About The Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication
The Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication (CCX) supports leaders, church teams and dioceses across London, England and beyond as they multiply disciples, churches and networks.
CCX is led by the Bishop of Islington, the Rt Revd Ric Thorpe. In 2015, Bishop Ric was consecrated as the Bishop of Islington to support the Diocese of London’s goal of creating new worshipping communities across the capital.
We’re part of the Church of England but work with many denominations and networks.
Our involvement - Multiply 2020
Mack got involved with CCX just before the Covid-19 Lockdowns. The annual in-person conference called Multiply, which was previously scheduled for June 2020, was nearly cancelled. Mack offered delivering the conference online, on the customs website hosted on the Wix platform. At the time, online conferences were a huge nich and such project was a big unknown. Previous, Multiply 2019 was an in-person conference with over 600 guests in 3 locations on three days, with more than 20 speakers delivering content. Multiply 2020 is supposed to be larger. Mack merged multiple technologies and delivered: - 10 Youtube channels - for the live streaming of the main part of the conference and seminars from ZOOM. - ZOOM - for interactive seminars for the second part of the conference. As part of it was setting up, delivering and training hosts to deliver three sets of 9 interactive seminars simultaneously. - Website in Wix - as a "place" where the conference happened. There was a cost to attend the conference, therefore the sales of the tickets through Eventbrite were set up, and the website was password protected. - Facebook group - as a "place" for an in-place connection of the participants. This group welcomed more than 1000 people and is now the biggest active church planting facebook in the UK. The results were astonishing! - The conference drew more than three times as many guests as the previous year. - Feedback received from the guests was overwhelmingly positive. - The team delivering content comprised about 100 high profile speakers. - All of the content was also captured and is available on Online Learning Platform CCX.MEDIA The conference was so successful that the Diocese of London wrote an article about it. You can read more here: Church Planting Conference and the legacy for London
Our involvement - www.ccx.org
Mack continued being involved in the new digital work of The Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication. Mack began to develop the proposition of replacing an old website and an additional 3rd party Online Learning Platform with the solution in WordPress. The main opportunity was cutting the costs of those platforms by 95%. After a few months of work, the prototype of the website was ready. Because of the scale of the project additional team was involved. Working with large team Mack delivered the website that included: - More than 20 information pages - Blog - Online learning platform with a subscription system - Vacancies hosting pages - Donation pages and system - A "place" for the next conference to happen
Our involvement - Multiply 2021
The new website was to be delivered just before Multiply 2021. Stakes were high, and the weeks were long. The WordPress server failed the day before the conference, and the website wasn't working; fixing it would be a longer job. With only 16 hours to the conference, Mack started replicating the design and functionality of the WordPress website in Wix. The website was ready within 8 hours with all of the planned functionalities. The conference's aftermath taught us all about the greatness of the Wix platform. Not only did it allow for the fast creation of the website from scratch, but the platform's reliability saved the day. The conference drew nearly as many attendees as in the previous year and continued to expand the mission of The Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication.