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We fast together as a whole church on particular days. If this is new to you, you might find it helpful to watch the video below where Elizabeth talks about what fasting is, why we do it, and how to fast.

In 1985, Steve Thomas was the founding Senior Pastor when Oxford Community Church was planted. Since then, God has led Steve and his wife Lorraine into what we call 'apostolic ministry' in our wider international family of churches, including senior leadership of our Salt & Light International family of churches on four continents.

I like getting things done, and helping others get things done. But over several years God has been recalibrating me, teaching me that a healthy rhythm of life in God includes both times of retreat as well as times of getting things done. (You can read here about what I learned from Aidan, an earlier Christian leader from 635AD.)

Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to report further on the Gift Days in June 2023.  

As a reminder, our 2023 Gift Day season was framed in terms of generosity! God is generous. He wants his people to 'inherit his DNA' of generosity, and for us to seek to foster that culture as a church community. As Senior Pastor Steve said, "These Gift Days are a nudge to get us all into the groove of generosity, even extraordinary generosity: some might start giving regularly for the first time; all are invited to add an offering." 

Steve Jones, OCC Senior Pastor, introduces our founding vision for the church - and how that leads us to prepare for our 2023 Gift Days on Sundays 18 and 25 June, and 2 July.

<< Back to the main page for Gift Days 2023

This page answers some of the common questions you may have about the 2023 Gift Days specifically. More general questions are tackled here, such as 

During the panel on 4 June 2023, 33 questions were asked. We were only able to answer a few in the session, and committed to give brief written answers to the questions here. Similar or overlapping questions have been combined for brevity.

One of a series of blogs from team visits to Bethel Church (Redding, California), a large and well-known church that God is using to serve the body of Christ more widely. See my previous blog here.

In previous blogs I noted some of the really straightforward learnings from my recent trip to Bethel, as well as the first two challenges (risk-taking, and fivefold leadership) that I've had to process more.

Imagine the whole of The King's Centre alive with expectation, worship and art! That's the scale of the healing rooms at Bethel Church that run each Saturday morning. Prayer teams arrive early. They were already expectant and joyful to be there from the off. No one needed to drive the pre-event prayer meeting, but everyone knew how to engage with the Holy Spirit and get in step with him for what he wanted to do that day.