The Chigwell Christian Fellowship started in 1986 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. We therefore drew on scripture alone, carefully filtering out and rejecting any teachings or practices that originated from those who came on the scene after the apostles of Jesus were dead and, therefore, after the New Testament was complete. Although this makes us somewhat different from most other churches, we remain confident that we are in line with how the apostles of Jesus set up churches as instructed by the Lord Himself, and as recorded for us in the pages of the New Testament.

Sadly, the church folded soon after the disastrous covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, when it was made actually illegal to hold corporate gatherings, whether in homes or public buildings. However, we are leaving the website up so folk can still avail themselves of the resources it makes available. Over the 40-odd years the church lasted we always longed to see people come to know Him for the first time, and for other biblical churches to be raised up, and we are thrilled that other such assemblies have come into being in numerous other parts of the world as a result of our labours and influence. 

As far as our beliefs are concerned we happily subscribed to the creeds and confessions of faith that have been adhered to by the vast majority of Christian churches throughout the millennia. We believe in the Trinity – that God exists in three Persons in the form of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and that salvation is received, as a free gift, through grace by faith in Jesus alone, as the result of what He accomplished on the cross through His substitutionary and atoning death. We await His future literal and bodily return to earth. We believe that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is the inspired and infallible Word of God, constituting our final authority in all matters of doctrine, church practice, family life and personal holiness. Indeed, we believe the Bible to be the final word in regards to absolutely anything and everything you can think of, and we unapologetically maintain that all 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 to see a much more comprehensive statement of faith than the one here given, and who would like to know our position regarding other areas of biblical understanding. However, our reason for not doing so is twofold:

Firstly, we don’t want to promote the erroneous idea that fellowship between believers’ hinges in any way on agreement concerning secondary matters of belief. We have laid out our position above on that which seems to us to be the irreducible minimum in order to be truly said to be Christian, but we also believe that the basis of fellowship between Christians is simply that they are truly seeking to follow Jesus. Secondary issues, whether matters pertaining to church practice, or other issues such as differing understandings regarding predestination, the end times etc, are not the basis of our unity in the faith as brothers and sisters in the Lord.

Secondly, we haven’t posted a comprehensive doctrinal church statement because we don‘t actually have one. Our understanding is that each individual must struggle through the scriptures and reach his or her own freely arrived at, and freely held, convictions. Believers should know for themselves both what they believe and why they believe it, and it is not for churches to dictate doctrinal positions. This is not to say that we would tolerate anything among ourselves that would fall into the category of actual heresy – our definition of such being that which falls outside of the historic orthodox faith as upheld by the general consensus of the Christian Church for the last two millennia – but merely that we recognize there to be various areas of honestly held doctrinal differences between sincere and faithful believers. Should, however, this cause anyone to suspect that we are ‘soft’ on sound doctrine or ‘light’ on Bible teaching, then we refer you to both the comprehensive written teaching on this site plus the 300-odd systematic ‘whole counsel of God’ teaching audios and videos.

We pray you have an interesting, edifying and profitable journey through these many resources we have made available!