About

Our name Rochdale Evangelical Church tells you quite a lot about us.

We are for Rochdale

We’re a local church started by people living in Rochdale, for people living in Rochdale. Our goal is to tell people in the town the best news there has ever been – the news about Jesus Christ.

We are Evangelical

Evangelical is a word you may not have come across before. It describes what we believe the message of Jesus is. In particular, we find that message reliably recorded in the Bible for us.

Bad News

Jesus’ message is about the all-powerful God who created a wonderful and perfect world. It was a world where humans lived in perfect harmony with God, each other and the rest of creation. But we know that’s not the world we see right now. Our world has been and continues to be broken. We believe the root of that is the way that we as humans rebel against God and do what’s wrong. We call that sin. The bad news is that quite rightly God is angry at our sin and we face punishment for that sin. You have probably heard of that punishment: hell.

The Bible says:

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
(Romans 3:23 NET)

Good News

Jesus’ message is good news though. He tells us that God really loves people and has always had a plan to re-create the world of perfect harmony. We call that heaven. And his wonderful plan wasn’t to wipe us out, but to provide a way for us back to that harmony.

The plan was to send his Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus lived the perfect, sinless, life that we can’t. He then died a death, executed on a cross, not for the things he did wrong, but for the things you and I have done wrong. So he took the punishment for our sin instead of us, so that we can be forgiven and if we’re forgiven we can live in harmony with God again. But the story of Jesus didn’t end with his death. Instead, the Bible tells us that loads of witness saw Jesus risen back to life, giving us a rock solid hope that the restored creation, with everything back in harmony, will be a reality. And that even if we die before Jesus brings that recreated world about, we can know that we will live forever in that world.

For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
(John 3:16 NET)

Our Response

That message requires a response, which is to turn from our rebellion against God (what the Bible calls repentance) and turn to Jesus and put our trust in him and seek to live for him (what the Bible calls belief or faith).

Now after John was imprisoned, Jesus went into Galilee and proclaimed the gospel of God. 15 He said, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the gospel!”
(Mark 1:14-15 NET)

That’s what it means for us to be evangelical and that’s the message we want to bring to Rochdale.

We are a Church

The final word in our name is church. A church isn’t really a building – we haven’t got one of those yet! A church is really just a group of people who have put their trust in Jesus, meeting together.

The Bible says:

And let us take thought of how to spur one another on to love and good works, 25 not abandoning our own meetings, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and even more so because you see the day drawing near.
(Hebrews 10:24-25 NET)

So that’s what we want to be. We want to be a group of people meeting together in Rochdale who have trusted in Jesus and want to share him and his message with other people in Rochdale.

If you want to find out more about some of that, have a look at some of the links below, have a browse through our website or get in contact with us.