Belief

What we Believe

About the Church

St Gabriel's Church is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion - a fellowship of around 85 million Christians under the spiritual leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Certain other churches are in full communion with us, including the European Old Catholic Church, the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran Episcopal Churches, the united churches of the Indian sub-continent, and the Indian Mar Thoma Church. In total we are over 100,000,000 (one hundred million) Christians in fellowship together under the spiritual leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury.


About the Faith

  • We hold to the teachings of the early "Ecumenical Councils" - those gatherings of Bishops from around the world which took place in the days before the Church first became divided into different denominations.

  • We teach the faith received and codified in the 'Catholic Creeds' - that is, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.

  • We believe that God's single greatest revelation of himself to mankind was the Incarnation - the birth, life, ministry, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and we seek to keep Jesus, the Good Shepherd, as our constant focus and inspiration.

  • We also believe in God's continuous revelation of himself to mankind through the guiding work of the Holy Spirit, and we believe that in Confirmation each individual receives gifts of the Holy Spirit particular to his or her ministry and calling.

  • We believe that the Bible contains the revealed Word of God, containing all things necessary for salvation. We hold to the Anglican tradition of faith based upon "Scripture, Tradition, & Reason". A faith informed by the teachings of Scripture, the developed tradition of the Church (under the guidance of the Holy Spirit), and the God-given gift of human reason by which the Church interprets these ancient truths, to proclaim them afresh in each generation.

  • As Anglicans we believe in the government of the Church by Bishops, and in the ordained ministry of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, supported by a huge range of lay ministries, and indeed the individual vocational ministries of each member of every congregation.


About the Sacraments

We celebrate the two Sacraments of Holy Baptism (God's cleansing forgiveness, freely given, through blessed water), and the Holy Eucharist (Jesus' own body and blood, freely given for our spiritual nourishment, through blessed bread and wine); and we hold these great sacraments, commanded in scripture, to be necessary for all people. We also recognise God's use of other sacramental gifts to feed and sustain his church - in particular in the sacramental celebration of Unction (anointing the sick with oil), Confirmation (channelling the gifts of the Spirit), Matrimony (Christian marriage), Holy Orders (Christian ordination), and Reconciliation (the gift of confession with forgiveness of sins).


About People

At St Gabriel's we hold to an open policy of welcome and worship. This means that everybody is welcome at any of our church services. We recognise our own sinfulness, and as such we do not judge others, lest we ourselves be judged. Our worship is open to all people of any gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or creed - we care about people's present and their future, so we do not waste time judging anybody's past.