OUR FAITH

Christians are followers of Jesus Christ. We believe that the fullest revelation of God we can know is through the life and witness of Jesus, and that by freely giving his life for us on the cross, human beings could come to know and be reunited with God, who Jesus taught us to call and relate to as our loving Father. Through Jesus’s faithfulness death was vanquished and God raised him to new life, where he is alive now, and it is possible for us to know him and to have new life with him forever.

In the upper room on the night before he died Jesus gave himself to his followers at the Passover meal. He gave them broken bread to eat and wine to drink saying ‘This is my body’ ‘This is my blood’, so that they could be his living flesh and blood in the world to carry on his mission. The Body they formed had life breathed into it by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost as that Body went out into the world to seek out and to save the lost.

Eventually that seed became a tree with different branches formed because of the way parts of that body related to one another and themselves: differences such as teaching, language, and geography yet all one in Christ.

We talk about the Church of England or the Anglican Church as being one of those branches which is rooted in the teaching of the first Apostles, yet at the reformation it was able to bring people to know God in the English language for the first time. It enabled people to have a conscious and powerful personal relationship with God to feed that passion for God and for mission in their lives.

The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church, but strictly speaking it is a Communion made up of different national churches around the globe with more than 70 million adherents in 38 Provinces spreading across 161 countries. They share in common the ‘The Five Marks of Mission’.

The mission of the Church is the mission of Christ.

All our churches look to the Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda for our sacramental oversight, our PCC's having adopted resolutions under the House of Bishops declaration on the ministry of Bishops and Priests.