Dear friends

We are pleased to be able to send you the first Oakwood Church email. We are living through a worrying crisis; hope in Christ and mutual support as a community of Christians is vital to our life together. The ministers met this morning online to share in Morning Prayer (as usual on a Thursday), and made a video of this which was posted on our church Facebook page. The reading for today was Hebrews 10, which included these verses -

"And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching." Hebrews 10:24-25

What an excellent message for this week! As everyone stays at home and keeps social distance from others, we encourage you all to be in touch with each other in whatever ways you can. Particularly, please be keeping in touch with people by phone who you know do not have access to the internet. If you know of anyone in need of support please do let us know so we can arrange someone to phone and/or take help to them. We are greatly encouraged when we talk to people who might be isolated and find that they have already received calls from church friends. Thank you - let's keep this up between us.

As a church we are using our contact system to phone people up, our website and Facebook page to share news and encouragement together, and we are beginning to use Zoom to meet online. The Zoom system allows people with computers, tablets, smartphones and landlines to have meetings together. We will be holding a service in this way on Sunday morning. A second email will follow soon with details of how you can join in with this.

We have created this Oakwood Church email list from those addresses that you have given us permission to use (by being a member of the church and/or signing one of our contact forms). We are learning how to use this system - please let us know how you find it. We know that there are people in our church community who use email but are not yet on the list - if you know someone who would like to subscribe please do ask them to get in touch so we can set that up for them.

We look forward to discovering new ways to be the church family in coming weeks so grow in our ability to look after each other.

Yours in Christ, George and Kathryn