About us

Our purpose

Sion Catholic Community for Evangelism is a Spirit-led community.

We are called to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ and equip others for the task of evangelisation.

Guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we seek to be a prophetic sign of hope through our work, words and witness of life.

We are a community of disciples on mission, laity and clergy working together to make the Good News of Jesus Christ known.

For more than 30 years we have been running parish missions and school missions across the UK. Alongside our school ministry, we also run programmes to enable young people and families to grow in faith.

At our residential training centre SENT in Brentwood Essex, we run a variety of courses including the popular Beloved weekends for women.

We value

Community Life

Embracing our commitment to love one another.

Encounter

Creating space for people to meet with God and one another.

Discipleship

Growing in maturity as missionary disciples, to disciple others.

Worship

Glorifying God through our fully Catholic and charismatic life.

Mission

Building the church by evangelising ‘from community into community’.

Our journey

Conceived on 8 December 1984, Sion Community has offered parish missions since 1985, and in the 1990s grew to offer secondary and primary school missions and residential events at SENT.

In the year 2000, we birthed a sister community, Céilí, in Ireland, where our founder, Mgr Pat Lynch, now lives. Currently, we are working in a number of partnerships: TEM – a new evangelisation project in Lithuania, theASCENT – a discipleship process for Catholic young people, Sawyer’s Church – a local ecumenical outreach.

We work under the authority of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales and have three patron bishops -Archbishop Bernard Longley, Bishop Alan Williams, and Bishop David Oakley.

Leadership Team

Our elected leadership team reflects the Covenant membership of the Community. We are unified in our diversity, each pursuing different mission pathways and serving the community through our leadership.

Matt Spiller

Matt Spiller has worked as a leader in youth ministry for 20 years. He lives with his wife and three children in their family home in East Anglia, but previously lived in community for ten years. Matt has a technical mind and a heart for people, which means he is just as likely to be found fitting a door, repairing a laptop or listening to a tearful friend!

Matt enjoys working with a team, aiming to bring out the best from the people around him. His default focus is for those around him to grow and develop.

Although his academic career was stunted by a colourful social life, which took him to some difficult places, Sion Community introduced Matt to the person of Jesus, an experience that changed his life forever.

Alice Hall

Alice met Sion Community through a Cross Purposes school mission in 1992 and has been involved with Sion Community ever since. She is single and in discernment for a more committed consecrated life. She lives at the Ark, our community house in Coventry.

Following a Discipleship Training School in her late teens, she initially joined the youth team and later moved into initiating, leading or developing various areas of ministry within Sion Community. She has a degree in Drama and Theology and a Masters in Theology and Christian Ministry.

Alice is passionate about the love of God and about people. She finds life serving Him through preaching, teaching, praying with and walking alongside others as well as through worship. Alice looks forward with hope to what God has in store for Sion Community in the coming season and is delighted to be leading the Community as part of a team.