At WPM our focus has always been to worship fully, love all and serve the city. Over the last few weeks that has looked very different! Along with sewing sets of scrubs for NHS and care workers as part of some local community groups, I’ve also been busy making masks for some of the young adults at Vitalise and some of the places we offer chaplaincy to. Many of the YA I’m talking to are anxious about returning to work/having to use public transport etc so I hope these will help.
For the last three years our Sunday evening services (Vitalise) have been taking place in Darlington street methodist church. Sadly, at the end of September Darlington street church met for their last service before the church closes. We are so grateful to everyone at Darlington street church for making us feel so welcome over the last few years.
Vitalise is now moving to St Peters house, 4 exchange street!
We will be meeting every Sunday at 5pm – 6.30pm
Why not come and see us in our new home!
Discipling new Christians is central to our mission at WPM so it is always a pleasure to see young adults reach a stage in their faith journey where they feel ready to make the public commitment of baptism. This Pentecost, we had the joy of baptising two members of our community – Chloe and Rob. We came to know them through our chaplaincy work at YMCA Badger Court and it has been great to get to know them, and to grow in faith alongside them.
As all our baptismal candidates are adults, they are also confirmed by our local Anglican bishop and received into Methodist membership; we are very proud of our ecumenical identity and had the pleasure of being joined for the service by the Wolverhampton and Shrewbury District Chair and the Bishop of Wolverhampton, both of whom are WPM trustees.
Left: Chloe and Rob give their testimonies before their baptism; centre: Nicola preaches on the promises we make at baptism; right: Rachel, local Methodist district chair, blesses the waters of our baptismal hot tub.
We were also joined by some of our prayer supporters and by some of the staff and residents of YMCA Badger Court, which was really lovely. We like to think of the WPM community as extending well beyond our Sunday evening congregation, and it was great to have some of the people we usually only see on weekdays join us for this very special service.
Left: Chris Collins, the minister at Darlington Street, receives Rob and Chloe into Methodist membership; right: Bishop Clive confirms Rob and Chloe.
Left: Rachel leads our intercessions, inviting us to pray for the things on the hearts of our community members; right: Bishop Clive presides at communion.
We are enormously grateful to everyone who help set up for the service, to everyone who brought cake, and to everyone who came to support Rob and Chloe as they made this commitment. Please continue to pray for them as they continue to explore what it means to follow Jesus!
After all the excitement of Easter, we have just enjoyed another one of the highlights of WPM’s calendar – our annual weekend away to Cefn Lea in Wales. We are indebted to all who prayed for nice weather – we were blessed (for the most part) with sunshine and the absence of rain, which we all appreciated!
As always, our weekend away was a mix of prayer and worship; small group discipleship; exploring the beautiful Welsh countryside; the consumption of plentiful food, and many, many games of pool. Like last year, our small group discussion used a resource written to accompany Ken Costa’s book, Know Your Why; this year, we explored how our faith can shape our decision-making and how we think about courage and perseverance.
Our schedule left plenty of time for more relaxing activities, however, and lots of us enjoyed the delights of Cefn Lea’s hilltop crazy golf range, as well as some fierce Scrabble sessions and the basketball facilities in the centre’s sports hall.
On Saturday night, we held our evening prayer service by campfire, with Andy leading us in acoustic worship – followed, of course, by s’mores and toasted marshmallows!
On the Sunday morning, we celebrated the 21st birthday of Rob, one of our community members, with tea and cake, before enjoying our Sunday lunch and heading back to Wolverhampton.
We’re really grateful to everyone who came and joined in with all our activities, everyone who provided lifts and to everyone who held us in their prayers while we were away. We’re back to normal now, refreshed and getting ready for our next big event: our baptism, confirmation and membership service, coming up on Pentecost!
Here at Vitalise, we are just settling back into our regular pattern of prayer, worship and chaplaincy after a hectic but enormously fun Holy Week and Easter. Our staff, volunteers and church members juggled all our regular work with one-off chaplaincy sessions, organising our interactive Palm Sunday service, building a prayer space at one of the city centre churches, and some top notch cake baking!
Palm Sunday Storytelling
How do you retell the one of the most well-known stories in the world? How do you make the story of the Passion speak to both a person who has heard the story all their life and to someone who is hearing it for the first time? This was our challenge this year. We love the Palm Sunday tradition of retelling the story of Holy Week in its entirety and wanted to create a service where both new and more mature Christians could encounter Jesus in the story of his betrayal, arrest and crucifixion.
Some images from our Palm Sunday service.
Storytelling is something we are really passionate about at Vitalise, so we decided to set up different interactions stations exploring different parts of the Passion narrative. As Nicola and Kate took turns to retell different parts of the story, we moved between them. We shared bread together as we heard about the last supper; we prayed for God to help us in our own ‘Gethsemane’ moments, and we even had a go at tearing the curtain of the Temple ourselves.
The Garden – A Gethsemane Themed Prayer Space
Everyone who knows WPM knows we love a big creative project! This Easter, St Peter’s Collegiate Church very kindly agreed to host our latest one – an enclosed prayer space (alternately referred to as a prayer station, tent and pod) designed to help explore the themes of isolation and longing articulated in the account of Christ’s experience in the garden of Gethsemane.
The frame for the prayer space took shape thanks to Nicola’s excellent DIY skills!
So much of our meditation on the Passion – particularly in Holy Week – occurs in large spaces (like church buildings) and with others, at the likes of Good Friday vigils and Maundy Thursday services. We wanted to create a space where people could explore the themes of loneliness in this story in a more enclosed environment.
The completed prayer space.
Poetry and Bible passages were hung from the frame of the prayer space, and users of the prayer space were invited to respond to them in their meditation time, if they so wished.
Easter Sunday
After all this meditation on the cross came the light of Easter day and the WPM Easter service. Nicola preached on the message of the empty tomb, of the conquering of sin and death, with Kate’s prayers focusing on the personal reconciliation made possible by Christ’s death and resurrection. Of course no Vitalise celebration would be complete without mountains of cake, which the community generously supplied (and consumed)!
Our decorated Easter Sunday cross.
The WPM staff and volunteers enjoyed a well-deserved break last week but are now back in action – after all, it’s now only 3 weeks until our annual weekend away to Wales!
As a church located in one of the most culturally diverse parts of the UK, it would be extremely remiss of us not to try to engage with individuals and local communities of other faiths – we’re called to love all, to serve the whole city of Wolverhampton.
Photo credit: Express and Star website.
To that end, we have been running – and participating in – a handful of events designed to increase our understanding of the different religions we see around us, and reflect on how what we learn can help us grow in our own faiths.
We were fortunate enough to have Interfaith Enabler and advisor to the Bishops of Wolverhampton and Lichfield, Ray Gaston, come to speak to us about Christian discipleship in a multifaith world. We hugely enjoyed his talk and it sparked a lot of interest in learning more about the faiths of others. So the following month, in November 2017, Kate put together an interactive session for Vitalise (and mini-version for our chaplaincy partners), to mark Interfaith Week. It was titled Faith and Feasting, and was designed to help people explore how different religions think about food and the practices of communal feasting and fasting.
Kosher food quiz and some Indian sweets from our Faith and Feasting session.
Both of these sessions were linked by a focus on equipping individuals for better engaging in interreligious and intercultural interaction in our daily lives. Our growth as disciples is, in large part, presaged on us witnessing to our faith in the world around us – a world where the presence of faiths others than our own is frequently a topic of discussion, at home and in the media. Knowledge of the beliefs, practices and worldviews of others is therefore vital for any conversation we might what to have about the place of faith – be it ours or anyone else’s – in our homes, colleges and workplaces today.
Wolverhampton’s religious landscape in the snow. Left: the Buddhist Vihara on Upper Zoar Street; right: the Shree Krishan Mandir on the Penn Road.
January 2018 saw a small group from Vitalise join a day-long workshop run by Ray Gaston which involved visiting several places of worship in the Pennfields area of Wolverhampton, followed by an afternoon of reflection which included group discussion of Biblical passages. We were delighted to be welcomed into the Shree Krishan Mandir and the Tayyaba Masjid (no pictures of its exterior from the trip – it was too cold!) who showed us enormously gracious hospitality. Leaders from both these places of worship spoke to us about their faiths and facilitated very informative question and answer sessions. We then spent the afternoon at St Chad and St Mark’s church in Pennfields reflecting on our experiences of the morning and reading and discussing passages from the Bible in the light of these encounters. You can be sure there were some disagreements within the groups we were a part of, but it was a very fruitful exercise for us all!
It is exciting to see that there is a strong desire among many people at WPM to further explore what reflection on interaction with people of other religions can teach us about our faith – so watch this space!
New Year has all of us thinking about fresh starts and the excitement of what the next twelve months might have in store for us. For a few of the members of the Vitalise community, the beginning of 2018 has an added element of excitement – they’re beginning their preparation for baptism, confirmation and admission into Methodist membership!
It’s always immensely exciting whenever any of the young people we work with decide to mark their decision to follow Jesus in this way. Like any church, we take great joy in seeing young people we’ve built relationships with wanting to mark their commitment to our faith and our community in such a public way.
The individuals preparing for this next step in their faith journeys are, like all who go through baptism, confirmation and Methodist membership admission with us, preparing by engaging with a ten-week series on Christian faith. However, because we take our mission to walk alongside these young people really seriously, we are undertaking this course together as a whole community, as part of our regular Sunday evening worship.
With topics ranging from breaking bread to resisting evil, and from fellowship to prayer, it’s a great opportunity for all of us to rethink our understanding of our faith and refresh parts of our relationship with God.
Prayer stations on the theme of Micah 6:8 during our session on getting to grips with the Bible.
A service of ‘baptism, confirmation and admission into Methodist membership’ might sound like a bit of a mouthful! However, as an ecumenical project supported by both the Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury District and Diocese of Lichfield, we feel it’s really important that our community members get to take ownership of both the traditions which have contributed to the establishment of this particular church.
We have no date as of yet for the service itself but don’t worry, we will keep everyone informed – keep your eye on our social media in the coming month or so!
Those of you who are well acquainted with the folk at Vitalise will be unsurprised to learn that Christmas is one of our favourite times in the Christian year. We love the carols and opportunities for drama and storytelling that come with the season, and this year was no different.
Our Christmas service was a much more chilled-out affair this year, following last year’s large-scale nativity production, comprised of a series of monologues from key characters in the Christmas story. There were, however, plenty of mince pies and yule log, and some high quality carolling.
Our chaplains enjoyed a busy Christmas season this year. They ran a Christmas craft extravangza evening for the residents of YMCA Badger Court making hot chocolate, decorating gingerbread and making Christmas cards, all while putting the world to rights on topics ranging from grief at Christmas to the intricacy of the Hollyoak’s Christmas storyline.
We were also enormously grateful to receive a generous donation of Lush cosmetics from a partner at a local Wolverhampton church, which we had great fun distributing to the folk who use our chaplaincy services, as well as the young people who attend the Vitalise Sunday services. Christmas truly came early to those of us who enjoy bath bombs!
All of us at WPM wish you a very happy new year, and we can’t wait to see how 2018 shapes up for us!
As those who you who came to support us at our licensing event in September 2017 will know, Wolverhampton Pioneer Ministries celebrated its tenth birthday by welcoming in a new leadership team!
(Kate’s on the left, Nicola’s on the right)
Nicola Turner has taken over the role of Team Leader. She is excited to build on the work of the amazing leaders who have gone before and to put her own twist on our vision to worship fully, love all and serve the wonderful city of Wolverhampton!
The role of Young Adult Outreach Coordinator has been taken up by Kate Tingle. Some of you might recognise Kate as she attended Vitalise as a church member back in 2015 while she was training to be an archivist.
So does this mean change for Vitalise?
Yes and no! The overall vision of Vitalise – to worship fully, love all and to serve the city of Wolverhampton through our work with young adults – is staying the same and both Nicola and Kate are really passionate about working particularly with folk who might not otherwise feel like they fit in ‘regular’ church. But Nicola brings new gifts and different passions to her role as team leader and WPM will naturally grow and develop, as it always has done.
What are you guys up to at the moment then?
WPM has some great new projects unfolding at the moment. Our chaplaincy offshoot, Bluefish Chaplaincy, has got a new partner in the city. In addition to our work with YMCA Badger Court and The Way Youth Zone, we now offer chaplaincy services to the parents and staff at YMCA City Tots!
We see Christmas as a really important opportunity for missional work with our chaplaincy partners, so we’re hard at work putting the finishing touches to our Christmas extravaganza, the Vitalise Christmas service, which will be held on Sunday 17th December at 6pm – all are very welcome!
We’re also starting to think about projects for the new year – we’ve got some interesting ideas in the pipeline so watch this space!
| Alpha Course starts… on Alpha course | |
| Publically committin… on Alpha course | |
 | Debs Walton on Sunday 9 March |
 | secretthoughts on Sunday 9 March |
Wolverhampton Pioneer Ministries 