Sunday 27^th July 2025

‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,
baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’
Jesus, Matthew 28:18-20 (NIV)

Making Jesus known
As a church we’re committed to ‘knowing Jesus + making Jesus known.’  That means we’re committed to being disciples of Jesus ourselves, and also to making disciples of others – not only individually but together as a church family.  It is, quite simply, what Jesus tells us to do as his disciples: to be disciple-making disciples.

A key time and place where we do this disciple-making is in our Sunday gatherings.  A challenge we’re facing is that our 10am service is full to bursting and we can’t fit any more people in safely (as you may well have noticed).  We’re both thankful to God for the growth in our church family and recognise that our ability to make Jesus known to anyone else at 10am is limited – and that’s something we’d really like to change.

In January the PCC asked a small working group to explore the possibility of establishing an additional service to meet this need.  Originally, it was thought this would be a second morning service at St Stephen’s. However, the recent news of both my retirement and the success of the bid to revitalise St Wulstan’s presents additional challenges and possibilities.

To move forward, the working group would like to gain a better understanding of where the church family is currently – including our needs, opinions and capacity to serve – in order to make helpful recommendations to the PCC as to how we might do things differently in order to make Jesus known to more people.

To this end, a congregational survey will be launched next Sunday 3rd August.  Please do fill it in!  It will take around ten minutes, and the more people who complete it, the more accurate will be the picture of where we are as a church family and what we should be doing next.

In all of this, we can be confident that the ascended Lord Jesus himself is smiling on us.  We’re trying to do what he has asked us to do, and he has promised to be with us as we do.

Prayer
Lord, we want to know you better ourselves, and to be more effective in making you known to others; please help us and be with us, as you’ve promised, so that both of these things become reality.  Amen.

Yours warmly, in Christ,
Chris Hobbs (Senior Minister)