First Sunday reflections Part 2

Please see the earlier post for reflections and impressions of our first experience at Whitefield church. In the evening on June 1 we made our way to The Bridge Methodist Church. It is in a district of Manchester known as Radcliffe. The church is located in the heart of that community and used as a community center for many activities. Its congregation is a bit of a mixture of ages and its worship style was very different from what we experienced in the morning at Whitefield. While Whitefield used very traditional liturgy for its worship, The Bridge utilized power point to project its hymns on a screen. The worship space has been modified from its previous state. It was a large sanctuary seating 1000 people with a three story pipe organ. About 20 years ago they did something I have never heard of and might have difficulty describing. If I don't paint the picture well, comment back and I will try to clarify. They enclosed the upstairs balcony area and made a portion into a mini-gym (about a half court basketball size). With the other portion of what was the balcony they made classrooms. Today, those classrooms house some computer labs for student work and tutoring. The Bridge has a youth ministry as well.
The downstairs part of the sanctuary was also divided with one portion made into a fellowship area and another the new revised worship space. The worship space now has modern sorts of pews (rows of hard plastic seat and back with cushions) and the space altogether seats probably 100-130. There is now an electric organ and a piano which serve as the accompainment. The old stairwell to the balcony connects all of this but they have also added an elevator.
The musicians are very good. In worship, there was clapping and singing that was "rousing,", a common British descriptor.
There was not as much structure to the service as in Whitefield and much in the way of worship order is left to the preacher or speaker for the evening (the circuit does have several lay speakers that rotate in regularly).
After evening worship we headed to the once a month community youth service that our Methodist youth attend. It is multi-denominational and rotates from church to church each month. Held in Christ Church (Anglican), a beautiful sanctuary that reminded us of St Paul's Houston, worship was led by a praise band and a speaker who was converted to the Christian faith in the Bridge Youth group and is now a youth leader at another church.
There is so much more to share but I'll leave it at that for now.