COVID Reshaping

helping to organise and lead worship. Tracy taking on some mammoth catering with her faithful team. Relationships have continued to be a major part of all Presence has done and is still doing. It was during one of the house of prayer conferences in Stoke that I first met Jonathan Anderson and his friend Johnny Tuck. These two young guys were passionate for the Kingdom and lovers of God. Through calls and growing connections, Jonathan invited me to The Gather Festival in the North East of England in the summer of 2017 and 2018. These times felt like another opportunity to stand with others and to serve out of a heart to welcome God’s presence into the land. I think as well as lead worship, I did everything from stewarding to word projection, backing keys, befriending. I also had the opportunity to take with me my eldest daughter Jess, with her husband Tom and our good friends Katie and Kev Britton.

In the years that followed I was able to keep travelling back up to the North East with others from my team at The Beacon, including one of my other daughters, Lily. We helped to lead at ‘Gather nights’ in local churches and later for other friends in the area along the way. God still had a way of opening up new doors

COVID Reshaping

During 2018 and 2019 at The Beacon we were prayerfully considering a reshaping and fashioning for His purposes in the City and beyond. A challenging aspect of this was to be the closing down of our Sunday celebrations in order to clarify our position as a prayer and worship hub and community rather than regular, traditional church community. A couple of weeks after our announcement COVID caused pretty much everything in the nation to be closed down, Whilst it was a shock and a challenge. The timing was very interesting. Suddenly no churches were meeting on a Sunday! Aware of my call still in a place of lockdown, I, along with many others, began to release our worship online. Facebook, YouTube and Zoom became our new ways of pouring out praise into the earth, staying connected and building something new. I’d be leading some days for the house of prayer, some days for the World Prayer Centre plus some other local groups. We also helped to organise and broadcast 24 hours of worship online with musicians from around the city. Closed doors didn’t hinder God, In fact He was teaching us in the process. There were to be two new connections for me over the lockdown days. One was the ‘Hallowed Be Your Name’ group which particularly connects believers in the UK, USA and Canada for nights every month of