Month: February 2025

Some Welcome Church Updates – February 2025

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Spring is in the air, daffodils and crocuses are appearing in the garden, and it will be March on Saturday. As we come to the end of February, here are a few Welcome Church Updates and prayer requests to keep you in the picture:

Grant Applications – some good news

Our grant application to Your Fund Surrey, who we are applying to for funding towards launching our new Community Grocery, went in last week. We received over 1000 positive comments on the Your Fund Surrey website, which we were very pleased with.

Here is a word cloud we received from Your Fund Surrey about the comments people made:

And here is a Pie Chart showing how positive people felt:

The application is for just under £500,000, and we will hear back about it in June. Please pray for a positive outcome.

In the meantime we also applied to an organisation called The Benefact Trust, who are a Christian grant funder. They replied very quickly with a “YES”, and we received a cheque from them this week for £80,000. This is a wonderful encouragement and a sign of God’s provision for us as a church.

We are looking at some other grant funders now too, and would love to raise £800,000 in total from grants, so do pray for this whole process.

Big Weekend Away

This month we opened the booking for our Welcome Church Big Weekend Away which takes place on the Bank Holiday weekend in August – Friday 22nd to Monday 25th August 2025.

Roughly half of the available places have been booked so far, so don’t delay booking – you could miss out. When it’s full it’s full!

The weekend away takes place at Braggers Wood Camp Site in the New Forest. We have the whole place to ourselves this year.

You’ll get to enjoy connecting with others from Welcome Church over delicious meals (all included), fun activities, day trips, or simply relaxing in our marquee. We will also seek God together as a church family, enjoying times of worship and teaching, and looking at what it means to belong to His family. We’d love to see you there; there is something for everyone!

As a special offer there is a 25% discount on all bookings made before 1st May. To book your place please use this link.

Baptisms

This Sunday morning, 2nd March, we will be baptising people at our 9am and 11am meetings. We’ll be baptising a total of 8 people, 4 in each of our meetings.

Baptisms are always a great moment to celebrate what God is doing in our church and a great opportunity to invite friends to church too.

Please be praying for all those getting baptised this weekend.

New Pastoral Lead

Don’t forget, as I posted in my blog earlier this week, we are now looking to recruit a new Pastoral Lead for Welcome Church. This is a full time, senior role, based in our church offices. The details of the vacancy can be found by clicking here.

We have had some interesting contacts so far, but please don’t hesitate to share this opportunity far and wide. In the mean time we would really value your prayers that God leads us to the right person to fill this key vacancy.

Some other employment opportunities will follow as the year goes by, so watch this space for those too.

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Welcome Church is Recruiting

/ Steve Petch / 2 Comments

A New Pastoral Lead

I shared in a blog at the start of this year that we would be looking for new some new, employed members of the Welcome Church team this year, and we’re excited to say that our new Pastoral Lead is the first role we’re looking to fill.

We need to increase our ability and capacity to respond to the more urgent and immediate pastoral needs of the church, and we also need to prepare to support the increasing pastoral needs that will come both with further growth, and through our Welcome Works ministries, such as the upcoming community grocery. 

Who are we looking for?

We’re looking for someone who can lead the planning and the practical delivery of pastoral care across the church. They will also bring leadership to our small group ministries – our ‘LifeGroups’ and ‘LearnGroups’. These small groups will become increasingly important for maintaining our family culture and ethos, as we become a larger church and are key to pastoral care too. 

The right person will be someone who does some of the ‘doing’ – such as responding to urgent pastoral needs – but we’re also particularly looking for someone who can enable and support the skilled and dedicated leaders we already have operating in these areas; we are looking for a leader of leaders who’s able to think strategically about how we care well for those who God brings into our family, and who can build teams and work through others.

This is a key role in our church and a senior one.

We’ll be searching for the right person through a number of avenues, and one of those is through this blog. If you’re interested to know more, we’ve developed a job specification and details of how to apply which you can access via this link. Please don’t be shy in coming forward if you feel something stirring in your heart and think this may be something you’d like to explore further, and please don’t hesitate to get in touch for a confidential chat – we’d love to hear from you.

Stay connected with everything happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog for weekly updates sent straight to your inbox

Time To Have Your Say

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Hello! It’s Dub Everitt here, Outreach Pastor at Welcome Church, and I’m excited to be guest-writing Steve’s blog this week!

I want to update you on the renovation of our new building – the ‘Church Gate’ office block – and invite you to take action today to help make a huge difference in our community.

An Incredible Journey So Far

Many of you played a vital role in our gift days in November 2023 and June 2024, helping us raise an incredible £2 million toward the £3 million purchase of Church Gate, which we completed (with the help of a mortgage!) in May 2024. Of the money given so far, £400,000 has been set aside towards the renovation costs.

One of the key ways we’ll use this space is to launch a Community Grocery – a project that will provide affordable food and essential support services to those who need it most.

What Is A Community Grocery?

A Community Grocery is a ‘social supermarket’ designed to help families struggling with the cost of living. It’s an initiative founded by The Message Trust in Manchester, offering deeply discounted food while preserving dignity and choice for members, who can select the items they need to best support themselves.

For just £5 per year, people can sign up for membership, and then they can shop for between £5 and £12.50 a week, saving up to £50 per week—that’s £2,500 a year!

But it’s more than just groceries. Members can also connect to our other initiatives such as debt advice, money coaching, cooking courses, mental health & wellbeing groups, job clubs, and more. In 2024, we helped 169 individuals through these services, and this new space will allow us to expand our impact to reach 1,000 grocery members in our first year.

This is a project that will change lives in our community.

Where Are We Now?

We’ve been working closely with our architects, Plan A – the same team who were behind the design of our chapel, which we opened in 2020. The renovation plans for Church Gate are now complete, and the costs for redevelopment and for fitting out the building have been estimated at £1.2 million.

We have the first £400,000, and we’re now working hard to secure the remaining £800,000 through grants. If all goes to plan, we’ll start construction in June or July and open the doors before the end of the year.

It’s Time To Ask For Your Support!

We recently submitted our first grant application to a Christian Grant Funder, and the feedback was amazing:

“Hi Dub, just to let you know I’ve read your draft and it’s EXCELLENT! Honestly, brilliant. I have no doubt our trustees will want to make a contribution. I wanted to congratulate you on such a well-planned project that is clearly going to change (and probably save) lives.”

This funder will confirm their decision by mid-February, so let’s be praying for a positive outcome!

The largest grant we’re applying for is £497,000 from Your Fund Surrey, part of Surrey County Council. We’ve had great conversations with their team, and we’re preparing our application ahead of the February 28th deadline.

But we now need your help to get it across the line.

Here’s Your Call To Action!

To help our application to succeed, we need to show strong local support – and that’s where YOU come in. We are now looking to gain at least 1,000 comments on Surrey County Council’s “Have Your Say” webpage to demonstrate how much our community supports this project.

At the time of writing, we have 692 comments, which means we still need 308 more.

Can you take 2 minutes to help?

If so, it’s very quick and easy to do, and fairly self-explanatory. Here are the four steps:

1. Click on this link to go through to the Have Your Say webpage

2. Hit the big smiley face on the page.

3. Leave a short comment about why you support the Community Grocery and any other comments you may want to make, and then add your email address when prompted to do so

4. Check your e-mails for a link to click on to confirm that the comments you made are yours. If the link doesn’t arrive do check your junk box too

That’s it—you’ll be done before your kettle boils!

Your endorsement, along with others, could help to secure nearly £500,000 to support people in need across our town.

One Last Thing: Please Spread the Word!

Once you’ve shared your comment, please pass the link to the Have Your Say webpage on to others: to your friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, or anyone who cares about making a difference in our community. Please feel free to share it on your social media feeds too.

The more people we can get behind this, the greater the impact we can have together.

Thanks in advance for all your help

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