Café Worship

Café Church activities

HERE at Ruberslaw Church, formerly Bedrule with Denholm with Minto in the Scottish Borders, we have been holding Café Church three times a year since 2013. Café Church is set out around tables in Denholm Village Hall so that when people arrive they can enjoy coffee or tea with biscuits and chat before we begin our worship. This is led mainly by our lay worship group, which consists of eight people.

Our main aim with Café Church is to reach out to those who do not regularly attend the weekly services. At times we have invited specific people. At the first Café Church there was a good turnout of regular worshippers but also a few families with young children.

The interesting thing for us was that the families continued to arrive long after we had started our worship, having understood the ‘café’ part of the invitation. This all added to the friendly, relaxed and informal atmosphere as we bunched up and made space for new arrivals.

Since then we have made a point of saying that although the advertised starting time is 11am, worship actually starts when coffee cups are empty and conversation begins to quiet down. We try not to interrupt the chat because people of different ages value the fellowship and we want to encourage that.

We have tried a number of configurations of tables and seating. Sometimes we move to a different area for worship but sometimes we remain seated round the tables. Some have been more successful than others but the great thing about the village hall is that we are not stuck with pews, so we can experiment. Our congregation, of around 40, is not shy about giving us feedback and we listen carefully to their views.

We try to have an activity each time to engage all ages. This has taken the form of a quiz, singing a song in rounds and breaking into groups to discuss various topics. The most successful have been craft activities such as making masks when we talked about the covenanters and more recently lanterns and ‘stained glass windows’ for Candlemas.

Jedburgh Presbytery provided a training course on leading worship for lay worship group members, led by local ministers. This was very helpful with tips and advice plus some practical exercises.

Sadly, our congregation is now entering a period of vacancy following the retirement of the Rev Douglas Nicol, but we would like to record our appreciation for the encouragement and support we received from him. Douglas gave us the freedom to experiment as well as invaluable advice.

We all feel much more confident about leading worship than when we began. We have all grown in our faith through the discussions we have had in trying to design worship and then by expressing our thoughts aloud to the congregation.

We can only pray that it has benefitted them too.

Finally, we would say, if your Church has a worship group, consider holding a Café Church.

The next Café Church in Denholm Village Hall is on Sunday September 23

We try to have an activity each time to engage all ages. This has taken the form of a quiz, singing a song in rounds and breaking into groups to discuss various topics.

This article appears in the June 2018 Issue of Life and Work

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