Vision and History
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Vision and History – our Heritage and our Future
St Jude’s is a relatively young church, coming into being in 1964. As you will see from the outline of it’s 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.
St Jude’s Church, Peterborough – 1964 to 2008
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 dedicatedthe building on 17 January 1969and 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 and present incumbent, the Rev’d Geoffrey Keating, was appointed in 1996.
Gifts, Benefactors and sources. (refer to plan and key overleaf)
1. Holy Family Wall Plaque 2. Stone recording consecration (placed here in July 1987 and made by Mr Firman, Stonemason). Above this memorial plaque, a stone head from Benwick Church, Cambridgeshire. 3. Holy Water Stoup. Surrounded by stone from Walsingham Priory and Saint Pega’s Hermitage, Peakirk. 4. Figure of St Peter, above the Holy Water Stoup, in reconstituted stone from Vezelay, Burgandy. 5. Door and doorway into Church by S.S.Teulon, 1850. Originally part of Benwick Church, brought here in January 1984 (taken down by parishioners). 6. Font from Benwick Church, imitation 14th century style, also by Teulon. 7. Shrine of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Statue given by Walsingham Parish Church stands on a stone corbel from Walsingham. 8. Saint Francis statue. Gift from the nuns of the Community of All Hallows, Ditchingham, Norfolk. 9. Icon of Saint Peter, patron of our City and Diocese. Painted by the artist Maria Moore of Canterbury. 10. Stations of the Cross. Set of 14 in terracotta by Sister Gladys of the Community of the Little Sisters of Jesus at Walsingham. Paid for by a donation from the Sainsbury Trust. 11. Statue of St Jude. Sculpted by Mother Concordia OSB of Minster Abbey, Kent. A gift from the Roman Catholic congregation who used to worship at St Jude’s. 12. Statue of St Theresa of Lisieux. 13. Organ. Built by Sheffield of Birmingham. Some of the pipe work came from Splott Road Baptist Church, Cardiff. 14. Tower. Contains three bells from the redundant church of Little Ouse, near Littleport, Cambs. They were rehung by Taylors, Loughborough bell founders. The steel framework was donated by Clarksteel Ltd of Yaxley. The stainless steel cross on the tower was made and given by Baker Perkins Ltd. 15. Statue of Our Lady and the Holy Child. Sculpted by and the gift of Peter Collingridge, London 15a Font donated by Westwood/Netherton Womens Fellowship in 1969. 16. Rood Group of Our Lord with Our Lady and Saint John, Evangelist – from the former church of Saints Peter and Paul, Teddington, London. 17. High Altar. The Mensa (slab of pre-cast concrete) is supported by a pillar given by the parish of Higham Ferrers, Northants and was installed, like all the other items of stonework, through the devoted efforts of John McCormack. 18. The design of the church pews is based on the modern ones in the Abbey of Saint Wandrille, at Fontenelle, near Rouen, France.
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