God’s church is his people, the gathering of those who have turned to his Son Jesus Christ. This means that in the truest sense, our church is the people of St Jude’s, not our building. The Apostle Peter writes of Christian people as “living stones” being built into a spiritual house for God (1 Peter 2:5).
Still, we also have a beautiful and historic church building to gather in. While the parish dates back to 1858, the current building was dedicated in 1865. The parish’s history is entertainingly told in Ron Ringer’s Summoned by Bells, a carefully researched book produced for our 150th anniversary in 2015.
The obvious photogenic qualities of our site have led to it occasionally serving as a film location. The 1997 film Oscar and Lucinda included a scene filmed in St Judes’ rectory. In 2017, several episodes of the Channel 9 drama Love Child were filmed in our church, rectory, grounds and graveyard.
In another link with popular culture, Paul Kelly recorded a song Randwick Bells, about hearing our bell tower heralding a wedding early on a Saturday morning.
Our logo is a boat. Most likely this originates from the ancient association of St Jude with images of boats. However, a little boat, tossed on a stormy sea, was also seen as illustrating the situation of Christ’s church, ferrying the elect through the ravages of this world. We take comfort that Jesus proved his power over the wind and waves when he calmed the storm on Lake Galilee, and by that same power he will guide us, his people, to the safe haven of God’s eternal kingdom.
The boat image used as our logo is a photo of the mosaic at the entrance to our church. This in turn was modelled on a boat image found in a window of our sister church, St John Randwick, Gloucestershire.
