In 2022, Debbie and I moved to Leicester to start the journey of planting Anthem Church. We were joined by Brendon and Debbie from the Bradley Stoke site and a couple of other friends and family who lived in Leicester. We started by meeting fortnightly in our home as we started gathering a small team and laying foundations for the future.
Then last winter, we picked up the pace in a number of ways - we started to meet weekly on Sundays, growing our children's work and moving our services out of our house and into a public venue.
After a lot of prayer and searching, the Lord provided an amazing venue at a museum near one of the universities. As well as having a beautiful space, the staff there have been incredibly supportive - even making us all dinner one week!
As we entered 2024, it felt like a change of season with God bringing new faces almost every week.
God spoke to me about always beginning our gatherings by sharing good news and testimonies. Often it's something small like a child learning to ride a bike, or a chance to pray with a colleague. Other times it's a wonderful miracle of healing or being able to lead someone to Christ. But the Lord has never let us gather without at least having some good news stories shared, and those testimonies always help propel us into worship.
Leicester is proudly the most diverse city in the UK and God has been answering one of our biggest prayers by bringing people from a wide range of nations and cultures. We're starting to try and reflect this more in our worship, as we're getting accustomed to singing in Mandarin, Farsi, Nepali, Afrikaans and other languages represented in our city and church. We still have a long way to go with this, but we dream of having a church where no-one has to leave their culture at the door and where everyone can bring their unique contributions.
Other lessons He has been teaching us are to always preach the gospel and to make time for people to receive prayer. We've been on a journey of growing in boldness as we learn how to minister to one another, and God has blessed us with a few healings.
This year we've been preaching through a series called Unsearchable Greatness, all about the nature of God. It's been a huge blessing to me to share the preaching with a couple of others: Aaron comes from a Chinese house-church background, so he really understands our small church dynamic and he's bravely stepped up to start preaching in English. Plus Jenny who was with us for a year whilst working as an evangelist with Mission24 and CfAN. They’ve both been a huge encouragement in stirring us to a life of mission.
We meet in the afternoons and always share a meal together at our services. We honestly didn't know how long we'd be able to keep this going for, but it's actually been pretty simple and one of the best things we could've done. It's helped people develop strong friendships and it's always encouraging to look around the room and see children playing, people praying and prophesying, laughing or crying together.
Right from the start we wanted to make sure that church planting was lots of fun! So we’ve prioritised spending time together, having lots of socials and things that would just help us grow as friends. This has been a huge blessing and definitely helped us in those times when it’s been hard and tiring work. God has given us some good relationships with other churches too, and we’ve been able to partner with them in evangelism and serving the homeless.
There’s lots more we could share, but that’s a bit of a snapshot of our church planting journey at the moment. We’d love you to pray for us:
For more people hearing the good news, coming to know Jesus or returning to him, and getting baptised
For us to raise up and bring through new leaders, especially in worship and children’s ministry
For those who are new to the church to get well built into community and discipleship, especially students.
