Last Christmas Revd Steve Miles from Ringwood Benefice felt prompted by God to call his churches to pray every day. Initially the numbers of people praying together were small, but then around Easter time, amazing things started to happen.
He explains, “I was visiting family in Devon and we were walking around my uncle’s farm, and I had a real sense of God saying to start praying, so when I came back after Christmas on 7th January, we started a prayer meeting every day. January through to Easter three or four gathered and then Easter came along and it was quite extraordinary. Last year’s Easter service had 90 people and this year it was about 280 people, which was quite astonishing.”
The church ran an Alpha course which was attended by around 30 people, many of whom had no connections with the church. More people began joining the gatherings to pray and congregations at St Peter and St Paul in Ringwood were also growing. In the last year the Sunday congregation has risen from around 20 people to over 100.
Revd Steve joined the Ringwood Benefice in 2024. He said, “I’ve always said ‘are we trying to control everything?’ or ‘are we willing to create the space to let God do what he wants to do?’ and I think that’s where we are in our journey now. It’s a bit of a wild ride because you don’t necessarily know what every day or week is going to hold. You pray for your church to be a place where the hurting, the broken, the lost, the marginalised can come and find healing and then suddenly you find that the hurting, the broken, the lost, the marginalised are the ones who are turning up. So, it’s been an amazing journey of learning how to love like God calls us to, in a way that isn’t always comfortable.”
Nicola Lambley joined the Alpha course in June. She is also among nearly 50 people taking part the church’s ‘Practising the Way’ course. She is being baptised later this month. She said, “I am new to Christianity, so I was exploring churches. I’ve always known this church throughout my life but never been to a service here. I walked in one day, and they were the most welcoming, lovely people and I haven’t stopped coming since. I’m excited about being baptised. It’s been on my heart for a while, and then the Alpha course cemented it, and getting to know the Bible and Jesus as well. I am hungry and thirsty to learn, and Revd Steve has put on all these courses, and he’s done a lot to try and feed that hunger that a lot of us have got, not just me.”
24-year-old Maddy Warmer, who is a student at Bath University, also took part in the Alpha course. She said, “I had wanted to get into church for a couple of years. I definitely had some nudges along the way. My life at the end of last year wasn’t in a good shape and I felt like someone was opening a door for me and knocking me in certain directions. I moved home for some work and I contacted the church, who told me about the Alpha course that was starting the next week. I joined that, and it has been a life-changing experience for me and a very emotional ride. I think love is the best way to explain our community, especially within the church. We pray for the community, we pray for one another and it’s brought me a lot of joy and happiness in my life right now.”
Maddy is one of a growing number of young adults who have been led to the church. A newly established young adults group sees around 15 and up to 20 people attending each Sunday.
Callum Rylance, who is 24 years old, has been coming to St Peter and Paul for four weeks after being invited by people he met in the community. He said, “I’d tried to figure out a lot of things by myself over the last couple of years and made good progress, but I’d never quite pulled it all together and I was feeling a bit lost. Then I came here and they were speaking of things I’d already learnt, but in a more cohesive way. The more I come back, the more I learn and the more the little bits of knowledge are being pulled together into wisdom. It’s bringing me greater peace, a sense of ease and connection with other people as well.”
Around 50-60% of the growth in numbers is from people who have felt called back to worship in Ringwood, but 30 to 35 people have come with no faith background.
Revd Steve added, “In the last three weeks, we’ve had four young lads who just walked off the street and that same pattern has been happening for the last six months. The phrase that we’ve talked about within the ministry team is that it feels like we’re hanging on to the back of God’s coat-tails, not sure of what’s happening but just turning up with an expectancy to be open to whatever he does.”
St Peter and St Paul in Ringwood has a traditional service on a Sunday morning and twice a month holds an evening service called The Well, with a time of worshipping, a talk and space for people to pray and be prayed for. Numbers there have increased from around 15 to 80.
Peter Vargeson retired to Ringwood in 2017 after being vicar of Bursledon and helped establish The Well. He said, “The biggest change has been when Stephen arrived, he was very insistent on biblical preaching. We preached our way through John. We preached our way through Galatians, thinking hard about what being a Christian means and how we encounter Jesus. In John, Jesus says to the disciples, ‘if you want to know what’s going on, come and see’ and people have come here to see and have stayed. It’s so powerful to see God at work. It’s a new freedom here and a new family being built. We do this service twice a month. Our other services are more traditional, but in a much more relaxed style now, wanting to be open, wanting to be invitational, wanting people to have the opportunity to come and see.”
James Swyer has been attending St Peter and St Paul for around nine years and has witnessed the changes. He said, “You can see both high church and more expressive church as well, but you’ll see the same faces at both, which has been really encouraging. We run a variety of different events in the morning as well, study groups and prayer sessions and there are different things that have made this space, and this community feel more welcoming to people.”
St Peter and St Paul has also seen children returning into the church family. A year ago, there were no children in church but now it has a Sunday children’s group and a toddler group on a Tuesday morning which welcomes around 50 people each week.
The church says it has responded to the growth with a daily commitment to pray together. 10 to 20 people now meet each day. They say they have an openness to fresh ways of thinking and doing and a boldness to open conversations about Jesus.
Revd Steve added, “It’s not that things have massively changed in one sense. It’s only in the last six weeks for example I’ve stopped wearing my robes on a Sunday morning, although I still wear a suit. But there’s a clear focus that regardless of our churchmanship, Jesus is at the centre of everything we do, and the bible has become front and centre of everything we do. We’re not just here to engage with a thought of the day for five minutes but to really open up the word and to get to know it and wrestle with it.
“In some of the series teaching we’ve done, people have said they’re finally seeing the dots connect. People who may have only gone to church once a month, because that was when the service was in their rural church, are now coming to church every week because they want to know the next bit of the story and so putting a teaching sermon at the centre of the service has transformed people’s understanding of their own faith.”
Links have been strengthened with other churches in the town through Churches Together in Ringwood. Church leaders regularly meet and prayer and there are joint services. They jointly fund a Christians Against Poverty meeting and around three times a year gather together for one big worship night and to pray for the town.
Revd Steve said, “In John 13, Jesus washes Judas’s feet and Jesus was willing to do that for Judas knowing that he was going to betray him, and we have the realisation that firstly we’ve got to love each other like that, before our community has any hope of seeing the love of Christ, because it’s by our love for one another, that people will know that we’re his disciples.
“It’s been if anything a crash course in learning how to love each other through the difficulties and the tantrums that people naturally have when things change or they’re not the comfortable way that they’d like, but I think we can let Jesus in knowing that he will change everything and knowing in him is life and life in all its fullness.”
St Peter and St Paul is one of six churches in the Ringwood Benefice. Some of the more rural parishes are also seeing growth. The toddler group at St John’s in Poulner has seen numbers rise and people there are gathering to pray.
Revd Steve concluded, “when you pray, things start to happen. When you pray for the hurting, the lost, the marginalised, the broken in your community to come, suddenly you’ll find they’ll start turning up on your door and you’ll have to deal with things that you never thought you’d have to deal with but that’s what the church is called to be. One thing that we’ve been driving home as a benefice is that we exist is to worship God and to glorify his name. Even though we don’t always have a clear plan of what’s going on, I believe that if you honour God, God will honour what you’re going to do and so take off the handbrake and just let him steer what’s going to happen.”
