Hi!
As Steve continues to recover from his cancer operation, I wanted to post a couple of key updates to this blog in his absence. Steve has led us through these changes with vision and clarity, and would be communicating them himself were he not away!
Whether you’ve been part of Welcome Church for many years or a couple of months, you’ll have realised that we are rapidly running out of space in our meetings: it is quite normal for us to gather over 1100 people on a Sunday. We are particularly squeezed at our 11am meeting which is roughly 150 people bigger than our 9am meeting, and on ‘special Sundays’ like baptisms and Easter Sunday, it is often standing room only! This should cause us to do two things:
- The first thing is to Worship our amazing God. We love what God is doing in and through our church, saving and adding people to us, and we give him all the glory. We may have worked hard planting and watering, but it is God who makes things grow, it’s God who saves, who changes lives, who is building his church.
- The second thing is to think about Stewardship. We are called to steward that growth as best as we can, and stewardship doesn’t look like pulling up the drawbridge and saying ‘we’re full, there’s no room here, you’ll have to go somewhere else’. We do not exist for ourselves, we are a family on a mission. Jesus has given us the gospel and commanded us to go and make disciples, and to do that we need space. When a group of friends or a family of 5 walks in and can’t sit together, we’ve got a problem!
And so for the last couple of years as an Eldership team we have been wrestling with the question ‘how do we create more space in our Sunday meetings for the growth God is giving us?’. And we’ve done various things towards that:
- We’ve maximised our seating. We’ve worked hard to get as many chairs out as is safe to do so. On our ‘big’ Sundays, we relocate refreshments so that we can set out more seats. On our Baptism Sundays our kids now enjoy the baptisms in their rooms via the livestream, because we know that we need the extra 50 chairs behind the baptism pool.
- ‘Go 9’. Last year we ran a ‘Go 9’ campaign where we aimed to encourage 150 people to move from 11am to 9am, to help balance out the two morning meetings, and to provide space at 11am where we most feel the pinch.
If you were someone who moved from 11am to 9am, thank you. Thank you for your faith, thank you for being willing to respond to a missional need in our church, thank you for changing your Sunday routine and habits for the sake of others that you may never meet. We were really encouraged by those who said Yes to Going 9.
However, the reality is that not enough people felt they could commit to that change to make a material difference to our Sunday numbers. 11am remains about 150 people bigger than 9am. And that’s ok! We’re not grumpy about it and we’re not here to guilt-trip anyone. But it did give us a vital piece of feedback: our current meeting times do not enable you to easily move from one meeting to another.
This feedback has helped us to recognise that if we want our meetings to be more balanced to make space for everyone who comes through our doors, we will need to change our meeting times, to make it easier for people to opt in to the earlier meeting.
Therefore, from March 29th, our meetings will start half an hour later, with the 9am becoming our 9.30am meeting, and our 11am becoming our 11.30am meeting.
Now some of you will already know that March 29th is the day when the clocks go forward and we move into British Summer Time, and so we are calling this ‘Clock Change Sunday’, where ‘the clocks go forward, but the meetings go back!’ So when you think about it, you will actually only lose half an hour’s sleep on that particular day – a Spring gift from us – you’re welcome. And, hey, if you get it wrong and come at the old timings, you’ll either arrive half an hour early, or depending on your punctuality, you may simply arrive on time!
If you are someone who faithfully attends the 9am meeting, from March 29th you’ll need to come for 9.30am. Let this change raise your faith for making invites and bringing guests: it’s a far easier invitation to say to a friend “come with me at 9.30”. Our hope is that this time change will tip the balance and allow many more people to join this earlier meeting, freeing up space that will see us through until the end of 2026.
If you’re someone who faithfully attends the 11am meeting, from March 29th it will begin at 11.30am and end at 1pm. For many of you that will be fine, God bless you – 11.30am will continue to be a great meeting! But there will be a good number of you who are thinking that a 9.30am start and 11am finish will suit you much better – our hope is that 100-150 of you will probably want to move over to the 9.30am meeting. To be clear – we’re not doing a ‘Go 9.30’ campaign, we’re not putting a card in your hand, or asking you to sign anything, we’re changing the times to create two great options for you, and we’re simply inviting you to opt in to 9.30am on March 29th if that works for you.
So that’s Clock Change Sunday on March 29th. And it’s not just Clock Change, it’s all change, because this is also the Sunday that we are planning to open up Church Gate for our kids and youth groups!! Watch this space for more updates about that in the coming weeks.
And that’s the end of part 1! I’ll be posting part 2 on Wednesday.
Grace to you!
Christopher, Teaching Pastor
Steve Petch's Blog 