Preaching

For Your Prayers – April 2025

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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.

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Welcome Back

/ Steve Petch / 1 Comment

September is here and a new church year has begun – WELCOME BACK!

Despite it being a quieter time overall, lots of fun things happened over the summer including Newday (for the youth) and Commission Festival (for us all), and of course the final parts of our preaching series on the book of Exodus. I also heard about Life Groups having fun with BBQ’s and various trip to beaches and parks. Whatever you got up to I hope you had some time to relax.

Most of what’s coming up at church this term can be found in the new purple book that you can pick up on a Sunday morning, and it’s also all in the online diary on the website and in the ChurchSuite app, but I wanted to highlight three things as the new term begins:

1. Commission Festival

We had a fantastic time as a church this summer at Commission Festival. The weather was kind to us overall, and it was great chance to hang out together and spend time with people we often only see in passing on a Sunday. We cooked and ate together as a church this year, and the food was truly amazing, so I want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who helped to make it happen. I loved the Karaoke and the Silent Disco and, although my team didn’t win this year, the Quiz Night was a lot of fun too.

On the more ‘spiritual’ side of things there were several helpful messages preached at the Festival, most especially by Ranjit from India, but for me the outstanding element of it all was the worship times, led in large part by our very own Jo and featuring a few other familiar faces too.

I want to say thank you to everyone who was there and, for those who couldn’t attend in person, I hope the live stream was useful.

At the end of the Festival we discovered that it won’t now be back until 2026 so, with that in mind, in 2025 we will be holding our very own…

… Welcome Church Big Weekend Away!

It will be held over the Bank Holiday weekend at the end of August so do put that weekend in your diary now. We’ve already booked a venue for this event, in The New Forest, and details on how to book your place will follow soon – watch this space.

2. Prayer Week

Next week will be our prayer week to kick off the new term, and all the details for getting involved with that are in the pictures below. Do join us for as much as you can – there’s no better way to start the new church year.

The week will culminate in a Prayer and Vision evening at 7pm next Sunday (15th September) so do join us if you can. We’ll be talking about all that’s coming up in the year ahead and sharing our hopes and aspirations for Welcome Church, all in a context of worship and prayer.

3. Loving People Towards Jesus

Our new preaching series is now also underway, and I’m looking forward to preaching part 2 this coming Sunday. To tie in with our prayer week I’ll be talking about The Power Of Prayer – so make sure you don’t miss it.

Outreach and evangelism is going to be a focus this term as we run up towards our Carol Services on Dec 15th. Let’s all get on board with what God is doing at Welcome Church – I’m looking forward to another great year together.

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Happy New Year

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I hope you had a relaxing Christmas season and that 2024 has started off well.

It’s been great to kick off this year as a church with a week of prayer. If you haven’t made it to any of the meetings so far it’s not too late to join in – details are all in the image below. The week of prayer is for anyone who says that Welcome Church is their church, so do count yourself IN and get involved – even if you don’t really know how to pray! This is a great place to start and learn.

The meetings have been excellent so far with a real sense of God speaking to us. I’m especially looking forward to Sunday evening:

Reset Your Life

Our New Year preaching series starts this Sunday (7th Jan) so make sure you don’t miss it! It’s called Reset Your Life and is based in The Lord’s Prayer. It’s a great opportunity to invite friends to church, especially people who came to the Carol Service. See you there.

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Some Helpful Resources For Our New Preaching Series

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Last Sunday we started our new Welcome Church preaching series on John’s gospel. We’ll be working through the first 12 chapters of John week by week from now until the summer, and I’m really looking forward to it. We’ve given the series the highly creative title of “The Gospel of John”, with the added strapline “A Matter Of Life And Death”.

Christopher kicked off the series on Sunday by taking us through the first 18 verses of chapter 1, usually called “The Prologue”, and this Sunday I’ll take us through the rest of the chapter. If you missed it or you want to listen again, you can access the first talk in the series by clicking here.

Resources

Christopher mentioned on Sunday that I would blog some resources this week to go with the series. These could be useful if you want to do further study and go a bit deeper, or if you want a resource to aid discussion in your Lifegroup meetings.

There are five resources I’m going to mention at three different levels, although there are literally hundreds of other great resources available too. I’ve added links to Amazon for each one, but these are actually available from all sorts of places, including from Origin Books in Jubilee Square, who we love to support if we can.

1. Entry Level

A really good entry level resource is:

John for Everyone by Tom Wright

This is written for people at every different stage of faith. It’s a great entry level book that will do you good and you can easily read it from cover to cover. This could work really well for Lifegroups to use together.

2. Intermediate level

If you want to go a bit deeper then I would recommend any of these three:

John 1-12 For You by Josh Moody

This book is deep but also concise, and includes questions for reflection. It covers the twelve chapters we’re looking at in our current series.

Holman NT Commentary Volume 4, John by Kenneth O Gangel

The Holman series of commentaries are well designed for people who are leading Bible studies or preaching. They are well laid out and go chapter by chapter through a book with good depth to them and some application questions. This could really help if you’re looking to lead Bible studies on John.

The Message of John: Here Is Your King by Bruce Milne

This is part of the ‘The Bible Speaks Today’ series, which is a consistently reliable set of Bible commentaries that won’t steer you wrong. It goes deeper than the Holman series and follows the text verse by verse more closely. You could actually use this book as a daily devotional.

3. Advanced Level

The Gospel of John: a commentary by Frederick Dale Bruner

Christopher and I both love this commentary on John’s gospel. It’s well written and full of fresh insights, but be warned: it’s an academic text, it’s not cheap and it may not be for everyone. We’re NOT suggesting you rush out to buy this unless you’re inspired to do some serious study. If you are, this would be an awesome resource to have … but only if you’re really going to use it … otherwise it may look impressive on your bookshelf but it won’t help you very much! 🙂

We really hope you enjoy this new preaching series and that it helps you to grow in your faith. Do let us know your thoughts as we go along.

I Love My Church

/ Steve Petch / 1 Comment

It’s been great to see more people starting to attend in person at church each week now that September is here. If you’ve started coming again recently, welcome back!

This Sunday we started our new preaching series for the autumn called I LOVE MY CHURCH, and we’ve given our series artwork a Welcome Church twist

I preached the first message in the series this week and, because all the rest of the series builds on this first message, I have a simple request for everyone …

… if you missed the talk, for whatever reason, please listen to it.

It’s a slightly longer message than normal because it’s laying the foundation for everything else to come, but don’t let that put you off. You can find it as a podcast from all the usual podcast sources, you can listen to it as an audio file by clicking here, or you can watch the video of the preach (the best option by far in my opinion) by clicking below. Why not make the time to do that before Sunday?

One more thing: Christopher Hawes has been working with an artist called Jack Seymour to create some beautiful illustrations to help bring the ideas in the series to life. This first one is below. Enjoy!