I've had websites for nearly 20 years.

In my last church we had a site for the whole time I was there.

When I arrived at Gildersome we revamped the site and publicised it heavily. We used ads on google ads and on facebook to drive traffic to the site for key periods like Christmas and Easter.

In all this time I've not had a single person come visiting in search of a church to join who could be credited to having found us on the web.

Then comes the last six weeks and ten people in three

Read more ...

We are seeing steady growth, in our normal 19th century inheritted Sunday morning service BUT our monthly intergenerational interactive event is growing faster than anything I've known. In August last year numbers were down at 23 people. This year it was 47. Some were with us for the first time more for the second or third and others who are regulars now. 24 of the 47 were not connected with us this time last year.

So what is causing this exceptional growth?

The event is round tables with

Read more ...

It's just a year since my last entry here.

In it I said that I look for a first visitor, first returnee and first baptism. We'd just had our first visitor. They didn't return.

However others have done and we now have nine new regulars. A family of four come regularly to the monthly intergenerational activity, a family of three and a couple are all weekly visitors. The husband of the couple will be our first baptism on 26th June. Bingo.

In the Autumn I shared with the church the need to have,

Read more ...

It's now three months since I started at Gildersome and we had our first outsider to visit. One of the children who comes to the monthly intergenerational event brought her friend and her mother this month.
Football managers start the season looking for their first clean sheet, first point, first win.
I start a new ministry looking for the first visitor, first returnee and first baptism.
The church has  a wide range of contact activities, (men's breakfast, healthy walks, high class tea shop,

Read more ...

I've become the minister of the Baptist Church in Gildersome. It's one of the oldest Baptist churches in Yorkshire, having been founded in 1707, though there are records of Baptists in the village in the mid 17th century.
I first preached here, to about 30 people, in the mid 70's.
Since then the congregation has grown in the 80's and drifted back until now, after 30 years on Home Mission the church has a membership of 23, an average congregation of 28 and a total of 43 regulars if we all came on

Read more ...

Well here we go again. I made a count today of the total number of people who attend my new church in Gildersome. If the regular congregation all turned up on the same day there'd be 43 of us, which is, coincidentally the number of people who attended Conisbrough when I went there after college.
However at Gildersome there is a head start as they had already started a monthly intergenrational event and a series of pre-evangelism activities. I am so looking forward to seeing where God takes us

Read more ...