Tradition:Conservative evangelical |
Monthly services:4 Sundays, |
Schools, colleges: |
Archdeaconry:Walsall |
Training Incumbent
The Revd Neil Robbie
Trained: Oak Hill. Deaconed: 2006
Neil served his curacy at St Luke’s Wolverhampton and is a member of General Synod. Neil is a Scotsman, married to Amanda, with three adult children and a lurcher. He worked as a structural engineer, including six years in SE Asia. His ministry passions include evangelism, expository preaching and hospitality. To relax, he likes good food, woodwork, golf and watercolour painting.
The context
Our urban Black Country parish includes factories, shops and offices, part of a huge country park, a canal and the Hawthorns, home of West Bromwich Albion. The M5 runs through the parish. Housing includes council tower blocks and privately owned Victorian villas. Children in our church primary school, with which we have wonderful links, speak 40 different languages at home. 40% of local residents were born overseas. The parish is one of the 4% most deprived in England. Many people are without formal qualifications. Male life expectancy is 73 years, the lowest in the diocese. There are many social problems including addiction, loneliness and housing difficulties.
Despite these challenges, our church is a very happy place, where we love one another across our many differences and seek to bless our community with the gospel and with grace. We seek to be an intercultural church family. Our services include Bible readings in Punjabi and Farsi as well as English, and songs in other languages too. We have a translation service which enables people to follow along in 240 different languages. On a typical Sunday morning we have around 50 adults and 15 children. We have no musicians, so we sing to recorded music. You can watch our services on YouTube.
Our Sunday Club meets every other week in termtime. We have strong links with our church school; our Assistant Pastor is Chair of Governors there. The school comes in for services a couple of times every term, and the church staff lead assemblies every week. A small group also leads occasional ‘Open the Book’ assemblies.
We are developing ministry in two local care homes, church members accompany the Vicar to lead monthly services.
We are embarking on a £1.3M building project to make our church more accessible, flexible and visible.
Mission statistics (2024)
| Electoral Roll | Usual Sunday Attendance Adults | Usual Sunday Attendance Children | Thanksgivings | Baptisms | Marriages | Funerals (church) | Funerals (crem) |
| 74 | 46 | 15 | 2 | 7 | 0 | 5 | 2 |