Preaching

Some Helpful Resources For Our New Preaching Series

/ Steve Petch / 5 Comments

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.

Full Time Calling?

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It was great to preach through the whole of 1 Corinthians as a church this year – I hope you enjoyed it. My last talk was all about “Seeing the Big Picture” – of our lives, of our church, and of all that God is doing in our world.

One part of the Big Picture I highlighted was the need for us to develop younger leaders both for our church and for the church further afield. It led towards a response where those in their teens, 20’s or 30’s who genuinely feel “a full time call to serve God in the future” were invited to respond for some “career ruining, future shaping prayer” 🙂

I thought that it might just be one person in one of our meetings, so it was good to see three young people respond on the day.

I’m aware that many of our younger people are involved in serving in different ways on a Sunday morning and others may have been away that week, so some will have missed what was said. So, if you’re in your teens, 20’s or 30’s and you’re part of Welcome Church and you missed that talk, please let me encourage you to have a listen … and if you also feel stirred to respond please do get in touch.

Blessings!

I Love My Church

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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!

A New Staff Team Member

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During our online communion meeting on Sunday evening, it was my privilege to announce a new staff member for Welcome Church. From September 1st Christopher Hawes will leave his role as a full time teacher to join our staff team. Chris will focus on preaching & discipleship and also on leading & developing the creative elements of all we do as a church.

hawesChris is married to Sarah and they have three young children. He’s already part of our eldership team, and I’m delighted that someone who carries our DNA as a church is going to be available to focus on this key role full time.

Chris will be undertaking our new Commission training courses, starting at level 3 and working through to the level 4 masters degree. By the way … there are some great courses available through Commission, including an internship year you could do at Welcome Church. Do let me know if you’re interested.

Chris and Sarah are a big gift to our church family. In addition to her work as an actress, puppeteer and motion capture artist, Sarah regularly hosts our online meetings and helps develop others in this too. She’s also part of the leadership of Welcome Kids.

I believe we have a good future together as a church. Coronavirus will not last forever.

This appointment will release significant time for me in my own role, and Chris will also be looking to develop other people in their gifts. I believe this appointment will serve us as a church in many ways and will help shape us for the years to come.

 

ALL CHANGE FOR SUNDAY! DON’T MISS IT!

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Because we really value community and want to improve how we meet together online each Sunday …

We are launching WelcomeChurch.Online

There will be no more Sunday meetings through Facebook. Instead you need to visit welcomechurch.online

This is a completely new platform for us. As you watch you can comment on the message, you can ask for prayer and more.

The biggest change is this:

Sunday meetings will broadcast LIVE at 9am, 11am and 6pm

Because it’s live you can’t rewind, pause or fast forward, so put the time in your diary!

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If you do miss it, you can watch or listen to the preach from Monday onwards through our church website.

Welcome Kids will be live at WelcomeChurch.Online at 10am each Sunday.

If you miss the kids slot it will be available afterwards through Facebook as before.

Stop Press! Announcing the launch of WelcomeChurch.Online

/ Steve Petch / 1 Comment

Because of Coronavirus we’re not permitted to meet together in person as a church right now, and it looks like this situation could last for a while. Because we really value community and want to improve how we meet together on a Sunday …

we are delighted to announce the launch of WelcomeChurch.Online

From this Sunday (5th April) there will be no more Sunday meetings through Facebook. From now on, to join in with our Sunday meetings all you need to do is visit welcomechurch.online

This is a great new platform for us. As you watch you can comment on the message, you can ask for prayer and you can even read the Bible text alongside the preaching. We’re really excited about it.

The biggest change is this:

Our Sunday meetings will be broadcast LIVE at 9am, 11am and the slightly later time of 6pm

This means that if you don’t want to miss out you will need to put one of those times in your diary and log on to welcomechurch.online at the right time. Of course, because it’s live, it means you can’t rewind, pause or fast forward; it’s like meeting in person again!

 

There is so much value in gathering together at the same time, especially in this season of self-isolation, so we really want everyone to prioritise being online for one of those meetings.

Of course if you do miss it, you will be able to watch or listen to Sunday’s message, from Monday onwards, through our church website.

I look forward to connecting with you all this Sunday at WelcomeChurch.Online

What about Welcome Kids?

Welcome Kids will also be using this platform for their meeting. They have been having a great time together each week with fantastic teaching, games, craft and worship.

They will be live at WelcomeChurch.Online at 10am on Sunday.

If you miss the kids slot it will be available afterwards through Facebook as before.

Sundays: a whole new plan

/ Steve Petch / 1 Comment

Our first Sunday Experience as a church online went really well; I hope you enjoyed it.

Some highlights following last Sunday are these:

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He’s got the whole world …

  • As a very conservative estimate, well over a thousand people around the world have seen our Sunday message or heard the podcast.
  • We’ve had great feedback from people in Brazil, India, South Africa and many other places in the UK including Northern Ireland. These are not people who we would normally have expected to connect with us, so our footprint has grown overnight
  • Numbers of people from our church started their own watch parties on Facebook (some by design and some by accident 🙂) and found that their friends who would not normally be with them on a Sunday at church joined in and watched too
  • The daily encouragement videos have been shared by many of us, and are also now being viewed by a wide range of people. Prayer requests are starting to arrive from both overseas and closer to home. Do watch these daily videos at 4pm, and share them with anyone who you think would be helped or blessed by them

NEW PLANS for this Sunday

The lockdown that we are currently living under means that the recording for this Sunday will probably all need to be done at home. We will do our level best to make it as high quality as possible! We are also trying to incorporate some worship content, so watch this space.

The specific plan for Sunday has changed and is now as follows:

  • Our Sunday experience will go live on both our Welcome Church website and our Welcome Church Facebook Page at about 9am
  • After that you can watch it at any time that suits you. Please share the link to your own social media accounts and directly with other people too
  • We will host watch parties as a church on our Welcome Church Facebook Page at 9am, 11am and 4pm each Sunday
  • If you want to watch in community with other people – which we hope you will -you can join in with any of our watch parties, or you could just start one of your own. These are a great way to interact with people along the way
  • The kids work will go live on both our website and our Facebook page at about 10am, so do make use of that too – it will bless your kids

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Prayer

Prayer is absolutely crucial at this challenging time.

Don’t forget that we are now praying online as a church twice a day via Zoom. All the details you need to join in, including the specific code to join the meetings, can be found here. Anyone is welcome to join us. I hope we will see you online to pray with us soon.

In case you missed it, here is a link to yesterday’s encouragement video:

The next episode will be out at 4pm today