The Chigwell Christian Fellowship started in 1989 when a bunch of otherwise quite normal believers decided that they all wanted the same thing - to be part of a church that was based solely on the teaching of the New Testament. What we did was to draw on scripture alone, and then carefully reject any teachings or practices that originated from those who came on the scene after the apostles and, therefore, after the writings that became the New Testament were complete. Although what we have ended up is, to say the least, a bit different from other churches, we remain confident that we are in line with how the apostles themselves set up churches as recorded in the pages of the New Testament.

There are, at present, around 25 of us in the church and we are just regular everyday Bible-believing Christian folk. We have a mixture of married couples, children and single people, and what we all have in common is that we are trying to follow Jesus the best we can. We long to see people come to know the Lord and for other biblical churches to be raised up, and are thrilled that other such assemblies are indeed coming into being as a result of our influence.

In laying out our beliefs we would, broadly speaking, happily subscribe to the creeds and confessions of faith that have been adhered to by the vast majority of Christian churches through the millennia. We believe in the Trinity - that God exists in the form of Father, Son and Holy Spirit - and that salvation is received by faith in Jesus alone, as a free gift, and because of what He accomplished for us on the cross through His substitutionary death; and we await His future bodily return to earth. We believe the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, to be the inspired and infallible Word of God, constituting our final authority in all matters, whether of doctrine, church practice, family life or personal holiness. Indeed, we believe the Bible to be the last word in regards to just about anything you can think of, and maintain that believers ought to live under its authority, and in obedience to it.

We are, of course, aware that there will be those who would prefer a more comprehensive statement of faith than the one here given, and who would like to see a statement of our position as a church in regards to numerous other areas of biblical understanding. However, our reason for not so doing is twofold:

Firstly, we don’t want to even come close to appearing that we are promoting the erroneous idea that fellowship between believers’ hinges in any way at all on agreement concerning secondary matters of belief. We have laid out our position on that which seems to us to be the irreducible minimum in order to be truly said to be Christian, but feel very strongly that the basis of fellowship between believers is simply that they are seeking to follow Jesus. Secondary issues, including matters such as church practice, don’t enter the picture when it comes to our unity in the faith as brothers and sisters in the Lord.

Secondly, we aren’t posting a comprehensive doctrinal statement as a church because we don‘t actually have one. Our understanding is rather that it is for each individual to struggle through the scriptures and reach his or her own freely arrived at and freely held convictions. Believers should know for themselves what they believe, and why, and it is not for churches to dictate set doctrinal positions or policies. This is not to say that we would tolerate anything so serious as to fall into the category of actual heresy (which we would broadly define as anything which falls outside of the historic orthodox faith as upheld by the general consensus of the Christian Church for the last two millennia), but simply that we recognize there to be many areas of honestly held doctrinal differences between sincere and faithful believers.

Anyway, you will find out a bit more about us as you proceed, and we duly hope that you have an interesting and profitable browse!