About Us
Vision
Love Jesus,
Love Neighbour,
Grow Disciples,
Plant Churches
In 2018 we set out on a new phase of life at St Paul’s Harringay. It was a big step!
We started 2 new services: a 9.30 formal communion service and an 11.00 informal service with children’s activities. We got together the money for a full-time vicar for the first time in 9 years, and welcomed 32 new adults in one go from Christ Church Mayfair. We called it a church ‘graft’, bringing together two different groups of Christians in one church.
Pastor Pete stood up at our Pentecost BBQ and called it a ‘blended family’. It was a phrase that helped us remember that, like when parents marry and bring together children who are already grown, it can lead to arguments, and it wasn’t going to be easy. But it was also tremendously exciting and there was a sense that we wanted to try being a family together, even though we came from catholic or evangelical backgrounds, or some other label.
We started praying church family prayers like, ‘make us one family on mission, treasuring Christ’. And that is the vision that we followed for the next five years. When we started, it seemed like a mountain to climb.
But more recently as we look back, it feels like looking from the top of the mountain. God has done what we asked him to do! In many, many cases we are a family together. We worship together with different styles, but with joint services ten times a year. We take communion together, we pray together, we enjoy Fetes and Christmas and Easter together, we sit round the table at our PCC meetings and take decisions together, we hold money in common together, and we have laughed and cried together.
In short, God has made us a family on mission, treasuring Christ together. Hallelujah!
So What's Next?
What of the next 5-10 years?
We’re wary of making bold plans. God could do whatever he wants. He could shut us down tomorrow. And our situation in the Church of England is indeed precarious. But, after Pete and the Elders spent some months weighing up where God is leading us, and running it past the Church Council, this is what we would like to spend the next years doing:
We want to be a church who
Love Jesus,
Love Neighbour,
Grow Disciples,
Plant Churches
We want to Love Jesus – because loving God is the thing on which hang all the Law and the Prophets, and it is our highest calling.
We want to Love Our Neighbour – because this is the second greatest commandment and we are positioned in a city with a opportunities all around us to relieve suffering, especially eternal suffering.
We want to Grow Disciples – in quantity but mainly in quality, in depth, through Bible teaching, in order that we all might use our gifts to serve God.
And we want to Plant Churches. This is in many ways the big, hairy, bold aim. God has got us to the stage where we are a stable, established church family, no longer threatened with closure. What if we could go and help other demographics, other churches, other neighbourhoods, like we were helped?
So our prayer is that now and in the years to come, we will Love Jesus, Love Neighbour, Grow Disciples, and Plant Churches.
Please pray for us: we need God to make this happen.
Please join us if you would like to. We need help to make this happen.
