Church Diversifies Services to Pull Down Barriers to Worship

A Wolverhampton church is to offer a diverse range of service-formats, in the hope of renewing its mission focus and attracting more people to its service every week.

|PIC1|The existing Sunday services at St Philip's Church in Bradmore, Wolverhampton (the parish of Penn Fields), are in a lively contemporary style with modern hymns and worship songs led by a music group. But later this month the church will offer an alternative act of worship of a more traditional nature.

The new service will follow Anglican liturgy with traditional hymns played on the organ or piano and will use hymn books rather than a PowerPoint presentation.

The Vicar of Penn Fields, the Revd Jeremy Oakley, said the new service was influenced by a visit he had made to Lichfield's partner diocese of Sabah in Malaysia. He said: "The Anglican Church in Malaysia is organised into parishes like in England; but here we tend to have parishes which are evangelical, charismatic or catholic and so on; and this tends to be reflected in the style of worship of that parish.

"But in Malaysia the individual churches offer a full range of services to suit everybody's taste. So they may start at 6.30 on a Sunday morning with a traditional choral service; and follow this with a lively praise service; and then a service in one of the many different languages spoken in Malaysia, and so they continue throughout the day."

Rev Oakley continued: "Although we have a 6.00am service on Easter Sunday, I don't envisage starting Sunday services regularly at that hour - not yet at least - but I do want to ensure that we take down any barriers to worship. Last year we wrote to everybody in the parish to say sorry for anything we may have done as a church which has put them off worship. The response was fantastic and we have been able to recreate relationship with many people who had a previous connection to the church.

"But while our existing service is popular with those who do attend, I know from conversations which arose as a result of last year's letter, that there are lots of people who are uncomfortable with such a modern worship style. I don't want that to be a barrier for them so we will now offer two services every Sunday."

To mark the launch of the new service on Sunday 20th May, the Archdeacon of Walsall, the Venerable Bob Jackson, will preach. As well as being Archdeacon of Walsall, whose area includes Wolverhampton, Bob Jackson chairs the Bishop of Lichfield's Growth Team and is a national expert on church growth.