St Francis's Church, Salisbury

St Francis's Church, Salisbury

St Francis's Church, Salisbury is an evangelical, charismatic Church of England parish church in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, a member of the New Wine Network of churches. The church stands in the north of Salisbury, on the A345 Amesbury Road. Some two hundred people attend its main services.

Main services

St Francis's is a church for all age-groups and maintains a variety of service styles to meet people's needs. These are:

• 09:30 Morning Worship 4th Sunday in the month
• 09:30 Holy Communion 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Sundays
• 11:00 Informal Worship Every Sunday
• 19:30 Awakenings (20s & 30s) Every Wednesday

The 9:30 am Sunday service is a traditional modern language Sunday service with a mixture of traditional hymns & modern songs. The thriving 11:00am '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 band with modern worship songs. Informal Communion is included on the 4th Sunday of the month. Children spend the first fifteen minutes in church before going to lively groups. A congregation for those in their twenties and thirties meets every Wednesday night at 7.30 pm, with modern creative worship and social activities.

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 the bridge project. The church also supports a school and missionaries in the Sudan.

History of St Francis' 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 a 20th-century 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 (21 m) high. The building was designed by the architect Robert Potter. It 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 variegated red bricks and the dressings are of reconstituted stone. The roofs are of reinforced concrete covered with asphalt. The church is a Grade II listed building.

The Wiltshire volume of Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England includes a short entry on the church:

"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 raised (£45,000) were 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.

Senior leadership and staff

• Vicar: Paul Taylor

References

• Wiltshire community history, accessed March 2009
• Personal communications from St. Francis's Church PCC members.
• St Francis's Church website [1] Accessed March 2009.

External links

• St Francis's Church website
• Public calendar of St. Francis Church
• Public pictures of St. Francis church