A number of great events hosted by The United Reformed Church are coming up in the next month or so, including the use of church buildings in the community, Black History Monthly and online discipleship. Please do share these with anyone you feel would be interested.
‘Building for the Future’: 3pm April 19th
An online conference to consider the strategic use of church buildings for mission and community engagement. We’re supporting the URC Church Buildings Forum with this event, which will include a keynote address by John Bradbury, a presentation by HeartEdge and examples of creative use of church buildings and assets. Please email: mission@urc.org.uk to register and receive the details.
More details can be downloaded on URC Buildings Forum Zoom Conferencev2
Black History Monthly
As disciples of Jesus, being anti-racist must surely be a fundamental part of who we are. We cannot wait until Black History Month in October to explore this. We need to constantly open ourselves to growing and learning. As such, we will dip into Black History every month during 2021, in URC Black History Monthly, a one-hour conversation on the third Monday evening of every month at 7.30pm on Zoom where we’ll all be encouraged to review a film, book or other resource for ourselves, before coming together to share an hour’s discussion, exploring and teasing out how it affects all of us in our situations and settings today. More information can be found on the URC’s website.
Online Discipleship Sessions
What does living the life of Jesus today look like online? It’s great that worship, fellowship and other important elements of the Christian faith can happen virtually, but how do we use technology to take us deepen our relationships so we can help each other walk the way of Jesus on a daily basis? The Walking the Way Steering Group wants to set up a network of people from across the URC to explore this further. To start off, they’d like to invite you to attend a Zoom session to think about what we mean by ‘discipleship’, what’s already happening with faith development online and how can we take things forward into more intentional community building.
If this is something you, or someone from your church/network/area of work might be interested in, they’d be grateful if you or they could e-mail wtw@urc.org.uk to receive a Doodle poll link to secure some dates/times for these sessions.
Church on the Edge Sessions
Knackered, Jaded, Scunnered? What word would you use to describe how you’re feeling right now? The times we live in are very strange. There are lots of difficult emotional, physical, social and economic challenges at the moment, which affect absolutely everyone in ways we could never have imagined beforehand. There are major, unanswerable questions about the long-term impact this will have, and where we go from here. If you need a space to meet with others, to be open and honest about this difficult situation, and to seek support from each other in living through these challenging times, then e-mail wtw@urc.org.uk to sign up for the first of three monthly Zoom sessions, brought to you by the URC’s ‘New Reality Same Mission’ group that Marie, Simon & myself are part of, on Thursday 1 April at 2pm.
In this opening session, we will be joined by Al Barrett and Ruth Harley, co-authors of ‘Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church’s Mission from the Outside, In’ to help us think about what God wants of us in the midst of everything that has interrupted normal life in these bizarre times.
