Connect Festival

On Mission With Commission

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

Welcome Church is part an international family of churches called Commission. Each summer we get together with the other UK based Commission churches, and some from further afield, for a festival where we worship together, hear great teaching and have a whole lot of fun and games. For the past two summers this has been cancelled due to Covid, but it’s back on in summer 2022. Connect Festival will run from 25th to 29th August at the Bath and West Show Ground in Shepton Mallet. Please click here to register your interest. Bookings will open soon.

At the Festival each summer there’s usually been an offering to help fund our international mission as a family of churches. It goes to fund church plants, leadership training courses, ministry to the poor, care of churches around the world and more. The offering helps fund some amazing things that we value as a church, and lots of us would normally have given to this offering in person at the event.

Because there’s been no conference in 2021 there’s been no offering, but the mission continues. With this in mind we’d love to invite everyone to consider making a gift to the Commission offering; a gift from Welcome Church. We’d like to ask every person to think about it prayerfully and to give with faith.

If you’re up for this challenge you can give in two ways:
1. You can give online via bank transfer to Welcome Church and mark it as being for the Commission offering. Click here for a link to our online giving details.

2. You can give cash or cheque by putting it in an envelope, labelling it for the Commission Offering and dropping it into the office during the week or into the box at the information point on a Sunday morning. (Please make any cheques payable to Welcome Church.)


Thank you in advance for your giving. We’ll gather it together over the next 2 or 3 weeks and send it as one gift from us all. Here’s a video that explains a lot more about what the offering is for:

Exciting Staff News

/ Steve Petch / 1 Comment

We have some exciting news regarding a staff change at Welcome Church.

Part of our role as a church is to develop and release leaders, and this applies to those who are employed by us as much as to anyone else. 

WhatsApp Image 2020-04-22 at 16.57.38Many of us will know Ben and Nancy Martin. Ben has been employed at Welcome Church for a number of years, first as a Kids Worker, and more recently as our Children’s and Youth Pastor. About a year ago, as part of our plan for his development, Ben was offered a secondment to Gateway Church in Basingstoke.

Over the last year at Gateway Church, Ben has been involved in lots of activities to help him develop, including setting up a brand new CAP Debt Centre like the one we have here at Welcome Church, alongside involvement with discipleship, pastoral care and lots of other things that have nothing to do with children or youth.

Ben’s aim was to develop further as a leader, and I’m delighted to announce that he has now been appointed to a new, permanent role as Lead Pastor at Life Church in Hook. Life Church is part of the Commission global family of churches, just like Welcome Church, so we will still see him and Nancy at Commission events including Connect Festival next year.

Ben will start this new role on May 18th, and this will bring to an end more than ten years of employment with us, and also his secondment to Gateway Church. It also means he will not now be returning to us in the summer, as was the original plan.

WhatsApp Image 2020-04-22 at 16.57.31As part of this move Ben and Nancy will be relocating to Hook. They already have a buyer for their house and a purchase agreed – all subject to contract of course. In case you missed their other piece of exciting news, Nancy is pregnant with a due date this August.

Please do join me in congratulating them both on this step they are taking; this will be an exciting new phase of their life and ministry together. Ben and Nancy will be missed, yet this new role is a great step into their future together and will be a huge blessing to Life Church.

Here is a video that Ben and Nancy made to share the news in their own words. Enjoy!

 

 

Connect Festival: BIG NEWS

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

As a church we go to a festival each year in August, camping with other churches from our Commission family. We always have a great time with excellent teaching, worship, sports, entertainments, youth work, kids work, fun and games. I love hanging out with people from our own church, and also being with thousands of people from other Commission churches too, both from the UK and other nations.

Sadly, because of the Coronavirus outbreak, this year’s event has been postponed until August 2021.

This week the Commission Office will get in touch with everyone who’s booked to let you know what happens next. If you’ve booked already you will have three choices:

ONE: You can have your money back … but please don’t do that unless you really have to.

TWO: You can donate the cost of your booking to Commission to support the work done all around the world, including amongst the poor in several nations. That could be a good option, especially if you know 2021 is not possible for you, or you just want to be generous at this difficult time.

THREE: You can roll your booking over to 2021. Remember the event is not cancelled – it’s just postponed. I’m sure most will choose this option.

Connect Festival 2021 will be awesome!

Just think what a huge celebration we will have together, having missed this year’s event and having come through this crisis together. Jo and I will be there. I know you really won’t want to miss it!