We believe in Church. We believe that, contrary to popular belief, the church is amazing
We believe that when the church looks like Jesus, when it sounds like him, when it feels like him, when it gives off his aroma everything changes. Communities are transformed, people’s lives are restored from the inside out. When the church is alive, people come alive. When the church is alive, communities come alive. If you want to change the world, the best way of doing that, we believe, is to be a part of church. In church people discover love and forgiveness and healing. They discover rhythm, purpose and passion. They discover fulfilment, direction and joy. Church matters.

Church gives people the way to salvation. It gives them the tools needed for personal transformation and renewal. It gives them a worldview that makes sense of the world and which gives direction and purpose to life. It gives them a way to find life.

How does Church do this? It does it by introducing people to God in Jesus. It does it through baptism and breaking bread and worship. It does it through engaging in prayer and disciplines and rituals that help us remember and reconnect ourselves with God’s love, his grace, his forgiveness and his presence. It does this through ministry and generosity and self-sacrifice. It does it by sharing the good news about God’s kingdom and inviting people to rethink their lives around it. It does it by inviting others to seek the kingdom, find it, receive it, and enter it. It does this through giving itself away, feeding people, loving them, forgiving them, bearing with them. It does it through blessing rather than cursing its enemies, and praying for those who persecute it. It does this through taking on the enemy and proclaiming that life, not death, wins after all – that love, not hate, is ultimately victorious. It does this by trusting in God, taking risks, living simply, giving things away and ‘taking up its cross’. It does it by loving the unlovable, forgiving the unforgivable, and believing the unbelievable. It does it by following Jesus and by inviting others to follow Jesus too. Everyone is a disciple. Everyone is a disciplemaker. There is a discipleship invitation everywhere –at home, at work, at the gym, at school, at college, in the hospital.

What does the church do? It prays, it worships, it breaks bread in homes, it devotes itself to the apostle’s teaching, it gives money away to those in need. It makes music to God, and celebrates the sacrifice of Jesus in the breaking of bread. It engages in mission and compassion and outreach. It embraces the poor. It makes space for the broken. It receives the unclean. It teaches and it baptises. It educates and releases. It equips and it appoints. It resources and it anoints. It guides and motivates and trains. It helps people to find their place and their role, their purpose. It prays for healing, sets people free and proclaims the year of the Lord’s favour. It restores the foundations, breaks the curses and restores godly ways of thinking. It runs courses, toddler groups, it provides family meals when someone has a baby. It visits the sick, lends out a van and buys a holiday caravan. It sets up a recording studio, reads with kids at school, walks the streets at midnight, runs a foodbank. It mentors, it enthuses, encourages. It blesses the local schools, it joins in with local community activities, it gets involved, it rolls out the red carpet by picking up litter and hiring out skips. It runs a community café and centre as a home from home, facilitating an art group, a breast feeding group, a knit and natter group, and offering countless people a chance to regain their purpose and their direction. It prays for breakthrough. It set up impact groups that make a difference to local people. It believes in people. It blesses marriages and supports families. It gives thanks for children seeing them as gifts. It supports the grieving and gives hope to the mourning. It takes a day off each week seeing it as a gift from God for the benefit of everyone. It lives life as if God’s Kingdom is at hand and available to all. It believes that Jesus is Lord. It believes that Jesus has won. It believes he is good.

This is what we are like. This is what we do. This is how we do it. This is why we do it. Want to sign up for another year?

If you want to read it online you can click here Seven

The heart of God has not changed and once again there is a call from God to meet him in prayer – either in our own homes or together at church. All over the country and the world we are seeing the blessing that comes when people pray and the church lives up to its calling as the renewed temple of God to be a house of prayer for all nations.

Join others on Tuesday evenings from 7-8, or set up your own ‘house of prayer’ at work, at home or at the weekends.

And remember – every prayer makes a difference.

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil
for the Kingdom
the power and the glory are yours
now and for ever
Amen

It’s been a late Easter and we are ready to celebrate all that Jesus has done for us. Join us for Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Come ready to leave behind the old and clothe yourself with the new. Jesus has died. Jesus is risen. Jesus will come again.

What’s interesting is how just moving building subtly changes other things – changes the way we relate, the way we sing, the places we sit, the way we connect with God, the way we welcome… May God continue to turn this challenge into an opportunity for us all as we journey together through this next month!

And I knew it was a God thing.

I am excited about our new series on Sundays called “EVERYONE”. I believe that God wants us to know something simple, but deep – that this thing is for EVERYONE, that he is for EVERYONE, that this gospel is for EVERYONE, that God’s love and blessing and presence is for EVERYONE. It sounds simple and sounds as if we already know it. Which we do. It’s just that we don’t always really know it – or live as though we know it. Somehow we have categories of who is in and who is out, who get’s good things and who is left out, who is blessed and who is not. God wants us to get this: It’s for EVERYONE.

Join us as we reflect, rejoice and explore this theme together.

Sundays to Easter

January

02 New Year
09 Everyone an image bearer
16 Everyone missed the mark
23 Everyone forgiven
30 Everyone a son

February

06 Everyone gifted
13 Everyone a disciple
20 Everyone a worshiper
27 Everyone a missionary

March

06 Everyone a priest
13 Everyone together
20 Lent 1
27 Lent 2

April

03 Lent 3
10 Lent 4
17 Palm Sunday
24 Resurrection Sunday

The other Sunday we discussed together a new idea – holding this “Sunday Live!” service at the school rather than in ‘church’. After some worship together we introduced the idea and opened it up to discussion and reflection. Everyone threw in their ideas and prayers. People wrote down what they thought and wrote prayers to God about how they were responding. It was a good time.

The response was very positive and the next day the PCC discussed it further and there was a strong sense of unity and clarity about the way forward, so much so that we decided to give it a go from February!

So, from February the timings of our services will look like this:

1st Sunday – 10.15am at St Michael’s School for breakfast followed by worship for the whole family
2nd Sunday – 10.15am at St Michael’s Church for a Family Communion
3rd Sunday – 9.00am at St Michael’s Church for a Traditional Communion, 10.15am Coffee, 10.45am Contemporary Worship service
4th Sunday – 10.15am at St Michael’s Church for a Family Communion

You may notice that one thing we are going to try out alongside holding a service in the local school is also moving the ‘traditional communion’ that we hold on the first Sunday of the month at 9am, to the third Sunday of the month – giving us all time to set up the school and get things ready for a 10.15 breakfast down at the school on the first Sunday of each month. On the third Sunday we will hold a communion at 9am, then have some coffee and doughnuts between the services where we can all mingle and chat, and then have our second service.

As many of us commented when we chatted together holding a meeting at the school will require many more people to get involved and from the sound of it many of you would like to! We will chat about it more as the day approaches and we look forward to this new venture together. Chat together and pray for it. If you have any ideas or suggestions, now is the time to feed them in. If you want to get involved in some way – just let me know : )

Thanks for all your input!

Rich

A few weeks ago now I was reflecting about church and had an image in my mind of an orange. All my life I have been involved in church life trying to make it as juicy as possible – helping to make the worship relevant or contemporary, being involved in social programs, modernising our buildings, updating our use of technology, learning about leading services and preaching, trying to run vibrant house groups. It has been a good journey and I know that God has blessed many of our efforts and ideas. At times we have felt inspired.

The aim of all this commitment and endeavour has been to help make the inside of the orange (the church) as juicy as possible, as attractive as possible, as meaningful as possible and our hope has been that in doing so we would attract more people to join us on the inside of the orange, form a living relationship with God/Jesus and join church. We have prayed about this, sung about this and worked for this with all our effort.

All this has placed me right at the centre of the orange (the church) and I have been ordained as one of it’s ‘ministers’ or ‘priests’ and now, with responsibility for my own ‘church’ I have set about trying to make this particular orange as juicy as it can be here in Twerton.

This has been good and important. And not wanting to devalue any of this effort, or anyone else’s commitment, I now believe that God is wanting us to completely rethink what it means to be the church.

For years ‘church’ has been a building, a service, a program provider or an institution. From here on we need to see it as a people on a mission. For years ‘church’ has been something we went to, attended or helped to make. From now on we need to see it as something we belong to and participate in. The change is from seeing church as a club to seeing it as a team. Just as a football club is something people organise, watch, contribute to and maintain and a football team is something you belong to and participate in, we need to see church as a team where everyone is involved in working towards a goal.

What we need to do is turn this orange inside out. For years the juice has been kept and maintained on the inside of our church buildings, our church services and our church programs. From now on we need to open up the orange and get the juice on the outside – into people’s lives, our workplaces and our neighbourhoods.

This is a completely new way of seeing church and will require us to give up our old ideas and practices and systems. ‘Minister’ will no longer be a title given to just one or two but instead owned by everyone. ‘Disciple’ will no longer be something the super keen sign up for but will be the normal Christian life. ‘Worship’ will no longer be something we go to for an hour but a life lived in adoration to God and in response to his love. ‘Mission’ will no longer be something cringey that only the bravest and craziest of us do but the very foundation of our community life together.

And it is to this mission that we will begin to invite others to join us in. It is to this life that we will now invite people to commit to. It is to this ‘order’ that we will invite people to shape their life around. Instead of asking people to come to church we will be asking if they want to participate in the life we are living, centred on Jesus, focused on blessing our neighbourhood, and oriented around seeing the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

It is time to get the juice out, to step outside our church buildings and structures and services and to give ourselves away to people in need around us. And by our love for one another, for our neighbours and for our God perhaps at last many will again know us to be ‘Jesus’ disciples’ rather than just people ‘who go to church’.

Undoubtedly it will mean a few of the things we currently cherish will fall away or be less highly prioritised. So be it. May God help us as we start to peel away the skin and open ourselves to the reality of people’s life, letting go of our desire to be a church on that meets together and becoming a church that meets the needs of others.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for there is the kingdom of heaven.

It’s great that a group of young people want to offer themselves to us for this weekend and I am praying it will help us connect with young people especially and advertise the Rec House which is looking amazing. How about Joining in? Let Richard know : )

If you have any ideas or suggestions do get in touch!