As we continue to get back into the groove of life, post-pandemic, we're making a number of changes to Sunday services at OCC, a bit like the 'spring cleaning' we do after winter. Read on - and pray with us!
We love to hear each other's stories and contributions when we gather to worship. We believe church is a team sport, not a spectator sport (1Corinthians 12-14)! Because it's such a big deal for us, and because it's not how every church rolls, we've written about this before (here, here and here). So, we've been delighted to start seeing a fresh flow of testimonies (that is, stories of God's work in our lives), healings, prophetic words and many other contributions. Please keep them coming! Talk to the meeting leader of the day so we can fit your contribution in as well as possible.
We also love to pray together for each other in our services, supporting each other as God works in our lives. Even before the pandemic we'd been talking about how to upgrade our approach to this 'prayer ministry', to serve people as well as possible, signposting ongoing pastoral support where appropriate, while handling confidentialities well, recognising that we have a lot of newer people in the room each week. We're delighted to announce that from mid-March we expect to offer prayer ministry every week, supported by four new teams of pray-ers, coordinated overall by Liam Thatcher.
We love to see people growing into new roles, especially as a church serving a fast-changing city, and with people ongoingly responding to God's call to lead in other new projects. We're at another point of change. Chris and Lois Fulton have brought lots of fresh life and vigour to the worship team, since they took over the leadership in 2016. Lois has already stepped back from regular worship leadership to focus on her leadership of School of the Spirit, and we've recently agreed with Chris that it's time for him to handover the overall leadership of worship and tech teams - especially as they have a growing family. Happily, they have invested in mentoring people, so Beth Summers has agreed to step into the overall worship leadership role, and Richard Owen is continuing as overall leader of the tech team. With Josh Wells on paternity leave, Dan and Jenna Wood, and Jeremy Blakey are re-joining our roster of regular worship leaders. Please pray for Beth, Richard, the Woods and Jeremy in their roles.
Talking of the tech team - usually unnoticed, unless something goes wrong! - we're delighted to welcome some newer people to the team. As we're seeking to maintain a reasonable video stream, we need to maintain a bigger team than we had pre-pandemic, so please, if you have any computer, camera or technical skill, please talk to us. Talk to Richard via @email
We're also making some technical changes, some of which can be seen, others heard, and some not seen or heard! After hasty changes to serve church online during the pandemic, we now need to change some of those temporary quick fixes, to more resilient and simplified approaches. This is taking time, and some learning by doing, so we apologise that, at times, you will have seen some things not working so well! We're grateful for the skills of a team of volunteers who are helping us develop better systems and approaches to better serve God's people as we gather.
In particular, our tech team are working hard to get the sound levels as even and good quality as possible, across the room (including some geeky mapping, see the blog image!). We've learned that our current ageing sound system will always be louder in the middle seats, so you may want to try moving if it's either too loud or too quiet for your tastes.
Finally, you might wonder about the new short screen in the middle? We're also trying to get a third screen working, so that as well as seeing the words clearly, we can experiment with art/visuals to improve the aesthetics/ambience of our worship space, as well as serving those online with a suitable video feed.
