Beliefs & Values
Who We Are
We are committed to loving and serving those who live, work, study, and play alongside us in the vibrant neighbourhoods of the West End of Glasgow.
We believe all people in our city are made in God’s image and are loved and valued by God. We are a community of people united by our faith in Jesus Christ, who seek to love God and love our neighbours.
Our aim is to grow as a friendly, diverse and inclusive community, which is always ready to welcome new people. We have a lively and feisty group of older members and a smaller but growing new generation of students and young adults.
We want to be a place where cultures and generations meet and can enrich one another’s lives.
Worship is important to us at KH – our style is a blend of creative liturgy, thoughtful preaching and inspiring music in a range of styles, including traditional hymns alongside music from Iona and Taizé, as well as contemporary worship songs.
What We Believe
We are a Christian Church united around the gospel of Jesus Christ, confessing our faith in God the Holy Trinity, maker and redeemer of the world.
We are a local parish church, part of the Church of Scotland, which is a protestant, reformed church with its origins in the 1560 Scottish Reformation.
We are a presbyterian church – part of a national church which is governed through a series of councils or ‘courts’ – from our local elders (sometimes called presbyters) meeting as a Kirk Session, to Glasgow Presbytery which our church is represented on and finally, the General Assembly which meets annually in Edinburgh.
We are an ‘ecumenical’ church, both as a congregation and as a denomination, committed to working with other Christian denominations and to seeking the visible unity of all churches, in God’s way and at God’s time.
We are a ‘missional’ church. Our faith and life is our response to God’s Mission to us in Jesus Christ. As a Scottish Church we give thanks for the missional work of Ninian and Columba, through whom the gospel came to us, and we recognise with sorrow the mistakes our church has made in the past when engaged in ‘missionary’ work to others.
We value The Five Marks of Mission as a summary
of what it means for us to be missional:
The mission of the Church is the mission of Christ:
To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
To respond to human need by loving service
To transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation
To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and to sustain and renew the life of the earth.
We aim to be an inclusive and affirming church and seek, in dependence on the Holy Spirit, to journey into a deeper understanding of what that means, recognising Scripture as our supreme authority in faith and life and humble in our struggle to discern what it means to interpret scriptural teaching faithfully for our own context.
We oppose all forms of racism and all attitudes of ethnic superiority as abhorrent to Christian faith and life and commit ourselves to opposing them and to living as God’s beloved community, in which people of all ethnicities are welcomed and respected.
We are committed to a fully egalitarian position on the relationship between women and men. We oppose all forms of sexism, we affirm the social and spiritual equality of women and men and we affirm that women can be ordained and can serve in all ministries of the church on an equal basis to men.
We recognise the particular gifts, needs and challenges of those who are differently abled within our church and community and commit ourselves to welcoming and supporting people with disabilities.