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 - Rev Wes Hampton

 6.15pm Holy Communion - Rev Wes Hampton

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

from John Williams

I do like Isaiah chapter 40.  In the 6^th Century BC, God’s people were in exile in Babylon and the prophet Isaiah was trying to encourage them and prepare them to return to their own land.  They were in the midst of a pagan culture, maybe even tempted to worship foreign gods as idols.  Maybe they had even forgotten who their God was.  In this chapter the prophet was giving them a message of hope.  (Can you read the words “Comfort ye my people” without the music of Handel’s Messiah running through your head?)  His message was based on his realisation of God’s power and greatness.  Supremely for Isaiah their god was the Incomparable God.  Isaiah reminds the people of this by describing their God.

He was the Lord of creation and so much greater than nature in all of its wonder and immensity.  He was supreme among the nations and in control of powerful rulers.  He was a God who was able to work through history – how relevant this thought is today with all the upheavals in the Middle East.  He even commanded the comings and goings of the stars themselves and even knew how many stars there were and called each one by name!

This was their God and this is our God.  Isaiah ends the chapter by reminding them, and us, that for all his greatness and power, God is not remote.  He helps us all, whether we are rising to the heights or plodding along in our everyday lives.  And we, 2600 years later, have more; for we have seen God in Jesus Christ; who is risen and is alive today, helping us wherever we are and whatever situation we are in.

John Williams

from Rev Wes Hampton

Dear Friends,

What does the month of May mean to you?  Is it just a page in the calendar, thirty-one days of springtime, with a couple of bank holidays to get us through to the summer?  Or does it have a character of its own that makes it, in our thinking, somehow different to April or June?

Thomas Hardy, in his poem Afterwards, wrote “… the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,/Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk …”.  I cannot say that that is what first comes to my mind at this time of the year, but for Hardy it was important not only that he appreciated the fine details of seasonal changes, but that others recognized his awareness of nature.  This man, who died nearly a century ago, is remembered for his novels and poetry, but he hoped to be known as someone who noticed the seasonal emphasis of nature’s handiwork.

This year, most of May falls in the season of Easter.  We recall the accounts of the risen Christ appearing to his disciples, and of their varied responses.  For the first followers of Jesus, Easter is not a time of automatic and unquestioning faith, but of growing acceptance of the new thing that God had done.  Do we stop to see all this?  There is a danger that we brush past those stories which we have heard so often as easily as we travel oblivious to the “glad green leaves”.

Furthermore, we might well ask, when we do stop to take in the enormity of the Resurrection, and the promise of life that it brings?  Does anyone see that we are touched by all this.  Or, in Hardy’s words, will people say of each of us “He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”?

It is May – a time of verdant growth, and of spiritual life.  Do we notice, and can anyone tell?

Wes

Some previous Pastoral Letters are available here.