Welcome! Whether you’re new to church entirely, or just to our church, we’d love you to join us and we hope that the information on our website helps to answer the questions you may have. If not, please do get in touch; we’d love to hear from you.
Christians believe in a wonderful, loving and powerful God who created the universe and everything in it, including us! We believe he created humans to enjoy the world and enjoy company with God, but we walked away from that friendship and chose to live for ourselves. You may have heard the word ‘sin’, which we use to mean the wrong we do when we decide to live our way rather than God’s way. Because of this sin we became separated from God, and lots of wrong things happened to the world as a result, such as natural disasters and people hurting one another.
However, whilst we left God, he didn’t leave us. We believe he lovingly sent his son, Jesus Christ, to save us from all our wrongdoing. God is perfect, and part of that means he is just. He cannot leave bad things unpunished, but he is loving and wants to forgive. Jesus chose to die a horrible death on a cross in order to take our punishment so that God could completely forgive us and welcome us back. Not only that, but he says if we believe that Jesus has done this then we can have life with him even after we die.
So now, we all have a choice to make – Do we believe that Jesus died for us? Are we willing to accept God’s way of life over our own? Can we trust Jesus with our lives now and after death?
If you’ve never explored these questions, let me encourage you to try. It could just change your life! A great place to start is by joining our next Alpha group, where you can meet people asking the same questions and find out more about what Christians believe.
Church can have lots of expressions. We often celebrate God and what he has done for us by singing and praying; we learn more by listening to Bible readings and a talk, and we support one another by having time to catch up and get to know one another, and helping each other. We are also called to help the community around us. Church is often seen as a building or a service, but really it is the people – the family of God – meeting together.
Rayleigh Methodist Church has meetings on a Sunday morning and a ‘Messy Church’ once a month on a Sunday afternoon aimed at families. There’s also lots of things on during the week which you can get involved with. Have a look around our website and on our social media to find out more.
