Jesus-shaped church

We ‘re on a journey to become a Jesus-shaped church, full of Jesus-shaped people, making a Jesus-shaped difference to the lives of our members and communities. We want to share that journey with you!

A journey to becoming:

01

jesus-shaped church

We want people to experience us as Good News just as he was, because we share Jesus’ priorities .

Learn More →

02

jesus-shaped people

We want to see Jesus more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly to be recognisably like him.

03

jesus-shaped difference

We want to proclaim hope, respond to people’s needs, challenge injustice and heal our planet.

04

come and share our journey

Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome. We’d love to meet you!

Albion is:

  • A congregation that lives locally and thinks globally, with weekly services Sunday 10.30am.
  • A welcoming space – whoever you are, and wherever you are on life’s journey.
  • A safe space, where you’re free to be who you are.
  • A challenging space to wrestle with what it means to follow Jesus today.
  • An honest space to share questions and issues
  • A diverse space where difference is celebrated.

Here’s what you’ll find

Come to Albion and discover us for yourself – we’d love to get to know you!

The church is the people!

We’re a welcoming, exhilarating, interesting, open and sometimes infuriating bunch from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences. You’ll fit in!

A deep, radical, biblical faith

We aim to go deep in our discipleship of Jesus – a rich spirituality and vital relationship with God, nurtured by biblical preaching, study and prayer.

Radical welcome

God’s love is unconditional. We celebrate your identity whether you’re straight, cis or LGBTQIA+. We’re proud to offer same-sex marriage.

Justice, peace & the future of creation

The pursuit of justice, peace and the future of creation is part of the Good News about what God has done in Jesus. Activism is a vital part of our faith.

Meet our Ministry Team.

The talented folks who minister at Albion

David Hey

Church Secretary

Gillian Lewis

Church Treasurer

Joe Aspin

Chair of Building Committee

Margaret Frost

Weddings & Baptisms

John Scott

Lay Preacher

Ann Hewson

Pulpit Supply

Colin Bell

Caretaker

Olivia Ransley

Grants

Derek Sharples

Organist

What we believe

Welcome!

You’ll hopefully discover that faith for us is not about doctrine – some sort of “theological exam” that needs to be passed – but about how we live in the world today as followers of Jesus. Saying what we believe is therefore far more about how we understand the biblical stories of God and our world.

Of course, it’s possible to read and understand stories differently. We value the different understandings we all bring. If there’s one thing we all agree on, it’s the stories that shape our faith. At the centre of those narratives are the gospels, just as Jesus is the central figure of our faith. We read them through a mission and discipleship lens that assumes the writers’ purpose is to call us as readers to a life of what following Jesus in today’s context means.

We offer you these paragraphs about what we believe as an invitaton to a conversation about what difference faith makes to you, not an attempt to tell you what you ought to believe.


God

God is not only the creator of all that is, but the Great Lover who will not be put off or prevented from ultimately turning this world into the place it was intended to be from the very beginning. We know this through Jesus, God’s Son, whom God sent to save the world from being enslaved to the powers that trap and chain us in an endless cycle of despair, destruction and death (John 3: 16-17). Jesus is God’s gift of salvation for all of created reality. We discover in Jesus that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more, nor is there anything we can do to make God love us less. If we want to know just how much God loves us, we look to the Good Friday cross of Jesus, where we see Jesus giving his life so that creation might live. This is what we discover on Easter Sunday, when God raises Jesus from the dead through the Holy Spirit: it is the birth of the New Creation.


Jesus

Jesus didn’t come to show us the way to heaven; he came to bring heaven down to earth! That’s what he teaches us to pray: “May your will be done here on earth in exactly the same way as it is in heaven!” Following Jesus – discipleship – means living differently to make this world more and more “heavenly”. It’s what Jesus called “the Kingdom of God”. It meant prioritising the needs of the poorest, the religious outcasts and those on the margins. It also mean challenging the rich and powerful – the people who get to say how our world works and make sure it benefits them. That was what got Jesus crucified. It’s also how he expects us to live and why he says “The only way you can become my disciple is to put aside your own interests and priorities, take up your cross, and follow me!”


Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit is God’s very Life and Presence. If Jesus is God’s bodily presence in the world, the Holy Spirit is God’s means of being present in non-bodily form. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Holy Spirt is supremely the inspirer of the prophets: when the priests fail to call out to the king, the rich and the powerful for corruption and injustice (usually because they are collaborating in order to get rich themselves, or to avoid angering the king), the Spirit calls and inspires to say, “Thus says the Lord…” At Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit comes upon him and empowers him in his ministry and mission of healing, exorcising evil spirits and teaching. When Jesus is murdered on the cross, it is God who raises Jesus from the dead. And at Pentecost, 40 days later, the Holy Spirit descends on and remains with the disciples just as she did on Jesus. The Holy Spirit fills us with the Life of God and empowers us to minister, preach and share in God’s missiom of transforming the world into the Kingdom of God.


Church

The church is a community of disciples of Jesus who follow in order to “see him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly”. There are lots of ways of defining the church, but the way that Jesus defined it was by how faithfully and obediently we live, behave and act like him. Paul talks about the church as the Body of Christ – the walking presence of Jesus among us today. The church is most faithfully the church when it is most recognisably like Jesus. That’s challenging: it means that it is possible to be the church and yet behave in radically unchristlike ways – to be part of that from which the world needs saving, rather than a living example of what the Kingdom of God will be like. We are most recognisably like Jesus as we grow more and more like him and engage with him in his mission of transforming this world into the Kingdom of God.


Discipleship & Mission

Jesus was Jewish. He saw his own ministry as a prophetic renewal movement – he didn’t come to replace Judaism by starting a new religion (Christianity). He didn’t come to found a new religious institution (the Church). Nor did he come to teach us the “right things to believe”. He didn’t come to make us religious, or to teach us how to make sure we go to heaven when we die. He came to save us by transforming this world into the Kingdom of God – the place it will be when God is loved, worshipped and obeyed. What is distinctive about Jesus in relation to the Judaism of his day is the way he interprets what it means to “love God with heart, soul, mind and strength and love our neighbour as we do ourselves”. For Jesus, truly loving God (whom he called “Daddy” – a shockingly intimate term) meant seeing our neighbour as though we were looking in a mirror or at our own families. Very particularly, it meant prioritising the people who were always ignored, used and missed oit on any good thing going: the poorest, most marginalised people of his day. When God was in charge, he said, those were the people who would go to the front of the queue. Discipleship is the process of being formed to become more and more like Jesus in his relationship to God and the rest of creation. And mission means changing the way the world works: serving people by responding to their needs and difficulties; confronting injustice, oppression, absue of social, religious, political, economic and military power; inviting people to commit themselves to following Jesus and discovering the very Life of God; and all of this in the face of the climate catastrophe that threatens to annihilate our existence.


Do you want to contribute to the work of albion united reformed church?

Use the link below to make a donation to either the Church Fund or the Building Fund