Our view of this ministry
Beresford Job has been a Bible teacher now for over 30 years and has a huge range of teaching CDs, many of which are commentaries on the Bible itself but also teaching on specific topics of all types. He is accurate and detailed and good at explaining the Bible simply. His most unusual area of teaching is about biblical church. He has done much study on how the church was in the first century and how it ought to be now, as opposed to how it actually is. His teaching on this in particular would be especially valuable for you to listen to.
What they say about themselves
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. 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 of Jesus were dead and, therefore, after the New Testament was complete. Although this makes us somewhat different from other churches, we remain confident that we are in line with how the apostles of Jesus themselves set up churches as recorded in the pages of the New Testament.
There are, at present, around 20 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 we are thrilled that other such assemblies are indeed coming into being as a result of our influence.
In laying out our beliefs we 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 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 because of what He accomplished for us on the cross through His substitutionary death. We also 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 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 we unerringly maintain that believers ought to live under its authority and therefore in obedience to it.
We are, of course, aware that there will be those who would prefer to see 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 regarding numerous other areas of biblical understanding. However, our reason for not doing so 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 we also believe that the basis of fellowship between believers is simply that they are truly seeking to follow Jesus. Secondary issues, including matters pertaining to church practice, don’t even enter the picture when it comes to our unity in the faith as brothers and sisters in the Lord.
- Secondly, we haven’t posted a comprehensive doctrinal statement as a church because we don‘t actually have one. Our understanding is 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 both 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 among us that would fall into the category of actual heresy – our definition of which being anything that 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. (And in case this might lead anyone to suspect that we are ‘soft’ on sound doctrine or ‘light’ on Bible teaching then we refer you to the ‘Tape Studies’ section of the site where you will find a catalogue of nearly three hundred recorded Bible studies which we have done over the years and which can be ordered from us.)