Welcome to our Website!

However you got here – by googling, through a link, or just wandering through cyberspace, it’s good to have you looking at our pages. We’re a medium-sized congregation (about 400) in a large village with a fascinating history. For that matter, we feel we have an interesting history ourselves! You’ll find it by clicking About Us on the side menu.

But what we are really about is to do with the present and the future, as much as the past. As a congregation and parish church (since 1929) of the Church of Scotland, we are a community of people trying to live out the reality of the Christian faith in the real world of the twenty-first century.

Yet we are all shaped by where we came from. When the Relief Church and the United Secession Church got together, in 1847, the United Presbyterian Church quickly became a home for innovative and really quite radical thinking about God. They were the first Presbyterian denomination to make it clear that what they expected from Ministers and Elders at ordination was a subscription to “the substance of the Christian faith” contained in the Westminster Confession, not the whole, seventeenth-century substance of that really quite fierce document! And in scholarship and even liturgy – the way the Church worships – they were surprisingly innovative.

Our spiritual forebears were trying to live out the faith in the real world in which they found themselves. And that is exactly what we’re doing. Faithfulness to the heart of Christianity –  the Holy Trinity as the God of Love, God’s incarnate commitment to us in Jesus Christ, the new shared life we have in Christ through the Spirit, faithful listening for what God is actually saying to us, not the assumption that we already know – these are the things we hope are the foundation of our shared life as a Christian congregation.

And they spill over into an understanding of what we are called to be. A community of at-one-ment, whom Christ has made, and is making, at-one with each other and with God. A community of love and acceptance and risky openness. Of listening to and learning from each other. Some people might call that a “liberal” ideal – but there are people among us who would, and others who wouldn’t, call themselves “liberal” or whatever; labels aren’t helpful. The test is – can we love each other? Anyway, we prefer to see it as a radical vision. We want to journey with Christ, and see where he will take us. We want to be shaped by Christ, and see what he might make of us.

If you feel drawn to this, and maybe to us, we welcome you, along with your questions, and doubts! Faith isn’t certainty. Faith is trust. Doubt is what makes faith trust. We welcome you as you are to this site and to our congregation. Please, take us as we are, and let us know, gently, how you find us. Remember that we are, in Jesus Christ, a work-in-progress…

Which is why I usually sign myself:

Yours in the Adventure of Christ

            Rev. J. Owain Jones