As London grew and suburban development spread from Putney towards Richmond in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this parish found that an increasingly large proportion of its population lived at some distance from the parish church, St Mary the Virgin at Mortlake. Christ Church and All Saints were built in response to this changing situation, and the worship of God began at All Saints in 1929 on All Saints’ Day, 1 November.
This social and historical context is not unconnected with Spirituality: as a Christian church and as the Christians gathered within its walls All Saints exists, of course, primarily for the worship of God; but we are here, too, to serve the community in which the church sits. The greater part of the congregation at All Saints lives within a fifteen-minute walk of the church.
As a Christian church, All Saints is dedicated to the worship of God whom we understand to be a Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Churches may be many things, but they are all tents in the desert of this world, houses in which we give thanks for Jesus who is Emmanuel (‘God-with-us’), and places in which worship, adoration, prayer, lament, and thanksgiving are offered with a regularity that offers a fixed point as the decades pass, history unfolds, and the world changes.
In common with Anglicans across the world our Christian faith is rooted in Holy Scripture, set out in the Creeds, and nourished in the Sacrament of Holy Communion (also termed the Eucharist). As disciples of Jesus, we believe that he leads us – in good times and in bad – all the days of our life, and that it is in and through him that we have a dwelling-place with God. We trust that Jesus gives the Holy Spirit to each Christian and that, as we give time to our faith and as we faithfully walk with Jesus, we grow in our awareness of his faithfulness to us and to where he is leading us. As Christians we understand Jesus to be the Light of the World, and we pray for the courage to walk in his light each day of our lives.