St Francis Church Salisbury
St Francis's Church, Salisbury is an evangelical, charismatic Anglican church in Salisbury, Wiltshire, a member of the New Wine Network of churches. The church is situated to the north of Salisbury on the A345 Amesbury Road. 166 people attend the church across its main services.
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[edit] Main services
St Francis's Church is a tri-generational church and maintains a variety of service styles to meet people's needs. These are:
- 08.00 Holy Communion (Book of Common Prayer) 1st, 3rd and 5th Sundays
- 09.30 Morning Prayer 1st, 3rd and 5th Sundays
- 09.30 Holy Communion sung 2nd and 4th Sundays
- 11.00 Informal Worship Every Sunday
- 18.30 Choral Evensong 2nd Sunday
- 19:30 Awakenings Every Wednesday
The 9:30am Sunday service is a traditional Sunday service led by Organ and Choir with a mixture of traditional hymns & modern songs. The Informal worship service is a more family friendly time for worship and it aims to be relaxed, reverent and fun. Music is led by a worship group with modern worship songs. Informal Communion is included on the 4th Sunday of the month. Children spend the first 15 minutes in church before going to lively groups.
[edit] Key Activities
As well as Sunday services each week, the church members participate in a large array of mid-week activities, which include the Alpha Course, house groups and children's and youth activities. Church members actively support X:Site South Wiltshire and the bridge project. The church also supports a school and missionaries in the Sudan.
[edit] History of St Francis's church
The church was founded in 1930 to serve the north of the city. Work began in 1930, with the consent of the vicars of Stratford-sub-Castle and St Mark's. With much voluntary help, a temporary wooden church was built on the eastern side of Stratford Road and dedicated in November 1930. In 1937 a new district was established, partly from the parish of Stratford-sub-Castle and partly from that of St Mark's, and a vicar was installed. In the same year a building committee was formed and a new site at the junction of Beatrice Road and Castle Road purchased. Building work began in 1938, the foundation stone was laid in January 1939 and the church was consecrated in 1940.
The church building is in the modern style with a wide nave with passage aisles and an apsidal Lady Chapel behind the sanctuary, instead of a chancel. On the south side of the church is a tower, 70 feet high. The church is a Grade 2 listed building. St Francis's Church was designed by the architect Robert Potter; the construction is structurally concrete with brick cladding and infill, and the church has artificial stone surrounds to the doors and windows. The cavity walls are faced with varigated red bricks and the dressings are of reconstituted stone. The roofs are of reinforced concrete covered with asphalt.
Pevsner's Wiltshire volume contains a short entry on the church, as follows:
"St Francis, Castle Road and Beatrice Road. 1936-9 by Robert Potter. Red brick. Square, with a short s w tower and an apse. The details Österbergish - rather late in the day. Quite an impressive white interior, the floor of the apse raised considerably above the altar space."
In the 21st century the church has had a £450,000 renovation to bring the building up to modern standards. One tenth of the renovation funds (£45,000) were at this time given away to build a secondary school in Juba in the Southern Sudan.
The parish registers for christenings from 1930 and marriages from 1940, other than those in current use, are held in the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre.
[edit] Senior leadership and staff
Vicar Paul Taylor
Curate Gale Hunt
[edit] References
Personal communications from St. Francis Church PCC members.
St Francis's Church website [1] Accessed March 2009.
Wiltshire community history [2] Accessed March 2009.
[edit] External links
- St Francis's Church website
- Public calendar of St. Francis Church
- Public pictures of St. Francis church
Coordinates: 51°04′59″N 1°47′48″W / 51.083014°N 1.796747°W
