At Wotton Baptist Church we’re running our Sunday services on Zoom. It has been a good way to maintain fellowship for a church of our size, but the significant number of vulnerable children and families attending mean that we can’t publicly circulate the details of the service. Consequently we have welcomed a few new folk along during lockdown but we have not seen the explosion in attendance that others using YouTube Premiere or Facebook Live have seen.
Our church’s not-particularly-original but nonetheless genuine strap-line is ‘good news people’. We are very keen to find new ways to share faith at this time when Tearfund and others are reporting an upsurge of interest in prayer in the community during lockdown. God independently poked two members of our leadership team about running 24/7s Prayer Course on line to connect with this need. Tomorrow will see the last session of the course.
To advertise the church’s ongoing prayerful presence, we sent a postcard to all 2500 households in our small town. The flip side of the postcard (see images) included an invitation to join in with The Prayer Course. Off the back of this we started a small course (with just 3 seekers and 3 new believers) plus me on Zoom. It’s been an absolute joy to take part in the course – they want to learn to pray and week by week all 6 of them seem to have grown in confidence and faith as we have prayed together. Despite being aimed at believers The Prayer Course is accessible for anyone who wants to pray and 24/7 are more than happy for it to be used on Zoom.
We’re following lots of other churches in launching an Alpha Course on Zoom in September and I’m hopeful that the three seekers will take the invitation to join in. Five of the 6 prayer course attendees have already visited Sunday morning zooms on more than one occasion (two of them were Sunday regulars pre-lockdown).
In common with lots of churches, we’ve had a huge increase in local engagement through involvement with community care and in helping and being helped by our own neighbours. I’m hoping and praying that we can use more Zoom groups like The Prayer Course and Alpha to build more of the good news of Jesus into these new bridges.
Wotton BC are on of the churches working through the Re:Imagine process together. For more information on Re:Imagine, click here.
