting companionship, after school clubs, summer holiday activities, visit schools/hospitals/prisons, manage buildings and Church finances.

They can also find themselves contacting councils, writing to MP’s, approaching organisations as they advocate and champion those who struggle to make their own voice heard.

The list is relentless and seemingly unexhaustive.

All of this giving can take its toll.  It is hard to find a few hours off let alone a whole day or two days together.  Being a community leader, clergy can become a “lightning rod”; given opinions from politics to policing to programming; told they should simultaneously “take a stand” or “sit down and be quiet”.

In this world we find ourselves in, more than ever we need the clergy and the support they provide. And more than ever the clergy need support too.

We provide help and support to clergy and their families.

The demand for our services grows each year as clergy realise the importance of mental health self care.

Our mental health clinical services provide practical, supportive services such as diagnosis, preventive programmes and 1:1 counselling.  We create a safe space, independent of the Church of England, to allow clergy to speak freely.  We bolster the mental health of the clergy enabling then to flourish in their ministry, to the benefit of their congregations and the wider community.

St Luke’s has been supporting clergy for more than 130 years and with your help we intend to continue to offer mental health and well-being support to clergy, their spouses and children into the future.

To meet the demand St Luke’s urgently needs to raise additional funds and by supporting our event today you will help us reach more clergy and their families in the future – thank you.