Bradwell St Barnabas – About Us
Welcome!
At St Barnabas we feel privileged that the church and its churchyard have been part of community life in Bradwell for many generations. We treasure our connections with the community, through traditional services such as Christmas and Remembrance, as well as through activities like Community Cafés, Ladies’ Fellowship Group and the popular St B’s Baby Group.
Whether you have just moved to the area, are a visitor to the village or have lived in Bradwell all your life, we hope you will feel welcome at St Barnabas. We meet most Sundays in church for worship, and share our Vicar, Louise, with St Peter’s, Hope and St Edmund’s in Castleton.
Our worship style is fairly traditional; most services include communion. However we have introduced a Worship Together service on the first Sunday of each month, that is short, relatively informal, and encourages interaction. This service is still evolving, and we’d love your feedback. We also have one service a month, on the fourth Sunday, that is a Benefice Celtic based service, which takes place outdoors from April to September and indoors in chilly months.
We seek to extend a warm welcome to all those who visit, whether joining us for worship or simply taking time to enjoy the peace and tranquility of St Barnabas during the week. We pray that all those who visit will find something of God in our church community, in the building itself or in its surrounding grounds. The church is open every day from 10am-4pm.
We feel strongly that St Barnabas belongs to everyone, as God welcomes all. If you have suggestions about how we could improve our service and witness to the community, or could better meet your needs, we would love to hear from you.
If you would like to receive our Benefice weekly newsletter via email, which contains details of services, news and notices, please email Jane (Churchwarden) on: churchwarden.stb@gmail.com or phone 01433 621172.
You can also use the links below to find out details of our service times and all our events.
Monthly letter from our Vicar.
Louise’s Message for March 2025: Darkness
I am one of those people who really appreciate the mornings and evenings gradually getting lighter at this time of year. Before Christmas I regularly find myself counting the weeks, and then the days, until we are past the shortest day. And as we move towards Spring, I find myself saying to myself, ‘Soon it will be light at …..’
Yet, unless I am driving, I actually rather enjoy the dark. At one of the places we used to live, a deeply treasured activity was to walk our dog to the next village, and then turn off my headtorch and walk the mile or so back home along the river bank in the dark, with just enough starlight to
make the slightly lighter path show up, so that I didn’t fall in the river! And most of my favourite places are places far from artificial lights; places where the nights are dark enough to really see the stars; places where I can gaze upwards for ages, with more and more stars becoming visible as my eyes adjust, places where the Milky Way really shows up as a broad, lighter stripe across the night sky.
When the biblical writers searched for ways to describe the indescribable, when they tried to find ways to say what God is like, what Jesus is like, one of the images they chose was light. St John, for example, wrote: ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all’ [1 John 1: 5]. That imagery of
light being associated with goodness and hope, and darkness being associated with badness or difficulty has become rooted in Christian culture and tradition.
Fortunately there are also many places in the Bible that remind us that the common biblical imagery of light and darkness is just that; just imagery. And imagery is good when it works for us, good when it helps us understand more about God, but best ignored if we don’t find it helpful. I can imagine the writer of Psalm 139, for example, sitting in the quietness of night time, gazing at the myriad of stars, reflecting on the God who created all, and writing, ‘Even darkness is no darkness with you; darkness and light to you are both alike.’ [Psalm 139: 12] The psalmist understood that
we can seek and know God’s presence in the stillness of night, just as readily as in the brightness of day. Indeed, the gospels tell us of many occasions when Jesus went out to meet with God in prayer during the night.
So my prayer for us all is that as the seasons turn, as the nights grow shorter, but also warmer, we find moments to wait for God in the dark stillness and beauty of the night.
Yours in Christ,
Louise Petheram
rev.louise.p@gmail.com 01433 621918
If you would like to sign up to receive the regular newsletters from churches and Christian groups
across Hope Valley, please go to
https://mailchi.mp/f29b1286b3df/2t1gk3uwy2 or email me and I can sign you up.