Six
Anglican parishes
working together
About the Stockton Country Parishes
Our group of parishes was formed in 2004, since when, we've been working together increasingly closely, while maintaining our individual identities. The six parishes are extremely diverse and cover a wide area, stretching a distance of 12 miles from Great and Little Stainton villages in the west to Newton Bewley in the east.
Just to give you some idea of the diversity, the parishes span sixteen centres of population, ten civil parishes, and three boroughs (Darlington, Stockton and Hartlepool)! One is an industrial village by heritage, another is almost purely a farming community, and others include a mix of younger families, professionals, retired people, and long-term village residents. What our six congregations all share in common is a desire to be a spiritual resource for our parishes at the beginning of the 21st century.
Centres of Living Tradition
The Church of England has always aimed to be a Christian presence in every corner of England. As Anglican churches in 2007 we still aim to be available to every spiritual seeker, but that means we have to be a very different kind of church now than in the time of Elizabeth I. Every tradition needs to grow and change in order to meet the fresh challenges God gives us in our own time, and that's how we approach church life. Someone once wisely said that "Conventional wisdom is the dead faith of the living". We aim to be the very opposite - rooted in the good soil of tradition, but producing a harvest for the present and building for the future. We don't quite know where that will take us, but we're excited at the prospect, and we'd love to have you as companions on the way.