Buildings

For Your Prayers – April 2025

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

Hello Welcome Church!

Here are a few key things we would love you to be praying for this month. They are all key to the life of our church:

Go 9

We’ve talked several times about our Go 9 initiative, so I won’t repeat the details here – if you don’t know what Go 9 is, or are looking for more information please click here.

The deadline for people to let us know they’ll be moving to the 9am service is Easter Sunday, 20th April. Remember: this is all about our mission to Woking, and about making room for future growth

Please be praying for God to speak to people clearly about this move, maybe even to yourself!

Pastoral Lead Job

As you’ll be aware, we’re recruiting a new Pastoral Lead for Welcome Church – if you missed the information click here for details.

The deadline for applications was last Friday, and we’re now in a process of working through to the next stage. We’ll share more information when we’re ready to do that, but please be reassured that the process is ongoing.

Please be praying for wisdom and for God’s guidance for all who are involved in the process, and for all who have applied – we want to find God’s person for this role.

Church Gate

Our Church Gate project (click here for information) is continuing to move forward, and over the last two weeks a number of contractors have been on site as part of preparing their quotes for the work to be done. These quotes will be coming in over the month ahead.

Please be praying that we get some great quotes, and for wisdom to pick the best possible contractor so that the work is done well and delivered on/ahead of time and on/under budget.

Community Grocery Grants

The grant team are continuing to apply for various grants to help fund the Community Grocery set up, and also some to help with the ongoing running costs. There is a lot of excellent work being done by this team.

Please be praying for successful applications, and for the release of lots of finance.

Guest Speaker

This Sunday Natalie Williams, who leads Jubilee+, will be preaching for us. Jubilee+ is a UK-based Christian charity, dedicated to equipping churches to effectively support and transform the lives of those experiencing poverty in their local community. They provide resources and training to empower churches to integrate mercy, justice and community renewal into their outreach plans.

Natalie is a gifted speaker and author, and we’re blessed to have her with us – especially as we work towards the launch of our Community Grocery in the autumn.

Please be praying for a great meeting on Sunday and for God to speak to us powerfully as a church and as individuals, laying in a great foundation for the future of all we do.

Easter Services

We have two big moments over the Easter weekend:

Good Friday, 6pm to 7.30pm: We’ll have an evening of extended worship, with a short talk, and we’ll also take communion together. Kids are welcome, though please be aware that there won’t be any separate groups for them, so we’ll be worshipping together as families.

Easter Sunday, 9am and 11am: Easter is one of those great moments in the year: it’s joyful, meaningful, and accessible, and it’s a brilliant time to invite someone to church. I want to encourage you to think especially about people who perhaps used to be part of church life and have drifted away, although this is definitely an invitation suitable for everyone.

This coming week is a natural moment to extend that invitation – gently, thoughtfully – and we’ve got invitation cards available to help with that, if you’d like them – you can pick them up on Sunday.

Please be praying for many guests to join us on Easter Sunday and for God’s wisdom about who YOU could invite. Please also pray that the presence of God is all over everything we do.

Please Pray For All Of These Things!

We believe in a God who answers prayer, so please bring these requests before God. And lastly, here’s a quick reminder that we’ll be gathering in person to pray on Sunday 11th May at Welcome Church from 6pm to 7pm – please put that in your diary now.

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

Church Gate – latest updates and prayer requests

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

Our plans for Church Gate are continuing to move forward. In case anyone is unsure, Church Gate is the three storey office block next door to our current site. We’ve bought it and are in process of redeveloping it for use as a Social Action Hub with a Community Grocery on the ground floor, and also to serve our Children’s and Youth work each week too.

This week an inspection of the roof was carried out, so I took the opportunity to take a closer look myself – courtesy of the cherry picker. Well… why not?

For clarity, I don’t know much about roofing but I enjoyed the ride despite an innate fear of heights. I also took note of how much higher the cherry picker at the Hilton Hotel behind me was – I don’t think that’s a job for me!

Progress Update

In terms of a progress update, things continue to move forward on track:

  • Various building surveys have been carried out (such as the one on the roof)
  • Some grant applications have been submitted. Benefact Trust came back very quickly with a grant of £80,000, and we are now waiting to hear back from some others, including our biggest application which is to Your Fund Surrey
  • The floor layouts have been finalised
  • The architects drawings are in
  • Planning Permission for a new entrance has been submitted, and we expect to hear back during April (we are not expecting this to be a problem)
  • A thorough refurbishment of the lift has been commissioned
  • Various other quotes are coming in
  • The main part of the project is going out to tender next week, with quotes expected during April, and building work expected to begin over the summer for completion during the autumn
  • The Grocery team are in process of finalising an agreement with The Message Trust who we will be working with for the grocery
  • Outstanding Gift Day pledges continue to be fulfilled, alongside a few extra gifts too – so a big thank you for that. By the way, it’s still not too late to give to this amazing project!

In summary, things are moving ahead well and I’m looking forward to seeing the hoardings go up and the building work begin.

Prayer requests

Please be praying about this project as it goes ahead. Here are some specific prayer requests:

  • For a simple ‘YES’ to our planning application. As I said above, we’re not expecting any issues, but let’s not be complacent
  • For the release of significant grant funding, especially from Your Fund Surrey
  • For good quotes for the work to be done, with prices we are happy to pay
  • For wisdom as we pick the best main contractor to work with
  • For a great relationship to be formed with The Message Trust
  • For the whole Grocery Team – especially Helen who will be leading a lot of this through in the months ahead
  • For God to release all the finance we need to do this well
  • For no unexpected surprises – talking of which…

What about the state of the roof?

We knew there were a couple of leaks from the roof when we bought the building, and this week was the moment the situation was assessed properly. The outcome was not as positive as our best hopes, but nowhere near as bad as it could have been either.

In summary, repairs are needed to the flashing around the gutters, and some of the metal panels you can see from below need to be replaced or overlaid too. It’s a bit more work than we’d hoped for, but not outside our range of expectations, and with what we’d seen inside it could have been a whole lot worse.

We can’t call this an unexpected surprise, since we knew this was a real possibility from the start, but please be praying that there are no unexpected extras across the rest of the project as the work goes forward.

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

Church Gate Gift Day Results

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

On Sunday we announced the results of our latest Gift Days for our Church Gate project. It was an incredible result, and in case you missed it here’s the figure as it stood on Sunday morning:

Since Sunday morning I believe it has gone up a little higher, but I’m still waiting for the full details on that.

Thanks

The main thing I want to do in this blog is say a very big THANK YOU, on behalf of the whole Eldership Team, to everyone who gave a gift, large or small. It was a joy to see people of all ages taking part, from across the many different nationalities that make up our church. I also loved seeing people who’ve been part of the church for many years joyfully giving alongside others who’ve only just joined us. Wow!

100% of the money given will go towards the purchase (now completed) and the delivery of Church Gate, and when we add this to the money raised during the Gift Days that we held in November, it means that what has been given and pledged now reaches our initial target: to raise £2m in 2 years – except we’ve done it in just 8 months 😮

Moving forward

On Sunday September 15th we will hold a Prayer and Vision evening to kick off the new term (details to follow). We’ll give a full update on that evening about where we’ve got to and how we plan to go forward. For now though, let’s give glory to God for all He’s done for us. It’s a joy to be part of such a generous church and to be on this great mission together.

Stay up to date with what’s happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

Church Gate: A Big Encouragement

/ Steve Petch / 1 Comment

The Sunday will be the second of two Gift Sundays towards our Church Gate building project. I wrote in a blog that I posted last week about our goal for all of us to participate; please do read it if you missed it. This week I want to share an encouragement:

Whilst preparing for last Sunday’s meetings I was searching for a certain document on my desktop. As I was searching I came across a forgotten document that I’d saved at some point in the past. It wasn’t what I was looking for and the title – ‘151017.doc’ – gave little away as to what it actually contained. I opened it to see what it was and it stopped me in my tracks.

The document contained the transcript of a prophetic word given to our church by Guy Miller (the leader of our Commission family of churches) on Sunday 15th October 2017, the day I was appointed as Lead Elder at Welcome Church. Viewing it now in light of our plans for Church Gate, a building to the east side of our current site where we will open the community grocery, the Welcome Cafe and more, I can only say “WOW!” This is what it said …

“I saw a house, a big old house. Some of the windows had been blocked in. Some of the rooms had not been used for a while.  The kitchen table had been covered over…

“I saw the builders coming and some of the old doors being knocked down. I could see … a sledge hammer knocking out a few doors. Suddenly light is pouring in, people are pouring in … around the kitchen table there weren’t 5 people, there was something like 100 around the kitchen table. I think food is going to be a big thing for the Church, feeding people, whether that is the word of God or actual physical food, I don’t know.

“I see a great big conservatory being built on the East side. It is where the sun is going to shine. It’s where it is going to bring people in and they are going to enjoy the sunshine of this group of people, knowing the love of God.

“The basement needs to be opened up. It’s all full of cobwebs and dusty things. There are things that are in your history and heritage that need to be brought into the light … things that God has spoken; promises; things you have seen before. God says, ‘I want you to bring them up and start using them for this day’.  

“There are many rooms. There are many people God is going to save; the poor, the needy, the nations are going to come. God says this house will be full. At the moment, you don’t have a full house … there are many, many people; well over a 1000 people; this church is going to grow to.

“This is just as a starter and you need to be reaching out saying its faith, not our effort. It’s not ‘our best shot’, its grace.“

I hope that like me you’re encouraged! I believe it confirms again that God is at work through this project and will provide all we need; He knew about it long before we did, and the timing is all in His hands – even the ‘completely by chance’ timing of me finding the document again. Be blessed!

Stay up to date with what’s happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

Church Gate Open Days – why bother?

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

I’m looking forward to our first Church Gate open day this Saturday (8th June). This will be a great opportunity for Welcome Church people to look around our new building and see the size of the challenge that we’ve taken on – before it becomes a building site!

If you haven’t booked a slot yet, you can do so on this link here. There are further opportunities on the evening of Monday 10th June (click here) and the morning of Saturday 15th June (click here).

Why should I bother to come to an open day?

Although it might be tempting to sit back and wait for the work to be done (as someone said, “I’ll see it when it’s finished” …) I would love as many of us as possible to make the effort to see the new building as it is right now.

Despite all of us having busy diaries, there are several reasons for this:

1. Ownership: we need to own this project together as a church, and to do that we do need to actually come and see what’s going on – it’s OUR building.

2. Prayer: we all need to be praying for this project and for those leading it, and a visit will help to inform our prayers.

3. Insight: we would love to hear from you after you’ve visited. What is important to you about this project? What is God saying to you prophetically? Do you have any wisdom to impart to the team? (“Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed” – Proverbs 15v22)

4. Inspiration: we would love people to get inspired for what we’re doing together. Let’s get inspired about our social action, inspired about our kids work and inspired about our youth work. Perhaps God may even have a role for you to play that you don’t yet know about!

Gift Days

Lastly, let me please remind you that we have our next two Gift Days for Church Gate scheduled for Sunday 30th June and Sunday 7th July.

Our goal is two raise at least £2m over 2 years. We’re well on the way towards that target (£1.3m pledged/given so far) but let’s all be praying about what God is calling us to give this time round. We don’t want anyone to give more than God is calling them to, but we don’t want anyone to give less than He’s asking them to either.

Let’s all get involved in this Church Gate adventure that God is leading us into as a church.

Stay up to date with what’s happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

Some Welcome Church Updates – Jan 2024

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

Here are a few updates about what’s been going on at Welcome Church recently:

Solar Panels

Solar Panels have now been installed across the roof of the Chapel and have been up and running since Wednesday afternoon. Yesterday afternoon we could see that they were powering the whole of the chapel (although it was a ‘low demand’ time) as well as powering all of the heating in the front building and the offices. They were also selling power back to the grid.

Darren (our Ops Director) tells me he’s had a greater number of questions from people about the solar panels than about anything else we’ve done since the pandemic so, if you have any more questions, I just know he’ll be really glad to hear from you 😉

Before
After

Big thanks to Pierre for the before and after photos taken from his flat in The Marches.

Sundays

Sunday numbers have grown again this term with a significant increase over January 2023. Our 11am meeting is feeling quite full, so we’re looking at what steps we can take to seat people more efficiently and maximise the room that we have available – watch this space. The 9am meeting is also growing in size, but does still have a bit more space than 11am so, if you want a slightly less crowded environment, easier parking, the best selection of pastries and an earlier finish, do consider moving to the 9am meeting – no pressure, but perhaps a good option for some people.

Elders Week Away

Our Elders week away went really well, and we appreciate all who prayed for us during that time.

We covered a lot of ground together and came away encouraged, and with a plan for seven specific areas of church life that we want to focus on over the next two years. I won’t list those here today because we will now take time to reflect, pray and refine things a little first, but I may come back to this in a subsequent blog.

Church Gate

Last week CAF Bank did their valuation on our site for the new mortgage, which brought us another step closer to getting the keys to Church Gate. We expect that we will soon be in a position for our solicitor to proceed to exchange and completion.

Alpha & Alpha Plus

Our Alpha course has been underway since the start of January, with more than 20 guests in regular attendance. This week we also launched Alpha Plus, which is for people who have completed Alpha and want to explore things further. This launched on Wednesday with more than 30 guests. Please pray for both of these courses: that people have a great time, that they keep coming along and that they encounter Jesus for themselves.

COMING SOON: The Commission Leadership Conference

One last thing I want to mention is the Commission Leadership Conference, which is coming up at the end of February (Wed 28th Feb to Fri 1st Mar).

This event (not to be confused with The Commission Festival in August) is for anyone in a Commission church who holds a leadership position of any kind, inside or outside the church – if you lead anything at all you’re invited!

The theme this year is ‘Leading Like Jesus’. We’ll be learning from the characteristics of Jesus’ ministry and in particular his example of serving and shepherding. The conference will be about inspiring us to lead with humility and courage, remembering that Jesus came to serve, not to be served. Speakers this year include Rico Tice and Michael Reeves(two of my personal favourites). I’ll be leading a seminar at some point myself too, as will Darren.

This event runs during term time on a Wednesday to a Friday, and it’s in Bournemouth, so I appreciate it won’t be accessible to everyone, but we wanted to highlight it for anyone who is interested and available. It costs £65 to book for the three days, and day tickets and an online option are also available. You would also need to factor in travel, meals and perhaps a hotel.

The Welcome Church Office Team will be in attendance, along with some from our Eldership Team, and if you want to be there too then you can book using this link. Do please let us know if you book so that we can look out for you at the event. We will aim to have dinner together on one of the evenings too.

Stay up to date with what’s happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

So Many Reasons To Celebrate 🙂

/ Steve Petch / 1 Comment

We have a lot to be thankful to God for as a church right now! I want to highlight two things in particular: our Gift Days and our Carol Services.

1. Gift Days

Over three Sundays in November we held Gift Days towards buying Church Gate, the three storey building next door to us (click here for info).

Church Gate will be key to the work we want to do to serve the poor, including starting a community grocery to bridge the gap between the FoodBank and a supermarket for the most needy in our town. It will also provide extra space we need for our children’s work and youth work, which are both essential ingredients for our church’s future.

The owners of Church Gate agreed to sell it to us for £3m, which is a fair price. I’ve discussed the size of the financial challenge in a previous blog post (click here), but in summary we plan to buy Church Gate with a mixture of both cash and a mortgage. We needed to raise the first £1m as soon as possible – ideally in this first set of Gift Days.

It’s worth bearing in mind that we faced a BIG challenge going into these Gift Days:

  • We only had 5 weeks notice before the first Gift Sunday
  • The UK is in a cost of living crisis
  • Our town has been declared ‘bankrupt’ (section 114 notice)
  • We are in the run up to Christmas
  • As a church, we already gave sacrificially in 2019 to build our current building.

We knew we were up against a big challenge!

The result

After the three Sundays, adding together the money received, some outstanding pledges and the gift aid on that giving, together we have given just over …

… £1.25 million!

That’s an incredible result and one we should celebrate. We have so much to be thankful to God for in the way this has come together.

On behalf of the whole team I want to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who’s given sacrificially to make this happen. It’s a joy to be a part of such a generous church.

It’s still not too late to give to these Gift Days, remembering that it’s not the amount that matters, but the heart of worship it’s given with. If you want to do that you can visit our giving page by clicking here.

2. Carol Services

This Sunday, 10th December, we are holding our “Carol Service For Woking” at 2pm, 4.30pm and 7pm (NB: there are no morning meetings that day!)

More than 1900 people have now booked to attend on Sunday, and those numbers are growing every day. That figure doesn’t include the many people who are serving in various ways at each service and who don’t need a seat.

It’s still not too late to book a seat for yourself and your friends, and you can do that by using this link. Remember, this is the easiest church invitation you get to make all year; people love to come and sing Christmas carols.

Please do pray for this Sunday’s Carol Services. We want to see many people encounter Jesus and start their journey towards a relationship with Him. Your prayers really do matter!

I look forward to seeing you on Sunday but, if you’re ill or housebound, or you live too far away and just can’t make it to a service in person, the 7pm Carol Service will also be live streamed at welcomechurch.online. I hope you can join us.

Stay up to date with what’s happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

This Sunday: Preparing for our last Gift Day

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

This coming Sunday (26th Nov) will be the last of our three Welcome Church Gift Sundays for buying Church Gate (click here for more info). We’ve made great progress with our giving for this so far, but we do have a bit further to go to hit our target. I’m looking forward to Sunday 🙂

‘All In’

These Gift Days are an ‘All In’ moment for our church. We’d love everyone who’s part of Welcome Church to participate in proportion to their faith and their ability. Because of this, at the end of the meeting this week our Kids and Youth will be joining us for the ‘giving moment’. We’ll get to worship God together and to give as we do that, thanking Him for all He provides for us.

As a team we’ve felt from the start that giving towards Church Gate should be a ‘church family’ moment. Our goal has been for everyone to participate in some way, including our children and young people. That moment will come on Sunday morning, and parents will have an opportunity to enable their kids or youth to come to the front and joyously give to this project. 

We wanted parents to know about this in advance for two key reasons:

1) Because this is a great discipleship opportunity

Gift Days don’t come around very often, and buying a building comes along perhaps once in a generation. We want all our young people to be able to say they participated in buying Church Gate, and that they gave to God from their hearts, regardless of the amount.

As they participate, our children and young people will learn about the practice of giving to God, and, even more importantly, they will learn about God’s provision for us – that he gives us what we need and is a generous Father. The world will teach our kids that money should be held onto, that it will bring us security and happiness, but Jesus came to free us from slavery to money, and release us into the cheerful generosity that characterises our Heavenly Father.

We believe this will be as good an opportunity as we ever get to teach our kids about how we can worship God through our generosity. Given that children tend to learn more by what we do than by what we say, let’s not miss this moment; let’s enable our children and young people to participate in what God is doing though us as a church. Whether we have kids or not, let’s all model something together as a family as we step out in faith together.

2) So you can be ready to help your children join in

If you’re a parent we would encourage you to plan a moment during this week where you talk about Church Gate to your kids and ask them to think and pray about what God would like them to give. These conversations can be so encouraging, especially as children are so often much quicker to get excited about giving than we are.

You’ll probably need to remind them (and yourself!) to bring their money on Sunday, or if you’d prefer, you can give them some of your own money to put in, enabling them to participate in the offering that way. Doing that is actually a great picture of how God enables us to give, by providing us with all that we have. You may also need to actually get some cash out for them – so much of our spending these day is done through contactless payments that we rarely have cash in the house!

Remember: don’t worry about the amount. We talked last week about the widow who gave two small coins (see Mark 12v41-44). In Jesus’ Kingdom, it’s not about the amount, it’s about developing a generous heart that loves Jesus. Whatever your kids sincerely give will be lovingly and joyfully received by Jesus; He loves a cheerful giver, no matter their age! 

A last thought

The Bible teaches parents to “bring (children) up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6v4), and to “Start children off in the way they should go” (Proverbs 22v6). This Sunday is a great opportunity for some family discipleship, so go for it parents, and let’s go for it as a whole church family together too. See you on Sunday!

Stay up to date with what’s happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

It’s A Big Week At Welcome Church

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

This Sunday (12th Nov) is a big one for Welcome Church for two reasons:

1. It’s a Gift Day

This will be the first of three Gift Sundays for us to buy Church Gate (the building next door to us). You can find out more about why we want to buy Church Gate by clicking here, and the details of what it will cost by clicking here.

This week I was at “Commission Prayer and Fasting”, an event that pretty much does what it says on the tin: we get together as teams from our UK churches to seek God and pray. At the event I was lovingly ‘pounced on’ by a leader from another church who felt God wanted him to share something with me:

“I see a brick wall in front of you, filling your vision. God says not to worry about it. He’ll get you past the wall. He has it all in hand …”

I always find these sorts of moments encouraging, but this one really made me smile because here’s the view from my office window, a view of Church Gate:

“I see a brick wall in front of you”

Ahead of Sunday please be praying about what God is calling you to give personally. We have a big challenge in front of us, but we have an even bigger God who is our provider. Let’s be in faith for what He will do through us over the next three weeks as obstacle after obstacle is cleared out of the way.

“Lift up your heads, you gates;
lift them up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.
Who is he, this King of glory?
The Lord Almighty – he is the King of glory”
(Psalm 24v9-10)

2. On Sunday we have our next Encounter Evening

We’ve done several of these now, but this one is a bit different; it’s a big one! On the evening we will be served by a guest band from Kings Church Epsom. Jo and Meg recently spoke at a women’s conference at Kings Church. They were really impressed by the whole worship experience, and wanted us to experience it too.

Kings Church is unusual amongst our Commission family at the moment: it’s our only majority black church in the UK so far. They have a different style of worship than we’re used to, and I know we’re going to be blessed. Please come ready and expectant to encounter God, and please feel free to invite people from other churches to join us too, or anyone else you think will be blessed.

All welcome. Come as you are!

A Big Goodbye ☹️

This week we also said a sad goodbye to Kimberley and Luqman who fly back to India tomorrow (Friday 10th). They have been a real gift to us this year and we will miss them a lot.

The office team had a shared lunch with them on their last day with us (and 1 or 2 others popped in to join us too). We took time on the day to talk about what we love and appreciate about them both, and to share some memories and pray for them. There were tears, but I think that this mix of joy and sadness is all part of being part of the family of God.

I had my final goodbye with them both in the office today (Thursday). They even returned some of my missing books 😃. Do pray for them as they head home, not least because, at the last check, their luggage was 13kg overweight …

Stay up to date with what’s happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

Prayer Requests – Nov 2023

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

Here are some things we would love you to be praying about this month:

Gift Sundays

Our Gift Days to raise the finance we need for Church Gate are on Sundays 12th, 19th and 26th November. We would love everyone to be praying for this – for God to supply all we need as a church, and for Him to speak to each of us personally about what He is calling us to give.

A booklet is available with all the info you need to know, so do pick one up on Sunday morning or get in touch with the office to ask for a copy. It will tell you WHAT we are doing, WHY we are doing it, why we are doing it NOW (which is key to the whole thing), HOW MUCH it will cost and what we are asking YOU to do.

Baptisms

This Sunday we have baptisms at both morning meetings. Please pray for all those getting baptised.

There is a special need for prayer for 2 of those being baptised at 9am. They have come to us from a nation where to convert to Christianity could cost them their liberty and perhaps their life. Both came to faith in their own country. Both are fleeing persecution.

For this reason these two baptisms and testimonies, will not be live-streamed – we will switch the live-stream off at this point. We are also asking that no photos are taken or posted anywhere. The testimonies are well worth hearing, but you will have to be there in person at the 9am meeting to hear them.

If you are planning to be at the 11am meeting that day there might be room for some to stand at the back from about 10.15am if you want to arrive early and catch this part of the 9am meeting.

CST

CST is the “Commission Students to Thirties” event taking place on Saturday Nov 18th at Hope Church, Winchester. This year the theme of CST is about being ‘All In for Jesus‘. There will be great worship, great talks, time to connect with God and some good food too.

I would appreciate your prayers because I’m preaching the opening message at CST this year. Please pray that it connects well with people and helps to grow and stretch their faith.

If anyone isn’t booked in to CST and wants to know more, then do follow this link here for more information and a link to the booking page.

Luqman and Kimberley

Luqman and Kimberley, our two leadership trainees from India, finish their year with us next week, and will then head home to Goa. They are going to be greatly missed and will leave a hole in both our Office Team and our hearts ☹️. They have been a joy to have around and we’re sad to see them go.

Please pray for them as they return to India, that God will direct their steps into whatever He has next for them, and please do give them big hugs and lots of appreciation this weekend. Sunday 5th November will be their last Sunday with us.

Carol Services

Bookings for our Carol Services open this weekend. They will be held on Sunday 10th December this year, at 2pm, 4.30pm and 7pm. On Sunday we will give out all the information you need, and I’ll post it in my blog too, but please do be praying already about who you could be inviting and for all the preparations to go well. Please also pray for lots of people to sign up to attend.

A few other bits for prayer

In case that lot’s not enough to keep you busy praying, here are a few more things:

  • Reuben and Lucy get married this Saturday: pray for them as they start married life together
  • I’m leading the Commission ‘TLM’ training day on Saturday 11th Nov: the topic is ‘Grace for Ministry’
  • Our Alpha Course have their ‘Holy Spirit Day’ on Sat 25th Nov: pray for people to encounter the Holy Spirit and give their lives to Jesus

Stay up to date with what’s happening at Welcome Church by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.