The 4pm service is coming!

We believe God is asking us to begin a brand new weekly 4pm Sunday service at Harris Academy.

Here are the basics:

What we're proposing is that we begin a 4pm service in the main room of Harris Academy every Sunday from January 2024. The service will run from 4pm till 5:30; there'll be coffee and treats before and after the service. Our format of worship, teaching, and ministry will be exactly the same as at the 10:30 service. The sermon will be the same as well. Tom and Lesley will be present and leading the service, just as they are in the 10:30 service. Tina will oversee amazing kids groups, just she does in the morning, and essentially, it will be the same experience of church that we currently have at the 10:30 AM service, except it will be at 4pm in the afternoon. 

To use a gardening metaphor, what we're looking to do is take a cutting from the 10:30 service and plant it at 4pm to make a new weekly service that will grow into the same type of plant.

To do this we really need 40 to 50 people to choose to move across from the 10:30 AM service to the 4 PM service. We're asking you to ask Jesus, ‘am I one of those people?’

Why are we doing this?

Two reasons: capacity and mission.

The first reason is capacity. In the first month of beginning to meet at Harris in January 2022, we had on average 171 people across the whole building, including kids, youth, and adults. In June of this year, we had an average of 244 people, which is an increase of 43% in 18 months. With all the praying you guys have been doing, it feels like the rate of growth is increasing, and so we realize we need to do something to create more capacity in our services. This extra capacity is needed in every area - our kids groups are wonderfully overflowing; the car park here is often full; when we gathered on Easter Sunday, there were over 300 people in attendance, which makes it quite hard to make it a great experience for every single person. Adding a new service will double our capacity - we'll have double the space for kids, double the space for adults, double the space for sinners to meet with Jesus and be saved.

Starting at 4pm is actually one of the easiest ways to increase our capacity, and that leads us to our second reason, which is mission. As we've been contending for awakening, haven't we just been broken again for the people in Croydon who don't know Jesus? God sent us to Croydon and said, ‘go and help them encounter the incredible love of Jesus and come to life in His name,’ and while it feels exciting to have a room full of people on a Sunday morning, there are thousands of people in Croydon who have not yet encountered the love of Jesus and come to life in His name. Last week, as we prayed and fasted, I, Tom, chose to walk through the center of Croydon. I hadn’t done it for a while actually, and just walking, seeing the boarded-up shops and the broken dreams they represent, seeing the relationship problems, the challenges, the discouragement, it felt like a crushing burden. And so we feel, “we've got to go again”. We've got to go again for the sake of people whose lives are currently broken and lost. Our King told us a story about leaving the 99 to find the one. He said Heaven celebrates more over the one person who repents than over the 99 who do not need to repent. And so, we feel this deep conviction from the Lord - we must continue in mission to seek and save more people all across Croydon. We just want more people to be able to have that experience and that miraculous encounter with Jesus Christ because it’s Jesus Christ changes lives.

So, if you’re part of Croydon Vineyard Church we’re humbly asking if you could do one of two things. The first thing is whether you would consider relocating your Sunday service attendance from 10:30 to 4:30 in the afternoon? Maybe a lie-in on a Sunday morning sounds fantastic, maybe you have kids who want to do sports on a Sunday morning, maybe you have other things you'd like to do on a Sunday morning and actually coming in the afternoon would be an easy and attractive thing for you. Or maybe even you’re realizing, “I really wouldn't want to do this but I just feel Jesus telling me I have to do this”. We’d like you to consider this, so on the first Sunday of October, November, and December at 4pm, which is the time of the service we're going to be running, we will host a one-hour information and intercession session at the Harvest center from 4 to 5pm, and we'd love you to book on and come and explore that..

The second thing we'd love you to think about is to look around the 10:30 service and think, ‘if 50 people in this room were no longer here, could I, for a short period of time, step up to do something that they are doing, that they're not going to be doing in the 10.30 service anymore? Could I maybe double my service on a team just for three months? Could I maybe choose to step into a space that they're leaving for the sake of them going so this service then will be equally as strong as it is?’ Maybe you're thinking, ‘well, I don't have time and I couldn't do that, but I can pray.’ Well, please pray, that would be wonderful! Or maybe you think, ‘you know, I could just give some money to this because it'd be helpful to employ more people for the church so that there's more coordination.’ 

Could you either choose to come and be part of the 4pm and be part of that adventure, or you could choose to say, “I'm going to enable that adventure for us as a church community by staying and saying - God, would you do something in this 4pm?”

We're called to play our part in seeing Croydon come to life, we commend this next step of the mission to you.