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 Monthly message. June 2026 Churches count on nature
Over the years, there have been countless times when I have asked members of prayer groups or small discussion groups, ‘Where do you most / best sense God?’ Over all those years, only once has someone replied, ‘In church.’ The most common answer, by a very long way, has always been, ‘Outside, in nature.’
That answer has never surprised me. I spent my childhood in a tiny hamlet of eight houses, surrounded by miles and miles of arable farmland, long before the days of intensive use of agricultural chemicals that has become the norm today. My childhood hummed and twittered, and hopped and crawled and bounded with the myriad of insects and birds and animals that surrounded us in vast numbers. I understood and knew God through his presence in the wonder and beauty of the natural world around me, long before I became a Christian. I have cherished God’s creation since younger than I can remember, loving all life for its own sake long before I learned to love it because God does.
Over the decades of my Christian journey of faith, I have seen the Church of England gradually rediscovering a truth known to environmentalists world-wide, a truth that was known to our ancestors in faith for most of Christian history, only forgotten a few hundred years ago; that we are part of God’s Creation, unique only in that we have the capacity to love and care for all that God has made, as God does. I have seen the Church of England gradually rediscovering what was known to the writers of Genesis five hundred years before the birth of Christ; that humanity’s unique role is to share with God in caring for and protecting his Creation. In recent years, the Church of England has written this into its Five Marks of Mission, the five characteristics that describe what the Church of England defines as essential characteristics of being a church. The Fifth Mark of Mission is, ‘To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.’ In our global climate and biodiversity crises, we see how care for creation is also inseparable from care for our human neighbours; world-wide it is the poorest and the most vulnerable humans who are impacted most severely by the climate and biodiversity crises.
Each year, in June, the Church of England encourages us to reconnect with the nature that is essential to our well-being and that of our neighbours near and far. The Churches Count on Nature initiative encourages churches and communities to notice and record the species living in churchyards and burial grounds, from wildflowers and insects, to birds and mammals. Details of how to get involved can be found at https://arocha.org.uk/what-we-do/churches-count-on-nature/
My prayer is that even if you do not choose to take part in Churches Count On Nature, we will all find time to simply be still somewhere and take some time to notice and appreciate our non-human neighbours that we share God’s land with.
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.
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