Bringing people back to church

Bishop James is urging people to come back to church

The Bishop of Knaresborough took to the streets in order to drive home the message of "Back to Church Sunday".

The Rt Revd James Bell was encouraging people across the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds to return to their local churches for the national 'Back to Church Sunday' event on September 27.

As part of his efforts he joined members of St Peter's Church on the streets of Harrogate to hand out special invitations.

The church had also printed and placed invitation cards in every parish magazine and Canon Tony Shepherd from St Peter's believes it proved successful:

We all need to wake up to the challenge to give urgent attention to developing a culture of invitation, welcome and hospitality. The Right Revd James Bell

"We reckon we had 30 to 40 more people than usual. Some of them we had seen before, but not for a very long time, but a fair few were new faces which is terrific.

"People respond to invitations and this is something we should be doing regularly. We have a once a month service, which is a rock service, and the team that organise it are frequently out on the street giving invitations out to people."

Nearly all the Church of England dioceses, from Truro to Newcastle, took part in this year's event, along with Churches Together in Scotland, the Church in Wales and the Baptist, Methodist, United Reformed and Elim Pentecostal churches.

Anglican churches in New Zealand and Canada also participated, making the event one of the largest co-ordinated evangelism events in recent history.

The theme of 'Back to Church Sunday' for this year was 'Come as you are'.

Writing ahead of the event in the September edition of Together, the Diocesan monthly magazine, Bishop James said:

"We all need to wake up to the challenge to give urgent attention to developing a culture of invitation, welcome and hospitality."

Although Sunday appears to have been successful, Canon Tony Shepherd admits the task now is to keep newcomers engaged with the church:

"We offer 26 services a week and some of them are very different indeed. We hope that people will be able to find something for themselves in that great variety we offer and we hope to be friendly and we hope to be welcoming."