About
Vision & Values
Christians have been meeting on the site of St Bartholomew's for almost 800 years.
It’s been a long and varied journey, with ups and downs along the way, but throughout, Jesus Christ has been a sure and constant foundation.
Today we’re a diverse and growing community, united in a vision for people to be drawn into relationship with Jesus, built up in their spiritual lives, and sent out in service to our community and the world. We’re passionate about reaching out to those around us with the good news of Jesus, and passing on this good news to generations to come.
We know we’re not the finished product, but we hope you’ll come and join us on our journey, as we gather week by week to worship God, grow together as a church family, and learn together to live out our love for God and His world in all of life.
On the rest of this page, you can find out a little bit more about our ‘DNA’ as a church, the things that are most precious to us, and the sort of church we’re aspiring to be, as God works in and through us.
Our vision
Words like “vision”, “values” and “strategy” can feel like empty buzzwords. We try to use them as a sketch map to guide us, rather than a blueprint to follow precisely:
Our values
1. Renewing worship
“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” (Augustine of Hippo)
We are convinced that to worship God is to live out our central calling as human beings. At the same time, the tragedy of the human condition is that we now no longer seek God as our highest and greatest good. Yet the wonderful heart of the Christian message is that God hasn’t left us lost and far from Him; instead, He has come looking for us in His Son. Our weekly worship seeks to make this wonderful story the liberating, controlling reality in each of our hearts, so that we live it out in our lives across the rest of the week.
2. Faithful teaching
“For Holy Scripture is the fountain and well of truth: which they that be thirsty, draw and drink from; it is the school of wisdom, wherein the true wisdom of mankind is learned; it is the heavenly bread of our souls, wherewith we be nourished and fed to eternal life.” (Thomas Cranmer)
At the heart of our worship is listening to Scripture, trusting God to speak by His Spirit as we engage with attentive minds and obedient hearts. Through weekly preaching, small group study, and regular courses and books, we joyfully receive the Bible as God’s Word, honouring it by seeking to be hearers and doers of what we read there.
3. Honest community
“When the church is functioning as it should, it becomes a family that welcomes the outcast, heals the broken, and loves the unlovable.” (Tim Keller)
4. Sacrificial mission
“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none; a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” (Martin Luther)
We rejoice in the extraordinary freedom won for us by Jesus Christ, and we now seek to use that freedom to serve our world in every way we can. Above all, we accept the privilege and responsibility of representing Jesus as His body, living and speaking the gospel in every way we can so that all those around us – friends, neighbours, colleagues, classmates – might find life in Jesus as we have.
5. Public faith
“We are not born for ourselves, and the end of our existence is to live for others.” (John Calvin)
Through all that we are and do as a church – from our worship and communal life together, through to our individual lives and walks with the Lord – our desire is to live confidently as disciples of Jesus Christ, faithfully and joyfully meeting all the challenges of living for and representing Him in this time and space in which we find ourselves.
If these values sound like ones you’d like to share in – or if anything in them makes you want to find out more – please do join us!
There is a range of different groups and activities happening throughout the week at St Bartholomew’s; click one of the links to discover more about what goes on.
If you’ve joined us recently, we would love to get to know you. Please get in touch to say hello, so we can help you get involved with church life here.
