New?
A MESSAGE FROM PASTOR LES
Thanks for checking us out!
All Nations church has a little bit of the flavour of Jesus about it!
Being one of His disciples all those years ago meant that you probably weren’t the sharpest tool in the tool box – the sharpest had been snapped up by the other teaching rabbi’s of the day who were always on the look out for the brightest and the best – a bit like Man United pinching all the best players off Spurs (my favourite team!)
But Jesus specialised in recruiting ordinary guys, working guys, guys with tempers, guys with attitude problems, political activists, some who’d known rejection, but all of them reckoned that being around him was great, and they hoped that some of his greatness would rub off onto them.So much so that they gave up their jobs to spend 3 years travelling around with Him; what a lot of fun that bunch of guys must have had!
And they got to do brilliant things like feeding hungry people, walking on the sea, and healing lots of lepers and sick people
And thats our church. A bunch of regular, ordinary people from many different nationalities, who’ve joined up because you can be yourself with us. We’ll accept you as you are, have a bit of fun with you, get you excited about what Jesus can do in your life and walk with you through your life journey towards becoming that special someone God had in mind when He was forming you in your mothers womb.
We also believe that every single person has lots of talents and gifts waiting to be activated by the Holy Spirit. Once that happens …watch them take off and discovera whole new dimension of life they never knew existed ( the Bible has a name for this – Abundant Life).
We are a happy church and also known to be clappy at times! We don’t mind dancing either…or kneeling, or sitting. Just be YOU, and let God be GOD!
Not many of us have a lot of money so we all give what we can, and somehow we seem to have enough to do lots of things in our local area and in India and Africa. Last summer we sent a team of 17 – 25’s to work at a holiday centre for orphans in Ukraine. Then we sent a teaching team to Romania in September and in the 40 degrees heat of April 2010 sent a team back to India. We won’t pressurise you into giving what you haven’t got, and we won’t raise your hopes and make false promises to you about God making you wealthy if you give a lot of money to us. We don’t believe in exploiting people. We’ll always try and be real and honest with you.
We choose our own leaders from those who’ve obviously got leadership gifts and have been living a strong Christian life for some time. Our leadership team at the moment is a real ‘all sorts’ with English, Irish, Jamaicans, Nigerians, Sri Lankan, St Lucian, Ghanains, representing all age groups and both sexes.
We work with our neighbouring churchs in Clapham Park and belong to what we call Churches Working Together in Clapham Park.
Because we believe that faith should be a personal thing , we don’t baptise people till they are old enough to decide for thenselves that they want to follow Jesus. We then use lots of water in a special pool as a way of symbolising how God gives us lots of forgiveness and burys a persons past and then lifts us up (resurrection) to live a new clean life with God. We once got the nick name the Salvation Navy!
Others call us ‘Baptists’ , and because of that we belong to a network of other churches who have similar convictions to us called the Baptist Union. We also have strong convictions that this marvellous news of Jesus needs to be shared with others so have linked up with an umbrella group for like minded churchs called the Evangelical Alliance.
We use the Good News Bible as we found this modern translation was best for those who didn’t have English as their first language, and we wanted to see everyone able to get into this life changing book.
What I suggest to people is come along for a few weeks and get to know us a bit and see if we are your cup of tea. Some people prefer a more formal church, others like a church where people dress up a bit; some like organ music and a service to last just one hour. You won’t find any of those things at All Nations so you might be happier some where else!
But if you like us, and God starts to lift you up and puts a smile on your face when you are with us, then the next step is to come to one of our Newcomers groups where you can meet Ann & I and find out about what the next step for you might be.
I like our church ; I’ve been coming for 35 years now. I hope you’ll feel at home as well!
Pastor Les
Want to get connected into the church? View our different ministries and choose what’s best for you:
link