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.
July 2025 A Celebration of Art and Nature
Since Richard and I moved back to Derbyshire ten years ago, summer has become very much linked for us with the traditional Derbyshire Well Dressings. And every year I am amazed and impressed by the skill and originality and creativity of these wonderful ‘natural’ artworks.
I have discovered that there seem to be as many different explanations about the origins and the age of the Well Dressing traditions as there are villages taking part. But back in the roots of the vast majority of these, there usually seems to be something about celebrating and giving thanks for the wonderful gift of water, that we can so easily take for granted until it is in short supply. And as we celebrate the gift of water, it always feels appropriate to me that how well the Well Dressings last is very much linked to the weather, linked to how much moisture is in the atmosphere, and linked to how quickly the boards dry out.
Every year, I love seeing the incredible skill of those who have been making Wells for years, sometimes for decades. But I also especially enjoy seeing the results of the children’s efforts, the Wells produced by those just starting out on this ancient tradition. My own efforts at natural artwork have been very much more modest. As a child, I remember my brother and I creating a model desert out of what was left of our lawn one particularly dry summer. And I remember one summer holiday when we devoted hours to creating pictures using only chalk from the local hills, and dyes of every colour under the sun that we made from local plants and flowers.
I am pretty certain that there is not much chance of me becoming a skilled artist, with natural or any other materials, but what a childhood spent very close to the natural world has given me, is a very deep appreciation of all life, and a very strong sense of how all parts of the natural world are linked and dependent on one another, and a keen awareness of how we are part of the ecosystems that sustain us.
As a Christian, I care about protecting the natural environment because it is the poorest in the world who are harmed first and harmed most by climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution. But most of all I care about protecting the natural environment because I believe that the natural world is created in God’s image, just as thoroughly as humanity is, and that when we damage the natural world, we hurt God, and we destroy part of God’s image in ourselves.
So my prayer for all of us this month is that we would each grow continually in our awareness of the natural world around us, and we would learn to love all creation as we love ourselves. .
Yours in Christ,
Louise Petheram
rev.louise.p@gmail.com 01433 621918
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