OUR VISION

St Jude’s is a relatively young church, coming into being in 1964. As you will see from the outline of its history below, it is a journey of change and development which we are still very much on, – buildings wise and church wise! We have recently completed a major refit of our roof, entrance hall and windows, keeping out the weather more successfully and enhancing our facilities.  We also have a new sound system.

In February 2009 we undertook a Healthy Churches Review, a ‘stock take’ of where we had come from, where we were now, and where God was calling us to be in the future. We assessed our strengths and weaknesses, and looked at how we might address the latter, and build on the former.

We have since undergone a Mission Action Plan process – a method of assessing our goals and putting them into reachable steps over a 5-year period. We celebrate the past and our heritage, and recognise how it has influenced who we are as a church, but we want to move on with God to wherever He would call us next.

God is always on the move!

Our Mission Statement is:

St Jude’s Exists to Experience the Love of God and to Share That Love with Others.

We are at present discovering how we might broaden that sharing, by developing our mission links, internationally, nationally and locally, and also through initiatives into our local community. Our youth are also in the process of reassessing and imagining their involvement with us. Many of these up-and-coming projects will have their own pages on the web site very shortly.

Our aims are to grow as a church, numerically and in our lives with God; to become a church that is attractive to, and more connected to the community around us, that we serve; to continue to rethink the use of our buildings imaginatively for the glory of God.

OUR HISTORY

In the early 1960’s when Westwood airfield was redeveloped for housing, the then incumbent of St.Botolph’s, Longthorpe, the Rev’d Cecil Gibbings, saw the need for a church to serve the people coming to live there.

The Conventional District of Westwood was formed in 1964 from parts of the parishes of Longthorpe, All Saints Paston and St John the Baptist Peterborough.  The Rev’d Roy Dooley was appointed as the first parish priest and for 5 years the church community used a former RAF hut for worship.

Earl Fitzwilliam (via the Fitzwilliam Trust) gifted land for the erection of a church and his wife requested that it be dedicated to St Jude, and so the first part of the present church was built in 1968-9.  Bishop Cyril Easthaugh dedicated the building on 17 January 1969 and St Jude’s became a District with the Bishop as our Patron.  On the 21 December 1969, the Rev’d Dooley was inducted.

Phase 1 had been a relatively modest building comprising the present hall, Damascus Room, toilets and kitchen and under the second incumbent, the Rev’d Jeffrey Bell who was appointed in 1972 – 1978, the church was enlarged in 1977.  Phase 2 saw an extension to the hall, corresponding to the ‘nave’ of the present church and also, the building of the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, then known as the Chapel of Christ the Servant.  Folding screens separated the two parts of the hall.

The third incumbent, the Rev’d Richard Giles, became parish priest in July 1979 and it was his plan to extend the dual-purpose building into a church with a separate church hall.  The architect for this building, Mr Joseph Robotham, designed the sanctuary, tower and sacristy, as well as the passage round the Blessed Sacrament Chapel.  The walled garden also belongs to this development.  The extension was built by John Lucas Ltd of Peterborough and consecratedby the Rt Rev’d Douglas Feaver, then Bishop of Peterborough, on the 14 July 1984.

The cost of this phase was £110,000. Of this, selling church land for affordable housing raised £55,000, the Diocese of Peterborough gave a grant of £40,000 and the parishioners raised the rest by a variety of fund raising schemes.

When the Rev’d Giles left in 1986 there followed 3 years of interregnum.  The Rev’d Douglas Bond became our fourth incumbent and was appointed in 1989 and remained with us until 1995.

The fifth incumbent, the Rev’d Geoffrey Keating, was appointed in 1996.

Our current vicar is Rev’d Keri Noddings.