A short video to celebrate Severn Church, Bristol’s 16th birthday in 2025.

One way to depict a church is, you might expect, to draw a building. Severn is a bit unusual in not having a building, but this is also a helpful reminder of how we see church as people drawn together with faith, vision and purpose.

To celebrate the church’s 16th birthday, we started with the idea of depicting a week in the life of the church. Again, that might bring some expected things to mind – what does the church do together? What events are important? What activities do we want to show everyone?

While there are quite a few of those things, it didn’t feel right to portray ourselves mainly as some sort of event hub, with or without a building, because most of our life – including how we experience and practise our faith – happens outside of corporate gatherings.

For me, this brought to mind a strange thing about Christian faith that I think we’ve simply become used to over year, and maybe shouldn’t ignore. We really value special times of gathering, but we also believe that God is everywhere. Sometimes it’s in the everyday, routine things that extraordinary encounters happen, or extraordinary thoughts, prayers or ideas come to mind.

Would we be able to show that in a video?

Dozens of people contributed short shots of everyday and extraordinary moments from their week, and I put them together with a few intro thoughts and a piece of music I wrote (yes, I actually made this one without any AI, just good old fashioned Logic Pro, Reason rack and a few samples.)

Does it feel like an authentic picture of a church to you? It did to us.