evangelism

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: A Simple Strategy for Impacting Lives This Autumn

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

Hi everyone! This is Dub Everitt, Outreach Pastor at Welcome Church. I’m jumping in on Steve’s blog this week to share our exciting Autumn outreach strategy:

We’re currently in the middle of a powerful preaching series titled “Loving People Towards Jesus.” Throughout this series, we’ve been reminded that Jesus is passionate about reaching people who don’t yet know Him—and He calls each of us to play a part in that mission. We are called to reach out in love, on His behalf, to the people around us.

In previous years, our church has hosted incredible invitational events like Fun Days, Firework Nights, Carol Services, and our special Invite Sundays. These “Hop, Skip & Jump” events connected hundreds of people to Welcome Church, with many deciding to explore faith further through Alpha or by attending our Sunday services.

This year, however, we’re shifting gears. Instead of large invitational events, we’re focusing on empowering each one of you to engage personally with the people in your world through a simple and memorable approach:

EAT, PRAY, LOVE

No, we’re not talking about the book or the movie! These three memorable words are designed to help us all focus on a clear, three-step outreach strategy for this term.

1. EAT…

… at A Taste of Alpha and during our Autumn Alpha Course
This year, we’re inviting everyone at Welcome Church to experience Alpha for themselves at a special event called A Taste of Alpha. It’s a fantastic opportunity to enjoy a mocktail, watch an episode from the new Alpha Film Series, and discuss it over a delicious two-course meal.

This event gives you firsthand experience of what your friends will encounter if you invite them to Alpha. We’ve already seen hundreds attend, and if you missed it, there are limited spots available for Wednesday, October 2nd. Click here to book your place for 2nd October

Once you’ve experienced A Taste of Alpha, we’d love for you to invite a friend to Try Alpha on Wednesday, October 16th—the first week of our eight-week Alpha Course. Your friend can check it out and, if they enjoy it, they’re welcome to continue for the remaining weeks! Click here to book for Try Alpha

2. PRAY…

… for your friends
Many of us have already made a list of three or more people we’re praying for daily. If you haven’t done so yet, take a moment now—ask God to bring to mind three people He wants you to pray for daily, and write their names down.

It’s a powerful thing to remember that God not only hears our prayers but also moves in the lives of the people we lift up to Him. Before you speak to your friends about God, speak to God about your friends!

3. LOVE…

… your friends towards Jesus
Sometimes, sharing Jesus with others can feel like a daunting task. But perhaps a better way to think about it is this: Jesus has given us people to love towards Him.

During His time on earth, Jesus poured out love, kindness, mercy, and compassion to everyone He encountered. Now, He asks us to reflect that same love to those around us, showing them what His love looks like in action.

In fact, He’s equipped us for this! As Romans 5v5 reminds us,

“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us“

This promise is true for each one of us who follows Jesus—including you!

So, let’s live lives of compassionate love and kindness towards the friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and anyone else God places in our path. Let’s trust that through us, they will experience Jesus’ love—and that this love will be a step toward their own encounter with Him.

Jesus is deeply passionate about our town and the people around us. He’s placed you and me in their lives to be a blessing and a signpost toward Him.

Let’s all commit to EAT, PRAY & LOVE this autumn, and watch as God does amazing things!

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

An Update On Luke Simone: on mission in a Favela in Brazil

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

Luke Simone has been part of our Welcome Church family for over 30 years, although you may not have seen him around very much recently! Why? He was a finance lawyer in London and New York before God called him to work among the least and the lost in Brazil.

Casa Cruzeiro

The work Luke started in a Favela (a slum) in Rio has steadily progressed from the first act of simply opening the doors of his living room almost a decade ago. When the neighbour’s rooftop could no longer support the number of people who were coming for prayer and to hear a simple Bible story, he and a friend established “Casa Cruzeiro” – a community centre and school grounded in the gospel and located at the highest point of the Rio slum that has become his home. 

Luke and the small team now serve up to 200 children and teenagers (and their wider families) each week, offering a safe and welcoming space for vulnerable, marginalised and disenfranchised youth in a neighbourhood fractured by gang violence and poverty.

Why is this needed?

Many of the young people in the Favela leave school illiterate or struggle with even the most basic principles of maths and Portuguese. The school they’ve established in the heart of the community now has over 70 students (aged 5 to 75) providing essential tuition to the poorest, who are often failed by the school system. The teachers also provide counseling to the younger children who frequently show signs of trauma through abuse in their homes or the loss of family members due to gang violence.

As the young people leave school, the team gives additional support and career counseling for the next steps, together with an opportunity to offer places on pre-vocational courses, providing simple and practical steps that enable those they work with to be able to eventually provide for themselves and their families. 

Alongside all this is the gospel, and they’ve had the incredible joy of seeing young people give their lives to Christ, get baptised and be discipled – no small thing in the Favela.

What does it look like to be on mission far from home?

Living in the Favela is not without risks. Gun violence and drugs are among the many day to day issues, alongside poverty, abuse and neglect. Despite all this, as Christopher shared in his preach last Sunday (quoting Paul from 1 Thessalonians):

“We were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thess 2v8)

Luke and the team’s overriding goal is to love and serve their neighbours, without an agenda, by sharing their everyday lives. They are aiming to live out the call of Christ day by day and to shine the light of Jesus in the darkness that is all around.

The work in this slum is very much a marathon rather than a sprint, but they are seeing lives impacted by the power of God with a goal of community-wide transformation – a break in the cycle of violence and brokenness faced by those on the margins. What Luke and the others have established is a “community within a community,” where disciples are made, relationships are strengthened and dignity is restored.  

Welcome Church is on this mission too

Welcome Church takes mission (both at home and abroad!) very seriously. Luke doesn’t do this work alone!

As a church we have been, and we remain, very much part of Luke’s sending, with groups praying and raising financial support for the ongoing needs.

How YOU can get involved:

If you want to know more about this, or you’d like to to support Luke in this mission to Brazil there are several ways to do that:

1. Get the newsletter: If you want to receive a regular newsletter from Luke, please use this link to send an e-mail to let him know – he will add you to the list.

2. Join the prayer group: There is a prayer group from Welcome Church who meet to pray for Luke and Casa Cruzeiro regularly. If you want to join them, please also use this link to send an e-mail and let him know – details will then be sent.

3. Give Financially: as a church we give to Luke each month out of our regular giving, HOWEVER there are a number of people who have wanted to give directly (in addition to their normal giving to Welcome Church) – and this has made all the difference. If you’d like to give directly to this work (either a one off gift or a regular monthly amount) you can do that by giving it to Welcome Church, and letting us know it’s for Luke Simone. We can then claim Gift Aid on your gift (if applicable) and pass both the gift and any Gift Aid on to Luke.

If you want to ask more about any of these things, please drop an email to Darren in the Church Office using this link.

Find out more

You can see more of Luke’s story by clicking here for a great video, but if you’d like to meet the man in person, he will be around this Sunday, at both the 9am and 11am meetings. I’ll be interviewing him briefly about his experiences in Rio and he’ll also be around to chat in person.

Here are some great photos from Casa Cruzeiro 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.

95 Days ‘Til Christmas

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

If you’re reading this on the day it comes out, it’s only 95 days ’til Christmas … and I’ve already seen Christmas decorations in the shops 🎅🏼!

Even more importantly it’s now only 80 days until our Carol Services. The reason I see that as ‘even more important’ is that they are the best and easiest event in the year for us to invite people to, since nearly everyone says yes to a Carol Service invitation!

Anyone who comes to our Carol Services will hear the good news of Jesus, and that’s the most important message they’ll ever get to hear; it’s a message that can change our eternal destiny. With this in mind, we want you to start thinking about the Carol Services NOW.

“A Carol Service For Woking”

Our Carol services this year are on Sunday 10th December, at 2pm, 4.30pm and 7pm, and they’re not just for our church, they’re for the whole town, and for all of the people we know. The first two services (at 2pm and 4.30pm) will include a kids party for younger children so you can drop them off and enjoy the service in peace with your friends.

Just like last year, these will be ticketed events. Tickets will be free for you and your friends to book, and we’ll let you know when the booking opens, but we want you to start thinking TODAY about WHO you’re going to invite, and also to tell you about a way to help make those invitations well.

Building Up To An Invitation

Last autumn we did a series of invitational events for people to invite their friends to in the run up to Christmas. We called it the ‘Hop, Skip, (Sing) and Jump’, naming it after the Olympic Event also known as the Triple Jump, which is a type of jump that enables athletes to jump further than they otherwise would:

  • The HOP was our September Fun Day
  • The SKIP was our November Fireworks event
  • The (SING) was our December Carol Services
  • The JUMP was our January Welcome Stories series

As people were invited to each successive event, and as relational links were formed, the numbers of guests grew and grew. In the end we were able to share Jesus with hundreds of people at each Carol Service – the largest Carol Services our church has ever seen. As a result, lots of new people joined us in January for our Welcome Stories series. Thanks to all who stepped up and invited people.

This autumn we want to encourage you to take part in …

… Your Own Personal Hop, Skip and Jump

We won’t be running the Fun Day or the Fireworks this year as a church, but we still believe in the power of relational momentum to help people connect with us as a church, and then go on to connect with Jesus. Introducing the people you know to other Christians from our church, builds a relational momentum that helps open the door for them to find Jesus for themselves.

So this year we want to encourage YOU to run a couple of ‘social events’ of your own – a HOP and a SKIP. Maybe you could do one in October and one in November, leading up to an invitation to the Carol Service (the JUMP). At the Carol Service we’ll talk about the amazing good news we have in Jesus, and we’ll invite people to connect with us in the New Year and even to join our next Alpha Course.

There are lots of Hop and Skip events you could do: a quiz night, a cheese and wine evening, a meal, a BBQ (weather permitting), a board games night, a pub night, an afternoon tea, a walk, a sporting event, a shared fireworks night and more. The key thing is that you don’t do it alone! Invite your friends who you’d like to see at the Carol Service to each event you do, and use it as a chance to introduce them to some of your friends from church.

There are lots of contexts you could do this in: you could do it as Life Group, or with just a few people from your Life Group, or with a group of friends from church, or as a couple of families together – whatever works for you and your friends at the life stage you’re currently in.

We’d love you to go for one event in October, and one in November, and then to invite those same people to a Carol Service on Sunday 10th December. And don’t just invite them to the service, why not also open your home? “All round ours for mulled wine and Christmas cake afterwards” or “Come for lunch with the kids and then we’ll all go on to the Carol Service together” – whatever works best for you.

The Greatest Christmas Gift Ever

The greatest gift God ever gave us is Jesus. This Christmas is your best opportunity to share that gift with the people in your life who don’t yet know Him. Let’s go for it 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.

Welcome Church Internship – an opportunity

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

From September 2022 (VISA’s permitting!) we will be joined as a church by two Interns from our wider church family in India who will be with us for a year. We now want to expand this opportunity by creating one more place, so from September 2022 …

We are looking for an Outreach and Social Action Intern

We have big plans for reaching out to our community and serving our town’s needs, so we’re looking for a motivated, passionate and diligent intern to join our outreach team to support in planning, administrating, and delivering this exciting programme.

As part of this internship, the candidate will gain experience in:

  • Event planning and delivery
  • Vision and strategy of social action ministries
  • Understanding of partnerships between the charitable sector and local government
  • A ‘relational momentum’ approach to evangelism

This internship will be run as part of the Commission Internship programme, which provides the candidate with enrolment in residential training in theology and spiritual formation, to continue their own spiritual growth. This is a great opportunity to LEARN about yourself and God’s plan for your life, SERVE the church and our local community, GROW in your faith and your gifting.

Interested to find out more?

Get in touch with our Outreach pastor Dub Everitt by dropping an email to dub.everitt@allwelcome.uk

Ready to Apply? Simply send a formal expression of interest to darren.forsdyke@allwelcome.uk and we’ll guide you through the process.

Finances & Accommodation:

This is a one year, unpaid internship and the candidate will participate as a voluntary worker, based in our church offices at Welcome Church. However we are keen to ensure that candidate’s expenses are covered, therefore Welcome Church will cover training costs, and provide accommodation and food, should the candidate require it, as well as reasonable expenses.

We also recognise that internship candidates value the opportunity to earn money and save, and so there is also the option for the right candidate to find part-time employment as a means of supporting their own financial needs. We will work with the candidate to give guidance around the exact details of this balance between the internship, study, work and (importantly) rest.

For this role we would expect the candidate to be a Christian, and to become an active part of Welcome Church, including regular attendance at our Sunday meetings and in the midweek life of our church. We will also require the candidate to have a full DBS check (completed by Welcome Church)

Welcome Church, The Future – Part 4: Autumn Plans

/ Steve Petch / 4 Comments

On Sunday (May 8th) we had our Welcome Church Vision Evening. This week I’ll be blogging about some of the key items we covered. This is part 4 of 5. (You can find Part 1 by clicking here)

Plans For The Autumn

One of my favourite places to be on a Sunday morning at Welcome Church is at the Info Point in our Welcome Lounge, where it’s a privilege to meet some of the new people who are joining us week by week. Hanneke and her team run it really well, so huge thanks to all who are involved. 🙂

Recently lots of our new people have been South Africans, which is brilliant, and many others are from the UK and other nations, which is also brilliant! One observation we’ve made is that lots of new people in this season are already Christians; not all, but the majority. It’s great to have many well established Christians joining us who are a blessing to further strengthen us as a church; you are all a gift from God!

Life Transformed Through Jesus

As a church our vision is to see life transformed through Jesus, so of course we have a passion to reach out to those who are not-yet Christians in the town around us. Let’s remember, outreach is God’s plan; the Great Commission is really His mission.

So how can we play our part well?

When it comes to reaching out we have two guiding principles we want to follow:

  1. Everything we do as Jesus’ followers is to be done in LOVE, and that includes every attempt to reach out to people who are not yet Christians. The best way to fulfil Jesus’ GREAT COMMISSION to go and make disciples is through Jesus’ GREAT COMMANDMENT to love people
  2. God calls us to be INTENTIONAL in our relationships, to love people towards Jesus. The end goal for our relationship with our not-yet-Christian friend or colleague is not only friendship (though that’s a great thing!), but for them to come to know Jesus; introducing someone to Jesus is the most loving thing we can ever do for them.

Relational Momentum

We’ve found that one of the best ways to introduce someone to Jesus is to build what we call RELATIONAL MOMENTUM, which simply means them meeting, connecting with, and getting to know other Christians from your church. Since Jesus told us, “You are the light of the world” we should expect him to shine though us, and he shines even more brightly through a group of us together.

An invitation to church given to someone who doesn’t know ANYONE in your church is one thing; the answer may be a yes or a no. But an invite to church given to someone who knows you, has got to know several of your Christian friends from the church, and may even have had contact with your church at an event is far more likely to result in a yes, and that invitation creates a great moment for them to encounter Jesus.

Loving People Towards Jesus

Remember, you can’t save anyone; only God does that. Our role is simply to love people towards Jesus, and the very best way we can bring people to Jesus is by bringing them to church, where they will encounter the Holy Spirit, hear the wonderful truths about Jesus preached, and have an opportunity to respond to Jesus.

As a church, we want to facilitate you loving people towards Jesus, so with this in mind, this Autumn we are relaunching our ..

Hop, Skip and Jump

The last time we did this was in 2019 in the run up to our building launch. The Hop & the Skip was a series of easy invite social events to help us build relational momentum through invitations, leading up to a church invitation for our Building Launch Event:

  • We Hopped with a Fun Day in September 2019 – 1,000 people attended including 500 guests. 460 then signed up to get a free ticket to our Fireworks Night
  • We Skipped with our Firework Night – 2,000 people attended, including 1,700 guests
  • We Sang with our Carol Service For Woking in Dec 2019 – we know singing is usually part of a triple jump, but we slipped it in there because it was too good to miss
  • We Jumped with our ‘Welcome Stories’ Building Launch Sunday on 19th Jan 2020 – Over 1250 people attended, enjoying pastries, coffee and a great time together

Following our Hop, Skip & Jump, our average attendance grew by around 250 people each week, from roughly 500 to 750 people, and many connected to Jesus for the first time … and then 10 weeks later Lockdown hit and a whole load of momentum was lost 😮. But life is increasingly returning to normal, so …

It’s time to do it again: let’s Hop, Skip, (Sing) and Jump

Here’s our Autumn 2022 plan, to give us all the opportunity to bring people in our lives on that journey:

  • HOP: Welcome Church Fun Day, Sat 17th September. I would love all of us to bring friends along; there’s no limit to how many people you can bring. Details will follow soon, but please put the event in your diary now and think about who you might invite, including whole families. Think big!
  • SKIP: Welcome Church FireWorks Night, Sat 5th Nov. Everyone who comes to our Fun Day can receive a free ticket to the Fireworks Night, giving them a 2nd brilliant event with Welcome Church to look forward to, and it’s also a great chance to reach out and invite more new people.
  • SING: A Carol Service For Woking. A great opportunity to invite your friends to enjoy Christmas Carols in our building with mulled wine and mince pies, and who doesn’t love a good carol service?
  • JUMP: The first Sunday of our new Welcome Stories Series, Sun 8th Jan 2023. 

A Triple Jump can take you so much further than trying to make one giant leap, so these Hop, Skip and Jump events will help our friends to connect and come closer to us, leading to that invite moment to the Welcome Stories Sunday in January.

Are you ready to go?

Welcome Stories

Alongside our Hop Skip and Jump we’ll also be launching some new Welcome Stories, one every 2-3 weeks, over this coming Autumn. As we launch them, it’s an opportunity for all of us to share them on Social Media, allowing all of our contacts to see these inspiring stories of God’s impact on the lives of people within Welcome Church.

During our last series of Welcome Stories, most stories had over 10,000 views on Facebook alongside other Social Media, mainly down to the fact that people across Welcome Church clicked “share” to enable their contacts to see them. If you haven’t seen our Welcome Stories then you can access them on this link.  

But don’t wait for the Autumn to get started

In the weeks ahead there will be other opportunities we can take to start building Relational Momentum with people, for example the Jubilee Street Parties and other events talking place over the Queens Platinum Jubilee weekend, or a Life Group social event or perhaps just your own BBQ.

And if you want to know more, why not read, or re-read, Dub Everitt’s excellent book: Loving People Towards Jesus. It’s available from Origin Books in Woking (but if you ask in the Welcome Lounge we’ll probably give you one as a free gift 🙂)

Tomorrow I’ll finish this series of Blog posts by talking about how we can all play our part.

Welcome Stories

/ Steve Petch / 2 Comments

Over the last few weeks at Welcome Church we’ve launched a brand new initiative called Welcome Stories.

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Welcome Stories are short videos from people in our church whose lives have been impacted for good by Jesus. You can check some of them out on our Welcome Stories website, or you can find them on our Welcome Church Facebook page, our Instagram account or our YouTube channel. There are lots more coming in the weeks ahead.

Sharing

As we launch these stories week by week we want to encourage people to share them to their friends via social media. Liking them is kind of you, but sharing them is actually useful for the gospel!

Please don’t use religious language when you share them, but do perhaps use the hashtag #WelcomeStories.

You can share them on Facebook and Instagram easily by sharing the posts we’ve already made on our Welcome Church pages. You can also share them from You Tube or from the Welcome Stories website onto Twitter and other media.

Why do it?

These videos are about helping people connect to Jesus … and that is already happening. We are already seeing fruit from these stories.

So far over 28,000 people have viewed one of our Welcome Stories. Just imagine the impact we could have in Woking if everyone in our church shared these?

And of course, this is all part of the run up to the launch of our new building on January 19th. It’s part of the invitation process. We will even kick off our new year with a preaching series called “Welcome Stories”.

So let’s get sharing, let’s get praying, and let’s expect God to do big things!

I’ve put a link to one of the stories here – Enjoy!

The video should be visible above, if it’s not then please click here to view it.