We have two church buildings. St Stephen’s dates from 1871. St Wulstan’s is more modern, built in the 1960s. In 2015 we completed a major refurbishment and building project at St Stephen’s which you can read about below.
Building for the Future at St Stephen’s
We want to serve our community with the good news of Jesus Christ for generations to come.
That is why we undertook, way back in 2005, to construct a new two-storey Parish Centre with meeting rooms and offices, together with an attractive entrance Foyer, and to re-order the main Church itself. Thanks to God’s many remarkable provisions, we now have a building which is warm, light, welcoming and ‘alive’ to help us do that better. The project was completed in 2015.
We identified three things that we already do well as a church, and would like to do better: Children’s and Youth work, Outreach and Bible teaching. So we wanted to have facilities that will create more space for our children’s groups, and help us engage better with our community and teach the Bible more effectively.
The names of the rooms in the new building express our various commitments as a church. It was William Tyndale who first translated the New Testament into English. Thomas Cranmer then ensured that the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England was governed by the Bible, and articulated the vital doctrine of justification by faith alone: we are saved not by what we do, nor even by co-operating with God, but solely by trusting in what God has already done for us in the death of his Son. As martyrs, they both remind us that there may be a cost to following Christ.
The great preachers of the Evangelical Revival, George Whitefield and John Wesley, encourage us to pray that God may once again revive this nation, and to believe that he will do so through the preaching of his gospel. The great missionaries, James Hudson Taylor and Helen Roseveare, help us to keep looking outwards and to be committed to world mission – spreading God’s gospel to God’s world.
The original vision for the work remains the same: Jesus said, ‘I will build my church.’ His building project, which is eternal, is to build a people who know him, love him and live for him. Our desire is to have buildings of stone and brick which will serve that goal. We want St Stephen’s to be a place where people of all ages come to know Jesus Christ, grow in that relationship, and go on to serve him here and elsewhere.
Building Phase Photos
Work to re-build the church took approximately 14 months. Here you can see some photos during the project.