On Monday this week we welcomed Mark Caldeira to our staff team as an Operations Manager. He already feels like part of the family to us, and is proving to be an asset.

Mark’s first challenge was to build his own desk, a task he handled superbly (ably assisted by Bruno). You can read more about Mark and Alverna and how they came to be with us by following this link.

On Sunday, Vinu Paul from Commission India will be preaching at Welcome Church in our morning meetings and also ministering at our Encounter meeting in the evening. Vinu was Mark and Alverna’s Pastor back in India, and also Mark’s ‘boss’, so we’re hoping Vinu’s visit will help them to feel right at home. Who knows, maybe Vinu will bring a list of jobs for Mark to do? 🙂

On Tuesday (in honour of someone’s recent birthday) Alice Potter brought in her speciality “Mississippi Mud Pie” as a treat for the team.

This was a long delayed moment! It was originally planned for March 2020, but Covid lockdown prevented it. In March ’21 we were still working from home. In March ’22 most of the team were actually ill with Covid, including me. This year we succeeded. We’re hoping for a repeat in ’24, but who knows what might happen by then??

A big thank you from the whole Office Team, both staff and volunteers, to Alice for her persistence and for her awesome Mud Pie. If you’ve never had it, we’d recommend it.

8 Big Values

As a team we’ve spent some time recently talking about the sort of environment we want to work in and the team culture we want to create. After a lot of honest and passionate debate, and much collaborative and faith-filled discussion we settled on 8 BIG VALUES .

The highly talented and servant-hearted Juliet has turned this into a piece of art, using our Welcome Church branding. It’s been applied to the office wall next to where we have our team meetings, which is a great reminder and helps us hold one another accountable for living them out.

Here it is. Please feel free to pop in and have a look:

As a team we want to be:

• HONEST
• PASSIONATE
• SERVANT-HEARTED
• COLLABORATIVE
• ACCOUNTABLE
• HONOURING
• FAITH FILLED and
• CARING

This is about how we treat one another. It’s about how we work together. It’s about how we want the people we serve to experience us as a team. You can see some other words written around the 8 BIG VALUES, which add description to them.

We may not get it right all the time, but this is what we’re aspiring towards.

As we live out these values we’re aiming to do the best work of our lives, here at Welcome Church … and why wouldn’t we want to do that?

Let me encourage us all, as a church, towards two things:

1. Please encourage us where you see us put these values into action. That would be a great way of honouring someone for their hard work.
2. Why not also model these 8 BIG VALUES in the areas of church life where YOU serve? Creating a caring environment makes all the difference.

One more thing: these are Biblical values – they weren’t just chosen at random. We took time as a team to build a clear Biblical foundation for each value, though I won’t post that work here.

These values reflect something of the heart of God towards us, and His character as revealed to us in Jesus. As we live out our faith in Jesus day by day, these values should come out in how we treat one another in every area of life. Perhaps they’d make a great list of values for your life, your family and your work place too.