Our story
We began in 2014 with nine adults and a few babies, meeting in a pub in Waterloo. Our aim was to start a church that would be a genuine community in a lonely city, engage intelligently and meaningfully with sceptics, and lay out Christ’s radical demands of discipleship.
Over the course of our short history, it has been thrilling to make new friends, see people’s lives changed in very concrete ways, and to baptise people who have made a decision to follow Jesus. In many ways, the church still feels young, but we have big ambitions to make an impact in London and further afield.
Our hope looking forward is to start many new churches, and to continue the slow and deliberate work of helping each person who comes through our doors discover more about Jesus and his amazing life, and find themselves amidst a family in the heart of the metropolis.
Affiliations
We are in partnership with a network of churches called Advance, which exists to plant and strengthen churches.
While Advance is a relatively new movement, it sits within the broader historic tradition of Protestant Reformed churches, with a strong emphasis on Charismatic renewal.
Beliefs
Basically, it’s all about Jesus.
You may be a sceptic or just undecided about Jesus, so please be assured that we want you to feel completely at ease to come and be part of the church and to journey with others who are working things out just like you. But if you need a primer, here’s the short story.
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Born into a poor family in an obscure village, most onlookers could not have known how much he would change the world. But the story of Jesus begins much further back in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures, the same scrolls he would have read in synagogue as a boy, that predict his arrival on planet earth to begin a revolution. It sounds like the stuff of comics and legends, but when you read the eye-witness testimonies of his friends and followers, you know these are not myths invented by a strange sect. They have the ring of truth.
Jesus captivated and repulsed people. He performed miracles that drew crowds, then he offended them with brutal honesty and drove them away. He could have been forgotten in the annals of history as just another controversial preacher, were it not for one extraordinary event.
After Jesus reached his gruesome death by execution, his followers were dejected. The light had gone out, it seemed, and all their hopes had crashed to the ground. But three days later he began appearing to them alive from the dead. And so he sparked the movement that has now claimed more followers than any other religion or philosophy in the history of the world.
In essence what we believe is this: that Jesus is the Son of God, sent by his Father to be our hope and salvation, put to death in seeming defeat, but actually dying according to a greater plan that was designed to deal with the sickness of our sin. His resurrection from the dead marks his ultimate victory over death, and gives us the certain hope that we too can live with him forever.
While many think this is a story that lacks credibility, it has captivated hundreds of millions of people because of the compelling reality of the Bible as a book like no other, and the very real power of Jesus to work in your life today.
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It has been said about the Bible that it is a book shallow enough for a child to paddle in, and deep enough for an elephant to drown in. It is massively diverse in style and content, but speaks with a single Voice on all kinds of issues that affect your everyday life.
We make it our aim to wrestle with and understand the teachings of Jesus and of the Bible, since there is a vast field of exploration into everything you can think of, from ecology to industry, life to death, money to family, church to creative arts.
We welcome you to come along and find out more.
Statement of Faith
For those who want to understand a quick summary of the core elements of the Christian faith, click here for a succinct one page summary that we would uphold passionately.