What Kind of Church Is All Saints?

So, what kind of church is All Saints?

It is tempting to answer that question simply: we are an Anglo-Catholic church. And that is certainly true. We treasure beautiful worship, the Eucharist, music, silence, incense and the rich inheritance of the Church of England. But that answer, important as it is, does not quite tell the whole story.

All Saints is a contemporary missional church rooted in an ancient Catholic faith.

That might sound like a contradiction. How can we be contemporary while standing in a tradition that reaches back centuries? But perhaps that is precisely the point. Our tradition was never meant to be something preserved behind glass, the building itself tells us something different. Its English and Cornish character, its saints and stories, its craftsmanship and liturgical life all speak of a faith that has taken flesh in a particular place. Our task is to do the same in our own generation.

To be a missional church means recognising that the Church does not exist simply for the sake of maintaining itself. We are here because God loves Falmouth, and because Christ sends his people into the life of the town. Worship gathers us, forms us and feeds us — but it also sends us back into the world.

That means being Catholic without imitation, Anglican without embarrassment, traditional without antiquarianism and beautiful without ostentation. It means being accessible without making the Christian faith banal, and rooted in history while remaining genuinely open to the future.

We want All Saints to be a place where ancient faith and contemporary life meet: where someone who has been part of the Church for generations and someone who has never crossed our threshold can both discover that they have a place.

The question is not simply what kind of church we have inherited, it is what kind of church, by God’s grace, we are now being called to become.