Our aim...

Fr Andy eats his hat
Whilst we are serious about our aims, we also aim to have fun too - this is Fr Andy delivering on his promise to eat his hat if we gathered more than the previous year's boxes in the annual shoebox appeal.
St John's is a community which exists for two basic reasons: to worship God and to serve our area. We gather to pray and worship, to draw near to God that God might polish the tarnish off our fragile lives and restore his image in us. The congregation is very varied and mixed, so you'll fit in just fine!

We're keen that people should feel that it's a safe space to come and see - we promise we won't jump on you and make you join something! And we don't claim to have all the answers - but in our faith we've found a framework and friendship with God which is beginning to make sense of life as we experience it. Christians talk about God as a mystery - not a puzzle to be solved, but a relationship to be entered into and an experience to be lived.

We have a feeling that people have often got the wrong idea about God, and our prayer for all who come into contact with St John's is quite simple: we want people to forget the god they don't believe in and discover the God who believes in them.

Our aim is to create an open, 'safe' community where people are encouraged to meet God and respond in appropriate ways. We want to foster mature disciples who live out their faith day to day. Lots of different things flow from that:

  • We think the mass (or Eucharist) is at the centre of what we do and how we pray, because it's what Jesus told us to do.
  • We believe that we are created and called to imitate God - so...
- What we see God doing is what he wants us to do...
- The way God treats us is the way we strive to treat others...
- The way God regards his world and creation is the way we should...
- The way God loves is the way we should.
  • Individually and together we are moulded and formed by the scriptures - click here for more on this
  • We are trying hard to love others as we experience God loving us.
  • We are on a journey together as a community: we don't have all the answers and we may not understand everything, but we stand a better chance of working that out together rather than 'you in your small corner and I in mine'...
  • We strive to be a truly open catholic Anglican church - so not everybody agrees about everything, but together and individually we are trying to 'cling tight to Christ and hang loose about the rest'!

What we believe...

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