New Year is often a time of reflection and anticipation. Our prayer is that God will go with us and that we will be obedient to him in the year to come. If you get a chance, grab a few minutes, be still, and pray. To help you in your prayers, here is an ancient blessing and a wonderful covenant. Don’t rush… take your time… God bless you.
A blessing
The Lord bless you and watch over you, the Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you, the Lord look kindly on you and give you peace; and the blessing of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit be upon you and remain with you, now and always. …

At the beginning of each month we have a slightly different routine for our Sunday gathering. At 9am we have a ‘traditional communion’. At 10.15 we have breakfast together and at 10.45 we hold an informal, more creative service specifically aimed at being accessible and meaningful to families.
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 …

Outside the church there is little talk of ‘Advent’.  The only words associated with it are ‘calendars’ and ‘candles’.  Apart from that Advent holds little power over our imaginations and lives.  It didn’t used to be like this.  For centuries the season of Advent was a significant and eagerly anticipated season of reflection, preparation and prayer.  Advent is a gift to us and for the next month, as a church community, we are trying to reconnect with this tradition and bring it up to date.  On the 5th December we are holding a special Advent service in the evening from 7pm.  Join us for an interactive service of worship and reflection which will awaken all the senses and bring Christmas alive. Looking forward …

Over the next few years it is my hope that our church here in Twerton will learn to ‘be church’ in a fresh way. Instead of organising ourselves around our services and programmes we want to see what happens when we see ourselves primarily as people engaged on a mission.
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 …

All around churches in the UK, especially the more traditional ones, people are celebrating Harvest. We know the kind of thing to expect – a few hymns (We plough the fields, Come ye thankful people come, etc), a short talk about Africa or Water or Ecology or Giving, and some prayers that have a more repentant feel. This is all good, but if we are honest the festival is hard to connect with at a deep level.
So what will we do?
This year we are not having a ‘Harvest Service’. We are having a ‘Harvest Season’. During this period of time (four weeks) we will be encouraging each other to give thanks to …

As a Christian community we are increasingly aware that life is all about connection – our connection with God and with others.  There is so much about connection in the bible… so much in the story… perhaps you could say that it’s a all about connection – with God, with each other, with the world around us… In it we read stories of connection and stories of disconnection, we read stories of how God wanted to reconnect us to himself, and how we repeatedly disconnect ourselves from him and other, and we read stories of Jesus who was so connected with his Father and yet allowed himself to become disconnected so that he could reconnect us to God.
This is what …

The empty tomb gets you thinking.  Dead people stay dead. That’s what the word means… Dead.  Dead is unambiguous… Dead is dead.  And so the empty tomb gets you thinking… It gets me thinking.  As for me I believe that Jesus is no longer dead. I believe that he is alive. I believe that the empty tomb tells us a crazy but simple truth… that Jesus rose from the dead. I believe it… And it shapes every part of my life.
For a start it shapes the way I see God. It demonstrates to me that he is more powerful than death – that other counterfeit power that takes us all one day and stakes a claim to be the power above all powers.  It tells …

Just wanted to plug the gatherings on Thursday and Friday to you : )
Thursday night from 7.30pm we will be gathering right at the front of the church to remember the last supper and the events that followed. The service will be quite reflective and somber in mood as we listen to readings about Jesus breaking bread, talking about betrayal, washing feet, praying in the garden, being arrested and being dragged to court… Big events simply retold and a chance for us to ponder them together with music and stillness…
On Friday morning join together for a further time of reconnection with the power of cross. Arrive at 10am for some quiet prayer and then at 10.15 I …

Hi everyone…
I mentioned briefly on Sunday a few ideas for helping us to engage with the amazing story of this week and thought I might put some of them on the website as I wasn’t the most articulate at that point…
Like many of us (most of us?) I need help to dig deep into the Easter story and making it personal to me, alive… Getting together with others who want to explore the themes with me or to chat about them always helps and that is why we are having a few specific meetings this week looking at the story together. On Thursday night we are looking at the last supper and the events just after that… on …

Easter is a great time for gathering together and spending time thinking through the most important story of them all – praying, kneeling, crying, laughing, rejoicing… it’s all here…
Join us if you can.
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