mission

Get Caught Up On A Global Adventure: From Woking to Rio (and Beyond!)

/ Steve Petch / Leave a comment

As a church, we’re part of something so much bigger than ourselves. We aren’t just a local church in isolation, we’re part of the global Commission family! Together, we have churches and ministry connections spanning the globe—from India, Nepal, Spain, and Portugal, to Mongolia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Italy, Serbia, Nigeria, Ghana, Canada, New Zealand, the USA, Brazil and more.

God is moving on a global scale, and this week, we have two incredible opportunities to connect with His heart for the nations. Here’s what’s coming up:

1. This Sunday (Sept 13th): Hear a Radical Story of Rescue with Luke Simone

This Sunday, we are thrilled to welcome our very own Luke Simone, who is ministering on the front lines in a Brazilian favela (slum). Some may remember I had the joy of visiting him there in 2024. We are Luke’s home church, and it’s going to be a joy to have him back with us.

Luke sent us a sneak peek of what he’ll be sharing:

“My name is Luke and I live in Rio de Janeiro, a blisteringly hot sub-tropical city in Brazil. It’s a place of breathtaking beauty and shocking violence. But how did the shy kid from Woking end up living in one of the poorest and most chaotic places on the planet?

“I grew up in a Christian home and gave my life to God as a teenager, but after a decade working as a finance lawyer in London and New York, everything started to unravel. Until the day that I heard a familiar, quiet voice. One that I hadn’t heard in a very long time.

“I left New York and now lead a growing community of believers in a slum in the centre of Rio.

“We are seeing God genuinely rewrite people’s stories here. Statistically, if you’re born where I live, you’ll be poorer than most, die earlier than most and be forgotten by most. Families are fractured by violence, addiction and the ever-present fear of eviction by the drug faction that control the community, but we’ve seen over the last decade young people rescued out of horribly abusive situations and slowly be restored by Jesus to new purpose and mission. We’ve seen God intervene in hopeless situations where the enemy has seemingly had a “right to roam” for years. We’re seeing new disciples beginning to disciple others.

“Come hear my story this Sunday!“

2. Thursday 17th September: Commission Global Day of Prayer

Mark your calendars!

On Thursday 17th September, our wider Commission family is gathering online via Zoom for a global prayer event. For one hour, believers from dozens of nations will connect to hear firsthand updates of what God is doing across the world and to stand together in prayer for the future. It’s a beautiful opportunity to pray alongside brothers and sisters you might otherwise never meet.

Because we span multiple time zones, the event runs at different points of the day. For us in the UK, these interactive Zoom sessions will take place at:

  • 2pm – 3pm and
  • 8pm – 9pm

Who is this for?

Everyone! This isn’t just for church staff or leaders – it’s for anyone who wants to be part of the global adventure God has us on.

Note: You do need to register in advance to receive the Zoom access link. Click HERE to sign up

A note from the Commission Team:

“We’re aware that many people in Commission churches don’t speak English as their heart language so we will be using the translation and transcription facilities in Zoom to enable those who find English hard to get real-time text translation during the meeting. please don’t let not being a fluent English speaker put you off”

God is writing an amazing story here at Welcome Church too. Stay connected by subscribing to this blog to get it straight to your inbox each week.

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.

Welcome Church, The Future – Part 2: A New Vision

/ Steve Petch / 2 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 2 of 5. (You can find Part 1 by clicking here)

Refreshing our vision and mission as a church

In 2021 we launched our Recovery Plan to help us recover from the pandemic. One thing the plan said we would do was “refresh our vision and mission as a church”.

In 2018, when we became Welcome Church, we introduced a new vision statement and mission statement. The vision statement was, “To see lives transformed and communities impacted for good through God’s Grace In Action”. The mission statement was, “To share God’s Grace In Action with all people in all of life.” These significantly shaped our church over the last few years.

Coming out of the pandemic we looked at these again to see how we might refresh them for an even better future. We observed four things:

  1. The phrase ‘Grace In Action’ hasn’t really gained traction
  2. Having two statements was perhaps a little ‘over-engineered’ for our context
  3. In reality, Belong, Believe, Become has actually been our mission statement day to day
  4. Whilst the vision statement is absolutely where our heart is, it’s quite long and most of us would struggle to quote it

With that in mind, at our Elders prayer week away in January, we prayed for the church and prayed into this issue and we made some decisions:

  1. We are going to move away from having separate vision and mission statements and replace them with one simple statement of purpose for our church
  2. We are going to keep Jesus at the centre of it

Following this we landed on a new statement of our purpose as a church, developed from what went before, which encapsulates the heart of what we’re called to as a church. It’s just four words long:

“Life Transformed Through Jesus“

We are all about Life Transformed Through Jesus.

This also has a nice twist to it: we can change the first word. This means that every church ministry can adapt it for themselves:

  • Children transformed through Jesus
  • Youth transformed through Jesus
  • Singleness transformed through Jesus
  • Marriage transformed through Jesus
  • Families transformed through Jesus 
  • Work transformed through Jesus
  • Debt transformed through Jesus
  • Retirement transformed through Jesus
  • Those in need transformed through Jesus
  • Our community transformed through Jesus

It all adds up to one thing: LIFE transformed through Jesus 

Everything we do, let’s do it all to see life transformed through Jesus. As we teach the Bible, as we care for one another, as we serve, as we give, as we run ministries and events, as we care for those in need … let’s do it all because we know that every person and every part of life can be transformed through Jesus. Someone should stick it on a t-shirt.

Tomorrow I’m going to blog about our how we’re now releasing two new leadership teams and creating a new leadership role to help us move forward into the future.