Our faith

We hold the faith of the historic Church, and we hold it with open hands.

Sancta Humanitas is a parish of the Open Episcopal Church, an open and liberal expression of Old Catholic Christianity. Our faith is rooted in the loving teachings of Christ, as handed down in the creeds of the early Church and traced through the succession of Utrecht.

At the heart of it all is a God of love. For some of us that is a certainty; for others it is a hope, held just as dearly. Both are honest ways to stand before a mystery none of us can fully grasp, and no one here is asked to profess more than they truly hold.

We read the Scriptures with reverence and with open eyes, as the story of people reaching for God, and of a love that beckons us from a time past and begs we listen. In Christ we see that love lived out in full: feeding the hungry, sitting with the outcast, healing the sick and forgiving without counting the cost. It is his example we try, imperfectly, to follow, and so, as he did, we look for truth wherever it may be found. We hold the scriptures of every faith, and the wisdom of every philosophy, to be sacred, and gladly take from each whatever serves humanity well.

We offer the sacraments to all who seek them, without exception. None of us comes to them as anything other than human, and none is turned away for it. We welcome people of every race, creed and sexuality, and we stand with those whom others have pushed to the margins. We count Christians of every tradition, and people of every faith, as friends and fellow travellers.

We go where we are needed. We pray where we feel called to pray. We speak when we are moved to speak. Honesty and humility are what we profess: to ourselves, before God, and to one another. Our rites and pastoral care are offered to anyone who asks.

If you hold no faith at all, you are no less welcome. Much of what we hold dear – that every person has worth, that kindness matters, that no one should face the worst of life alone – needs no creed to be true. We will never try to convert you. We would far rather listen, and learn what gives your life its meaning.

What we bring to every person and every rite can be named in five words: love, respect, empathy, discretion and compassion. Love comes first, because without it the rest is only good manners. Respect means meeting each person as they are, never as we would have them be. Empathy means sitting with someone in their pain, rather than hurrying them past it. Discretion means that what is told to us in trust stays with us. And compassion is what turns all of these from something felt into something done.

Around our seal run five more words, in the old language of the Church. Refugium, refuge: a place of rest for anyone who comes to us weary, as Christ promised: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Fides, faith, which Scripture calls “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1), and which we hold as much in hope as in certainty. Misericordia, mercy: the way, as the Venerable Bede wrote, that Christ looked upon Matthew the tax collector, seeing him “through the eyes of mercy” and choosing him all the same.

Pietas, duty: not piety worn for show, but the older sense of the word, a quiet devotion to God, to family and to neighbour, borne faithfully, like the shepherd on our seal carrying the lost sheep through thorns and brambles to the sanctuary beyond. And Fidelitas, fidelity: keeping faith with those who trust us, in small things as in great. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10).

Your theology is your own. We would love to know it and to share your joy in it, and if you come to share in ours, that is a blessing – but never a requirement. What matters in the end is that people can gather simply to be people, safe and content in the knowledge that they are loved, as they love their neighbour.