It’s been fantastic to be gathering back in the Highgrove building on a Sunday morning. There’s nothing like being together, with the Holy Spirit at work in our midst. But each Sunday is tinged with a little sadness as we recognise how many of our church family are missing.
So we’ve been praying and thinking about how to MAKE MORE ROOM for YOU and for others and we have a plan we’d like to share with you.
From 6 June we will have not one, but two, Highgrove services happening in our building every Sunday morning!
Each service will be an hour long and will have the same format and content. The only thing that will be different will be the way we structure our children and youth provision.
The first service will start at 9.30am. Adults will meet in the main hall while we use the back hall for our Sparklers pre-school-aged group and our Key Stage 1-aged Superstars group will meet in our brand-new side room.
The second service will start at 11am with a second Superstars group meeting, plus our Trailblazers Key Stage 2-aged group and our Devo group for secondary-aged youth both meeting at Sea Mills Methodist Church on Sea Mills Square.
As the children will go into their groups before the start of each service, this plan doesn’t allow for us to worship together across the ages. This is one of our key values at Highgrove, so on the first Sunday of each month we will have two all-age services with no separate children’s provision.
Between each service every week we’re hoping to serve refreshments in our Highgrove garden for much needed chatting and catching up with one another.
We will continue to livestream our service, albeit at the earlier time of 9.30am, so those who can’t yet meet physically can still engage with the service, as well as maintaining the opportunities for others not yet connected to church to easily be able to check out our services.
These plans will almost triple the number of people who can currently meet together on a Sunday morning. And, as social distancing requirements reduce over time, these numbers will continue to increase!
We’re excited by the prospect of not only increasing capacity for meeting together right now, in a Covid-safe way. But also, in time, the potential for further increased capacity beyond our original limits to extend our Highgrove welcome to new guests and increase the opportunities to share the good news of Jesus further and wider than we’ve ever done before!
To double the number of services we provide, as well as livestreaming, is going to be a huge challenge. That’s why we need you! Our teams will need lots of extra volunteers. If you’ve been part of a team before then please step back up. If you’ve not been part of a serving team for a while, then now’s the time to get involved. If you’re new to Highgrove, we’ve found joining a team is a brilliant way to get to know people and to feel you belong really quickly.
This is going to take all of us, but we’re so excited about MAKING ROOM in this next season. We’ll provide more information about these changes and how you can help over the next few weeks. But in the meantime, please be praying with us as we take this exciting step!