Bradford North Circuit

  Service Sheet (pdf) Call to Worship: Here I am Lord I’ve come to do your will Here I am Lord in your presence I am still Matt Beckingham, Here I am Lord, (Northumbria Community Celtic Daily Prayer) Introduction: Welcome to our service today. I’m Deacon Merry Evans, and I’m leading the next Session in the Bradford North Methodist Circuit of our Saints Alive programme. Our theme today is Time to listen to what Jesus actually said. If you are following the programme booklet you will find a number of challenging things Jesus said and I hope you are able to think about these during the coming week. This morning we shall be thinking about just one of those things Jesus actually said, his challenge to a wealthy young man about his possessions. Prayer: Living God, maker of all things, we meet together now to worship you. You call us to you as a loving parent calls their children, that we all might dwell in your love. May we have the courage to seek you more fully, letting go our love...

“Every person matters” The second in our worship series "Stay alive in the Spirit" Service Sheet (pdf) Welcome Welcome is something we say at the beginning of every service. Whether in churches or on YouTube, we welcome you, whoever you are and whyever you have come. But this morning, “Welcome” is the theme of the service. “Every person matters - all are welcome.” And maybe some of you question how welcome you might be. Maybe you’ve had the experience of arriving at a place of worship and not being made welcome – or being treated as though you didn’t matter. That was wrong. Jesus made it clear throughout his ministry that he was there for the ones the respectable people turned away from and we, his followers, try to live that out – sometimes getting it wrong and causing hurt, for which we are sorry, but always coming back to Jesus and trying again. Song Our opening song reminds us that we are all welcome around God’s table, those who think they have life sorted and th...

Stay alive in the Spirit Welcome to the first of seven services from Bradford North Circuit that will address the question “How can we use the COVID-19 crisis to get the church back on track?” The series is called “Stay Alive in the Spirit” and an outline booklet is available for you to download. You are welcome wherever you are. Week 1, Setting the Scene Service sheet (pdf) Call to worship Let’s begin right up to date with Psalm 137, written in about 600BCE. The writer was one of a group of people who were not allowed by the authorities to worship in their own temple; they are puzzled about how they will ever be able to worship again. Does this sound familiar? The psalm will be sung on the video by group called Boney M which you are probably too young to remember. A Collect for Today God of Change, comfort us in our fear, as we let your Spirit roam through our church, overturning treasured tables, driving out cherished prejudice and irrelevance, bringing in the wind of change so...

12 months into the pandemic, I have been looking back on the things I have done during the year and been surprised at the range of activities which lockdown has brought on: Walking:  My wife and I have walked on streets of Bradford which we had not walked on for more than 50 years! Averaging 2 miles per day, and missing very few days, we must have walked further than from Land’s End to John O’Groats (603 miles)! Jigsaw puzzles:  Friends have loaned us puzzles, usually 1,000 pieces. This is one of the hardest ones I borrowed. Crossword puzzles:  I have a book of Daily Telegraph puzzles, and I generally complete one per day. Good for the brain! Restoring furniture: During the beautiful weather around April – June 2020, I sanded and stained 6 dining chairs which we bought from Ebay. The garden was the ideal place to do this dusty job, and get a sun tan at the same time. Zoom meetings:  These were a new experience for most of us! It has been good to share in regular Bibl...

Allerton’s Community Play & Learn Hub In October we were approached by the Bradford Community Play Partnership to ask if they could use the church premises for their Allerton & Lower Grange Community Learning Hub. They had been running this from Ladyhill Park since 1st April but needed somewhere more suitable for the winter months. Supporting local families and linking with 5 local primary schools, 7 volunteers, including 3 of our own congregation, are working together to provide ‘Bags of Creativity’ during the pandemic. The group have provided over 5,000 packs to children, signed up over 700 children to a Summer Reading Challenge, engaged with 1,500 children in the Light Project with a physical literacy music lesson in the car park, with pallet Christmas trees, a grotto, forest school activities including making Bird Cake and incorporating: Exercise Counting, Measuring, Weighing Investigating natural materials Growing Sunflowers Reading Music The Hub will continue until Februa...

Like everyone else, we are all trying to get on with life but at times it is not easy and not meeting with all our Church family can be difficult and lonely. Just before Christmas we were having services twice a month but not all people were able to attend which was very sad but we all kept in touch by text/phone it is not quite the same but it is good to talk. During Advent we put a display in the porch window of the Christmas story, adding different characters each week until all figures were assembled around the baby for the community of Thornton to see. All our children in Sunday School received an Advent calendar to let them know we were all thinking of them. We also had a Christingle service but this was very different from previous years. Masks were worn, tables set out at the required social distance and hand sanitizers available in lots of areas. People made their own Christingles from packs but instead of using fruits, wrapped fruit lollipops did the job just fine. Rev. Chris...

Welcome to our first Spirituality page in the Link, where we will keep you up to date with various events and resources to help you explore and deepen your faith. Connecting to God Some of us have found connecting to God more difficult, as our usual patterns of worship have been taken away. To help us all cope, we are posting or emailing prayer and worship materials out each week, and some of us have been enjoying the freedom of being able to go back to these later in the week, and even sharing them with others. What you may not be so aware of is what’s available on the Bradford North Website and elsewhere. The Bradford North Website Rev Christine Crabtree, with the help of Roy Lorrain-Smith, Jackie Marshall and others, have been building up a wealth of material on our Circuit website www.bradfordnorth.org.uk/ under the headings of Prayer and Spirituality. You can find Prayer on Thursdays videos, audio and written meditations and stories, and Quiet Day materials developed for use at h...

Look at it like this... Read the Psalms and you may well be struck by the frequency of the Psalmist’s cries for help against enemies. You get the impression he must have lived a very dangerous life, and if the writer was David we know that he often did: in his many wars, on the run from Saul, and the attempted coup by his son Absalom. Here’s just one example of such a cry: Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel man (Ps 71:4 ESV) Leaving gender aside, I can imagine similar words forming the prayers of those today facing eviction, or loan sharks, or dealers, or pimps, or any other abuser. The rest of us could pray these words for them, in general or for known victims. Praying Scripture is powerful. But the words could apply to another kind of trouble. Paul saw a sort of war within himself, an inner struggle between what he wanted to do and what he actually did. He cried out, “who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:21-2...