Braniel Community Church – reaching out with good news
Braniel Community Church (BCC) was one of our first church plants back in 2013. The leader, James Crockett, shares how they have risen to the challenge of being church in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic.
“At BCC in 2020 we have been affected by the pandemic in the same ways as everyone else but we’ve sought to rise to the challenge and make changes that allow us to keep worshipping God and sharing the good news of His love. Initially we moved all of our efforts online, including Sunday services, prayer meetings, weekly bible study and quizzes, even enjoying a weekly emoji catchphrase on WhatsApp on Saturday nights.
“All of this allowed us to keep contact with most of our congregation and a highlight this year has been one of our kids accepting Jesus as her personal Saviour and asking to be baptised. (We look forward to the day when that is possible).
“However, we’re also an outward focused church and so we needed to find ways during the first lockdown to try and reach our community. We provided PPE to NI Ambulance service to help in the fight against Covid and we recently took on a Foodbank referral agency – both practical ways of helping those in need.
“Of course, preaching the gospel means both helping practically and actually preaching good news and so we looked at ways we could reach out to do that. Back in the summer we engaged with the Try Praying initiative. Try Praying is a 7 day prayer book, encouraging not yet Christians to connect to God through prayer and to pray big prayers and see if the Lord would answer. We encourage our congregation to take these books with them into their neighbourhoods, families, workplaces and clubs and offer them to people who are either struggling or sceptical, and we trust God to bring us some stories of His great work through the initiative. Anyone in the area can contact us for a copy of the book at any time.”
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