Story four: two town churches respond to God's invitation into something new

"One of the Church Councils was brave enough to write to the other Church Council, saying 'We’re going to think about our future. Shall we think about it together?'”

I came to Oldtown in 2019, as a probationer in my first appointment. When I came for my first look round at the church, I had one of those meetings where as I walked in, somebody said to me - literally, as I walked through the door - “A previous minister tried to close this church, and it will never happen over my dead body.” That was my first encounter.

Soon we were hit with covid. I was in charge of three churches at the time, two of them were in the town itself. And one of the things that we discovered as we began to fathom our way through the lockdown was that there was no point in us doing lots of things separately on Zoom. But our local geography is quite local. If there’s a motorway, you don’t cross it; if you’re in one of the other towns nearby, you’re not in our town. It was quite clear that although I was working with three churches, only two of them were really engaging.  As we began to do things together, just coffee and some worship, and we began to go under the banner of ‘Oldtown Methodist Churches’, two churches in one town, a walk away from each other – they had different histories, Prim and Wesley – what became clear was, people didn’t know each other particularly well. There were some difficult histories, and yet as people began to meet in that time of real oddity and need, there was a valuing of a wider relationship developing. And so we just did it together; we muddled our way through. We found a way to be together, largely online.

So then we came out of the pandemic and churches were beginning to think about reengaging in a physical space. The circuit itself was struggling, as many have, for Local Preachers, because a lot of people had stopped. And so the circuit were asking, "Can you find ways in which we don’t need as many preachers on a Sunday?" And so one of the things that I suggested was that we didn’t have two services in the town every Sunday. Because we’d been doing so much together, why didn’t we meet together and alternate the two buildings? And the churches agreed with that. And so that’s what we began, a pattern of every other Sunday. People began to see each other physically as well as on Zoom. And into the mix of all of that I just simply began to ask questions like: “Does this work? Would this be good for us, as we continue to develop? Do you think we’d be stronger if we did church together?” I can’t say that everybody went, “Let’s go for it”, but there was a process that was happening. I think there was a God thing happening, to be honest. Quite a few people only came when it was in their building, they didn’t come on the other Sunday. But gradually we began to continue with the questions.

As the Church Councils met in their individual situations, what was apparent was, we’ve got two very big physical buildings and a diminished number of people. Two sets of predominantly elderly congregations and very little energy for anything other than coming together on a Sunday. And so one of the Councils was brave enough to write to the other Council to say “We’re going to think about our future. Shall we think about it together?” And we began a consultation process. We began to talk with one another about what it meant to be a Methodist presence in the town. Not what it meant previously, but what it would mean now and in the future. I asked our District Mission Enabler to come in to help ask some of those questions with me, knowing that it would be something that we needed to support people with as well as to say some home truths and unlock thinking about sensitive issues.

We continued in our pattern of worship, one Sunday at one church, the next Sunday at the other. One had IT and various tech things, the other had nothing. So we changed the style of services on the two Sundays. And when there was a fifth Sunday, because no one could cope with “Well, it’s a fifth Sunday and where do we go?”, we had an afternoon service and we labelled it as something different. At a labyrinth style service, one of the things we did was to explore a verse together: ‘I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?’ (Isaiah 43.19a). People journeyed through the Labyrinth with a questions sheet which included questions such as, ‘What does this verse mean for our town? Is God doing something new here? And how can we join in with it?’ As a result of that, one of the common responses made was 'we can do it if we do it together'. And we had a number of 'buy-ins' from people, on a very small scale there was a sense that there is something stirring. ‘We don’t know what that means, but we’ll have a go’. So we explored what that could look like. 

Eventually I think the two churches themselves, the Church Councils particularly, were seeing that there was a lot of work to be done to keep these churches going, and they just didn’t have the energy. So there was some circumstantial push: there wasn’t enough money ongoingly to keep two churches going. They were asking those practical questions. At the same time I was saying, “Perhaps if we’re called now to be together, it’s because God is doing something new. And what is it that we could be opening ourselves up toward?"

We deliberately took a consideration of buildings ‘off the table’, agreeing that we would face the decision about buildings together, as one church. This was in recognition that merging would be unlikely if we discussed the buildings issue before we made the primary decision about whether God was calling us to be ‘one’ .

In September 2022, the two churches formally merged to become Oldtown Methodist Church on two sites. The congregation is about 90 people, with two members of working age. A shared mission group has been set up, and because of the clearing work we have done, the District has now identified Oldtown as potential town in which to pioneer a New Places for New People initiative. Hopefully some of the church members will go on this new Methodist journey with the pioneer in the days ahead.

This story is true and is told as far as possible in the words of the person who shared it. The story has simply been anonymised by using generic names and locations.