A Brand New Newsletter

Church Champions Update #1

Good Morning All,

We hope you’re doing well and that you’re having a great week. You may have noticed that this newsletter looks a little different than it used to, it’s simpler, hopefully nicer to look at, and importantly, we hope it’s more printable. We know that some of you love to print out different newsletters you receive from missionaries, organisations, and friends so help inform your thought and prayers and our previous design didn’t lend itself well to doing that.

It’s an exciting time here at Faith in Later Life, we’ve had lots going on, one of our highlights was the Faith in the Second Half conference earlier this month. In the coming weeks we’ll be able to share more about what happened there with you, as we know that some of you can’t wait to rewatch the conference talks, or see them for the first time. If you couldn’t attend this year, we’re happy to announce that the Faith in the Second Half conference will now be an annual event. Next year’s conference will be held from 09/05/2023-11/05/2023. Click here to find out more!

Faith in Later Life - The Basics

For those of you who haven’t been able to attend our most recent Church Champion Training Sessions, you likely won’t be aware that we’ve started work on a number of courses which will be hosted on the Faith in Later Life website, taking advantage of the brilliant resources and partners we’ve had the pleasure of working with, all so that you can be equipped, encouraged, and also so that you can bring others alongside you to help on the mission God has called you to. As much as we love the training sessions, and are doing everything we can to make sure as many of you as possible can attend those, we know that having two sessions once a month simply may not fit the schedules of many of you. In addition, there are Pastors and leaders all over the country who would love to do more for those in the second half, but simply don’t know where to start, or how to train others for the task. For that reason, we’ve begun with what we’re calling, “Faith in Later Life - The Basics” which will run through—either for an individual or a group—the fundamentals of what it means to serve older people and to live out mission amongst them.

We’ll be sending out regular updates about this, as well as about the courses to come, but if you’d like to know as soon as the course is available, reply to this email and we’ll add you to a waiting list. Also, if you simply can’t wait, click here for a sneak preview of what’s to come.

Training Session May

For those of you who weren’t able to attend, the latest Church Champions training session is now live and available to watch on the Church Champions Hub. You can click here for the link. Racheal Heffer from the Evangelical Alliance came and spoke to us about the latest research from Talking Jesus, an amazing piece of work which has helped shape evangelism in the UK for almost a decade.

We were very privileged to have Racheal come and speak with us as the research is hot off the press and there’s still more to come. If you haven’t yet had a chance, do go and check that out. You can find that by clicking this link.

Prayer Points

We love to say here at Faith in Later Life that we want everything we do to begin and end with prayer. If you want to join us in that, here are some things we’re praying for that we’d love you to join in on.

1. We want to see a Church Champion in every village, town, and city in the UK. It’s a big dream, but one we’re committed to praying into.

2. That the courses we are creating would be well received and would help many current and future church champions to serve the people in their local communities.

3. We want to see revival amongst those in later life in this nation. We’d love to see churches all across the UK take up the call of evangelising to older people, and we want to see God move through care homes, communities, and churches to save those of the second half of life.

If you have any prayer points you’d love us to join in on, please reply to this email or pop a comment in the comments section. Faith in Later Life exists to come alongside and support the mission of local Church Champions and it’s paramount that we do that first in prayer.

Stories

Finally, we’re really thankful to say that the main reason we’ve heard that some of you have been unable to attend training sessions is because you’ve been busy getting to the business of serving! Though we’re certainly working to make sure that you can still attend and be encouraged by the training sessions, we’re still just thrilled to hear that things are up and running again!

We’d love to hear more about what you’re up to though, and we’d also love to share some stories here on the newsletter.

If you’d like to contribute to that, please email us at churchchampions@faithinlaterlife.org , reply to this email, or leave a comment!

Grace and Peace,

Adsum Try Ravenhill