Welcome to the website of Uplyme Church. We hope you find what you’re looking for!
A church isn’t a website, no matter how flashy or informative. No, a church is a group of ordinary people, from all backgrounds and walks of life, who have chosen to follow Jesus. In Uplyme, we are doing our best to love and serve our local community and the wider world. This is the mission of God, and this is why our strapline is joining in with the mission of God.
Church is a group of ordinary people, from all backgrounds and walks of life, who have chosen to follow Jesus
Who are we and why do we exist?
When people think of church, all sorts of images pop into their heads – boring, irrelevant, old, out-dated, deadly, and so on. Well, yes, sometimes church services can be those things. We hope that when we get together that we are never boring or irrelevant! That is why we call our gatherings worship and not services. But the church isn’t just about worship on Sundays, far from it. We are church who are called to be outward-looking, to serve or bless our local community. We happen to gather on Sundays for worship, encouragement, and a good chat.
The Mission of Uplyme Church
We have five areas of mission – or five ways in which we seek to bless the local community and the wider church. These are:
- Families
- Schools
- Pastoral Care
- The Poor
- Other Churches
Everything we do hangs off these five areas of mission – our worship, the development of our building, our small groups, our prayer life, and so on.
But aren’t evangelicals wacky?
Ha ha, well, let’s face it, some are. It might be worth unpacking a bit of what evangelical means. The word evangelical has had a bad press recently. Some people connect it with the word evangelism and for others they connect it with fundamentalism and George Bush. The word evangelical simply means Bible-based. We are what is called an open evangelical church (or perhaps even progressive evangelical). This means that we love the Bible and think that it is the inspired word of God – but we don’t take it literally. We are certainly not fundamentalists. We think the Bible needs to be understood in context. For example, we don’t think that women should have their heads covered and remain silent in worship! At all our worship we do a talk based around the Bible – unpacking a theme or topic, applying it and making it relevant for today.