Welcome to Wokingham Methodist Church

We are now part of the Blackwater Valley Methodist Circuit, formed by the merger of our previous circuit, the Berkshire Surrey Borders Circuit, with the circuit to the south of us, the Hants-Surrey Border Circuit, effective from 1 September 2025.

Our previous minister, Revd Catherine Bowstead, has retired.  We welcome her replacement Rev Wes Hampton, from 1 September 2025.

Starting on Sunday 21^st September, evening service (with Holy Communion) will resume on the third Sunday of each month at the new time of 6.15 pm (new time chosen so you can park in the Rose Street car park without having to pay both an afternoon fee and an evening fee).

We now aim to open Little Fishes every Thursday throughout the year when Café Mosaic is open - including school holidays, but not Christmas/New Year.

Future worship and recorded services are on this page.

10.30am Morning Worship - Mrs Doreen Murgatroyd

 6.15pm Holy Communion - Rev Wes Hampton

This was our Easter Cross decorated on Easter Day 5 April 2026

from Kim Tame

Dear friends

No artificial additives?

As if technology hasn't gone far enough, we now face the prospect of Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking a bigger part in our lives.

I should start with a warning; this article has been assisted by Copilot and Perplexity.

We can't ignore the challenges now posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) - it's already here and making an impact.  I already use AI for research; though I check everything, since it can produce odd and inaccurate results.

But surely in that most traditional of environments, the church, AI could not have more than a marginal role?

So I asked Copilot - the AI that comes with the Edge browser - what it can do for the church. It told me about the help it can give with social media, automated messaging and personalised content recommendations.  How it can help with Biblical research, history and theological discussions.  How we could improve our scheduling and manage our donations and communication.

Then it told me about the challenges; that we could lose the personal touch and spiritual discernment in human relationships, and not least, that AI, in the way it collects and organises information, could be passing on false information.

It even came up with a case study; a small church in Switzerland, which temporarily swapped the usual confession with a priest for a multi-lingual bot and a hologram of Jesus.

The program was trained with scripts so that it could give appropriate responses - in 100 different languages. Two-thirds of the people who came to the AI confessional reported a positive experience, while others found the experience to be two-dimensional and repetitive.  At the end of the trial period, the project was not continued.

Could AI write a sermon?  I had to try.  For this experiment, I tried two widely available AI browsers; Perplexity and ChatGPT.  I told them which week of the lectionary I wanted, and asked it for some sermon themes and illustrations.

So far I'm not impressed - Perplexity produced a string of platitudes, with the odd sentence that I quite liked.  ChatGPT did slightly better, with a good sermon outline but fairly bland content.

I think I'll stick with thinking and writing for the moment.

Kim Tame

from Rev Wes Hampton

Dear Friends,

Easter is at the heart of the Christian story.  The resurrection of Jesus enabled people to understand his teaching and death, and to recognize his continuing presence with them.  It brought the Holy Spirit into their lives, empowering them to proclaim good news in the face of apparent defeat.  Without Easter there would have been no recollection of the ministry of Jesus, and no sharing of his Good News.  With Easter, we have all this and so much more.

Easter is at the heart of our stories.  Christ’s resurrection gives us confidence in his claim to have come “that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10 NRSV)  Such life begins with a group of disciples encountering the risen Christ, who are then transformed from a cowardly huddle into an evangelistic team.  Like the two who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, Jesus’ followers turned their focus from the sorrow of Jesus’ death to the joy of his new life.  Life experienced “abundantly” is rooted and bears fruit in the present. It also goes further to a relationship with the risen and exalted Christ in his kingdom.

Is such abundant life visible in our lives?  And, since life involves growth, do we see this life that Jesus has inaugurated spreading in this world?  Almost certainly, we shall feel that the answer is “Yes and No”:  there are signs of life if we look hard enough for them, but we sense that there could and should be more.  What needs to be invigorated in our own lives?  Not every change needs to be dramatic – with Easter the regular day of worship moved from Saturday to Sunday, which is hardly earth-shattering – but if our relationship with God seems stale, if our inclination to pray or to worship has declined, if we expect little of life, then we might need to allow the Good News of Easter to stir us up once again.  Easter roused a small group of people: now their message has reached every continent.

Wes

Some previous Pastoral Letters are available here.