Could you help someone get back into work through our Welcome Church Job Club?

Imagine coming alongside someone who has been out of work for months—building their confidence, helping them improve their applications and interview skills, and then finally hearing the words: “I got the job!”

That’s what our Welcome Church Job Club is all about!

Could you play a part in making that happen for someone in our community?

What have we been up to?

Over the last five years, we have run 14 Job Club courses with 165 people taking part—many connecting with Welcome Church for the very first time. Attendees receive practical teaching, encouragement, and one-to-one coaching to help them take their next steps toward employment.

And the results have been fantastic:

Around 50% of participants have gone on to find work.

But Job Club is about much more than just employment. People grow in confidence, feel valued, and discover a community of people they can belong to. Many have made lasting friendships, and some have gone on to connect more widely with the Welcome Church family too.

Could you join the team?

We are looking for enthusiastic people to join our Job Club team. You do not need to be a recruitment expert. If you have experience in the workplace, enjoy encouraging others, and can help someone take their next step, you have exactly what we need.

The course material is already provided, so we are simply looking for people who can help bring it to life by drawing on their own workplace experiences.

We run three courses each year. Each course is made up of eight weekly, 90-minute sessions (usually held on a Saturday or Monday morning, or early afternoon). Sessions combine short videos and practical teaching with discussions, team-building exercises, and role-play. We aim to mix useful professional guidance with plenty of encouragement—and plenty of fun!

There are two key ways you can get involved:

Become a Job Coach: Help present the course material and coach jobseekers. Coaches complete a short online training course provided by Christians Against Poverty (CAP).

Become a Befriender: Come alongside jobseekers, join in with discussions and activities, offer encouragement, and help people feel deeply welcomed and supported.

Whether you’re helping someone improve an application, prepare for an interview, rebuild their confidence or celebrate the moment they find work, you could play a part in making a genuine difference in someone’s life.

Other ways to get involved

Job Club is just one of the ways we’re helping people through Welcome Works. We also run Money Coaching, Life Skills Workshops, Kintsugi Hope groups, Cooking Courses, Debt Support, and more. There are fantastic opportunities to get involved across all of these areas.

So, if Job Club isn’t quite the right fit for you, but you would still love to use your time, skills, and experience to make a practical difference, we would love to hear from you.

Interested in finding out more?

Please contact Dub here, or speak directly to Neil Willis, our Job Club Manager

Stay connected by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

Things To Pray About – June 2023

Here are some important items of Welcome Church news that we’d love you to know and to pray about – including a trip to Italy 🇮🇹.

Alpha

We currently have 30 guests attending Alpha on Wednesday evenings, and a further 6 guests attending a daytime Welcome Tots mums’ Alpha course. The topic this week is “How Can I Have Faith?”

The Holy Spirit Day, which we run as part of the Alpha course, will take place on Saturday 1st July. Please pray for every guest to encounter Jesus and start a journey of faith

Newcomers Lunch

Our Newcomers Lunch is on this Sunday, and currently more than 40 guests have signed up to attend. Big thanks go to Hazel and her team who will be cooking the meal. Please pray for Dub as he leads this event and for our guests to grow in their sense of connection to Welcome Church and to start to feel like ‘Welcome Church is their church’.

The Big Summer Picnic

Plans for the Welcome Church Big Summer Picnic on Sunday 9th July are coming together well (click here to sign up). Please pray for good weather on the day and that we have a lot of fun. Everyone is welcome to attend, but do please sign up on the link above so we know you’re coming.

Welcome Works

Welcome Works are the various ministries that we run as a church, to help people in need in all sorts of different ways. Three of these to particularly pray for this month are:

  1. JOB CLUB: Our Job Club team is led by Neil Willis. Those in attendance are taught the key skills they need to handle job interviews and job applications so they can find and keep employment, often for the first time. The current course has 16 guests
  2. FRESH START: Our Fresh Start team is led by Dawn Wallace. It helps people overcome low level addiction and make a fresh start. The current course has 4 guests
  3. GET ONLINE: This is a brand new service for us, and starts this month. The team will be led by Steve Barter. Get Online helps people to learn basic computer skills, and learn how to access the internet safely, including such things as shopping and paying bills online – something many of us take for granted and rely on every day

Please pray for each of these courses, including all those who are in attendance and the teams who are running them. The goal of all of our Welcome Works is not only to help people in need – which is a great reflection of Jesus’ heart as revealed to us in Luke 4v16-21 – but also for them to encounter Jesus through us.

Office Team Wellbeing

We have had a couple of challenging incidents over recent weeks with members of the public acting in unhelpful ways towards our office team. I won’t go into details, and we do have sensible procedures in place, but please do pray for God’s loving protection over our office team day by day.

Italy: Insieme 2023

On Thursday this week (the day this blog comes out) I will be flying off to Ladispoli in Italy to speak at a conference called ‘Insieme’ (which is Italian for ‘Together’). The conference is for some Italian churches who are in the process of getting to know and perhaps join our Commission family of churches.

The theme of the conference is ‘Enjoying The Grace Of God’. I will also get to enjoy the company of Norman and Jane Bave, formerly of Welcome Church, who now live in Italy and will be in attendance at Insieme.

Please pray for me while I’m away, and also for Jo who is speaking at a Conference at Kings Church Epsom on Saturday. Please pray for Chris Kilby from Life Church Southampton who is leading the Insieme conference, and also pray that we would all be able to discern together what the future might look like in terms of these churches and their growing link to Commission.

I’ll be flying back on Monday, and remember, you can 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.

John Kirkby, founder of CAP, speaking at Welcome Church

This Sunday morning, 1st March, we are honoured to have an excellent and much sought after guest speaker at Welcome Church for our 9am and 11am meetings: Dr John Kirkby, the founder of CAP (Christians Against Poverty).

Everyone is welcome to join us for this special occasion.

CAP

About CAP

John started Christians Against Poverty in 1996, when God called him to sacrifice his career in finance and use his knowledge of the industry to help the poor. Since then John has seen CAP develop into an organisation serving tens of thousands of individuals every year, helping those struggling with debt, unemployment and life controlling habits, and equipping people to live well on a low income.

CAP has now helped thousands of people all across the UK to get out of life destroying debt. Our own CAP debt advice centre, which is one of our Welcome Works initiatives, opened in 2019, and is already making a difference to people’s lives. This adds to the work already being done with CAP in Woking by our friends at Christ Church and New Life Church too. You can see the full range of CAP services on offer at Welcome Church by clicking here.

CAP was featured last year in a BBC Two documentary The Debt Saviours, which followed the lives of some CAP clients and frontline workers in the middle of the current UK poverty epidemic. It showed how CAP is committed to transforming lives in partnership with local churches across the UK. CAP has also won many different awards, and John Kirkby himself recently received a CBE. CAP is also recommended by Martin Lewis, Founder and Chair of Money Saving Expert.

Come and join us for the morning

If you would like to hear John, please join us for either our 9am or 11am meeting. There will be great coffee, and tasty pastries and doughnuts available before and after each meeting – all free of charge. As for all our Sunday meetings there will also be kids and youth work taking place.

It’s an absolute privilege to have John with us, so make sure not to miss it.

Here us a link to the event on Facebook too.