Who We Are, Part 1
St. Bartholomew's is, firstly, a Christian church.
This means that the focus of our spiritual life revolves around retelling and remembering the stories and teachings about and from Jesus Christ, a Jewish man who lived nearly two millennia ago in a small corner of the Roman Empire. Through him the church knows God.
We inherit a set of traditions through the English Reformation of the Catholic faith. We are catholic in that we believe in an earthly, unified church. But we are reformed as we believe that local communities have worthwhile ways of worshiping God. People of all different nationalities have found this way of prayer beautiful and sufficient for their spiritual needs.
We use a prayerbook, called The Book of Common Prayer. This rite is roughly a translation of the Latin Mass that was said in England for nearly a thousand years. Many of the prayers were written during the English Renaissance by some of the finest poets known in our language. The BCP, along with the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, is one of the most influential pieces of literature in the English Language.