We aspire to be a church where you will find a welcome that is warm and genuine. We believe that a welcome for all was central to the life of Jesus and should therefore be a key feature of any church – and this welcome should be for all people and of all ages. Because of our determination to be a place of welcome we have taken two key steps:-
Our church is Child Friendly meaning it is a place where children are well catered for, valued and safe.
Our church building is registered for marriage services between a man and a woman and we are now registered for same sex marriages.
I’m Nick Jones. I grew up in Bramhall in Greater Manchester, and after studying English at university I worked for an NHS Trust as an information governance manager. I was previously an elder at Bramhall URC, and after feeling called to ministry I began training in 2013. I was ordained and inducted to Heswall URC & St. George’s URC, Thornton Hough in July 2017.
We believe that in our time the Holy Spirit has inspired many gifted Christian song-writers and innovative worship leaders. We seek to employ these gifts from God to enrich our worship and to make it relevant for people today.
We also believe that we possess a rich treasury of hymns and prayers given to God’s people over the long history of the Christian Church. We seek to blend both the old and the new to create balanced worship, which uses and celebrates God’s gifts to every age.
We aspire to be like the householder Jesus spoke of who “brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”
Along with the whole of the United Reformed Church, we believe that the Word of God in the Old and New Testaments, discerned under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is the highest authority for what we believe and do.
The Bible is central to God’s speaking to His people in every age. And God delights in the honest exploration of His Word. He does not require of us a slavish acceptance of what we find in the pages of scripture. They need to be interpreted and applied to situations which those who wrote down the sacred texts could never have imagined.
So we are an enquiring church and we are not afraid to ask difficult questions.
Although the United Reformed Church is one of the smaller denominations, we believe it has an important contribution to make to the larger church and to the life of our nation.
Seeking unity among Christians is part of our DNA
The United Reformed Church came in to being as a result of the uniting in 1972 of the Presbyterian Church of England and the Congregational Church in England and Wales. (Since then, we have been joined, in 1981, by the Churches of Christ and, in 2000, by the Congregational Union of Scotland).
So seeking unity among Christians is part of our DNA. In a world where divisions among people lead to so much bloodshed, Christians demonstrating the way to live in unity is an essential part of our witness. We are proud to be a uniting church that is still seeking ever closer union with other churches.
There are many issues on which the United Reformed Church has taken a pioneering role. We were the first church in Britain to ordain women. (Rev. Constance Coltman in 1917).
We were at the forefront of accepting that people who had been divorced could be remarried in church. And we were the first of the mainline churches in Britain to give permission to local congregations to become Places of Worship where Civil Partnerships could be registered.
The General Assembly meeting in Cardiff in 2014 explored allowing churches that so desired to conduct same sex marriages. That matter was discussed at local church level and we are proud to announce that we are now registered for same sex marriages.
It is part of who we are to be a radical, progressive church. We recognise that we are on a journey and that the truth never stands still.