‘We surveyed our community asking one simple question and our congregation doubled as a result!’

Our story began in January 2022. As we sought to rebuild our life as a church following the Covid-19 pandemic, we began praying and seeking where God was leading us.

St Bede Church, Bolton-Le-Moors is a traditional Anglican church in the Diocese of Manchester, serving the community of Morris Green in the town of Bolton. 

At that time, we were a small congregation of around 30 adults and a handful of children gathering for worship at our sole service at 10am on Sunday mornings. Still, we believed God had immeasurably more in store for us (Ephesians 3:20).

As we prayed together we felt God calling us to a new vision: ‘Living for Jesus at the Heart of our Community’, and our desire was and still is for St Bede to be a place where all in our community can come, worship, and encounter God together.

At St Bede we have always been blessed to have strong links with our church primary school, St Bede Academy. Our school has more than 600 pupils and is located a short distance on the same road as the church. Despite our strong links, however, I was puzzled by the fact that so few families from the school worshipped with us on a Sunday.

The simple question that started it all

This prompted us as a church to do a community survey. If we were serious about living for Jesus at the heart of our community; then we needed to engage with our community and ask the question ‘How can we help you?’.

In the survey, we invited people in our community to share not only their practical needs and the issues they faced, but their spiritual needs too. We asked about their faith and whether they currently attended a place of worship.

Our church lay reader, Tony Whitehead, had heard from lay readers in other local churches who had set up midweek services aimed at young families — in fact one of the services was called WOW (Worship on Wednesday). These services had been very successful in drawing younger generations into the church and so, inspired by this, we included a question in our community survey asking whether people in Morris Green would be interested in a similar type of service.

During the summer of 2022, we launched our survey. We used our school links to share the survey with parents and families and we held a summer fun day for the community where attendees were invited to fill in the survey too.

The response wasn’t huge. We received around 60 completed surveys but the results were fascinating. 71 per cent of respondents described themselves as Christian, but only 44 per cent attended a church. Significantly, 61 per cent expressed an interest in a midweek family service on a Tuesday or Wednesday.

The survey results gave us the encouragement we needed to launch our own Worship on Wednesday (WOW) service. A small team of us came together to start planning with the shared vision for WOW to be distinctive and different from our Sunday service.

Worship on Wednesdays

We envisioned WOW being an interactive all-age worship experience, a far more informal service than our regular Sunday service. In line with that, we decided it should be held in the more flexible space of our community room at the back of church, rather than the church worship area which has pews.

We launched WOW on 1 March 2023. It was a step of faith. We had never tried anything like this before and there was no tried and tested format for us to follow. So, we cobbled together a rough pattern for WOW; beginning with an activity on tables that people could partake in as they arrived before the service itself began at 6.15pm.

The service revolved around a Christian theme each week. Lasting 45 minutes, it included an opening prayer, a couple of all-age worship songs, another activity like a quiz or challenge, a Bible reading and short talk, and then prayers, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Grace. In short, everything you’d expect from a worship service!

To our amazement, we had 30 adults and children attend our first WOW. Around 75 per cent of them had never worshipped with us before. Most were families from our church school, many of which had responded to our survey.

Because they felt we had listened to them by launching WOW, many of them felt they should at least give it a try. Thankfully, they loved it, and continued to return each week, even inviting friends to join them.

What God has done through WOW

Within a matter of months WOW grew to a regular congregation of 40-50 people and effectively doubled the size of our weekly church congregation from 30-40 on a Sunday to around 80 across both services.

Since our first service; WOW has grown into a new worshipping community. Many of our original families are still worshipping with us on Wednesdays more than two years later.

Because they felt we had listened to them by launching WOW, many of them felt they should at least give it a try

What has been even more exciting is that, through WOW, we have had children and parents make a commitment of faith and become a disciple through baptism and confirmation. So far, we’ve had two young lads come forward for baptism, and three people come forward for confirmation.

Today, WOW continues to thrive in its original format. The only limitation we face is our lack of physical space, which limits us to 40-50 people each gathering.

WOW has been a wonderful journey seeing God at work in our younger generations. I believe there is a growing interest in exploring faith within our communities in this land. Our story is a reminder that all we need to do is step out in faith and follow Jesus’ Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:1).