St Paul’s Finchley is in the Barnet Deanery of the Edmonton Area of the Diocese of London (www.london.anglican.org). St Paul’s was founded in 1886 and was combined with St Luke’s Finchley in 1985 at which point St Luke’s Church was demolished. In 2006 we sold the St Luke’s church hall site for £1.4m and this provided the funding for the St Paul’s Centre which opened in 2008. The Centre has an office, a large hall, toilets (including a fully accessible one), an industrial standard kitchen and three meeting rooms. This is a much-valued facility, which is used not only by ourselves and the churches we host, but also by a wide range of groups and organisations. It therefore has an extensive footfall which provides us with a lot of community contacts and missional opportunities as well as enabling us to make a significant contribution to the common good and providing us with substantial revenue to resource our work and witness.   

In the last couple of years, we have been progressing our Warm & Welcoming Space Project. This aims to make the church building warmer and more welcoming, so that we can more effectively share our space with others and meet the spiritual and social needs of the local community. We are excited about the way in which these two elements of the project has positively impacted our ability to utilise the building and has the potential to generate additional income through increased lettings.  

In terms of people, our church consists of some 55 adults and 15 children and young people of whom only 35% have been members for more than 10 years. Under the leadership of our new vicar (who started in the role in September 2024), we aim to grow in numbers as well as diversity.

Our Sunday morning worship service at 10am is called Welcome Service. It has a style that is liturgical but informal and intentionally accessible to people who are not used to church, and who have experienced a more charismatic background. It is designed to be child and young family-friendly with two high quality children’s groups for those aged 4 to 13 and a creche area at the back of the church building.  We are seeking to employ a warm and dynamic full-time children, youth and families worker.

We run a range of midweek activities, including adult Connect groups and occasional enquirers’ courses. We are also involved in local primary schools, especially St Mary’s, the church primary school that we jointly sponsor with St Mary-at Finchley. Every year we aim to run a range of RE workshops on our premises, including Christmas Experience for Year 4 pupils and Easter Experience for Year 5 pupils.

Another important feature of our church life is our commitment to world mission. We support a mission partner in France, Open Doors, the Christian Care Trust and the local  Foodbank, and channel our financial response to disasters through Tearfund. We also extend hospitality to other Christian communities. The Farsi-speaking North London Iranian Church, use the church and church centre on Sunday afternoons, and Oastea Domnului, a renewal movement within the Romanian Orthodox Church, uses our premises on Sunday evenings.