Christ Catholic Church: There is a Place at the Table for You

Jesus Cares ✛ Christ is the Center ✛ The Gospel is the Way

Perhaps you’ve found your way here because you’re looking for something. Maybe you’re looking for a church. Maybe you’re returning to faith after being away for a long time. Maybe you love the beauty and mystery of the Catholic tradition but have wondered whether there is still a place for you within it. Perhaps you’ve been wounded by religion, disappointed by the Church, or simply have questions that don’t fit neatly into the answers you’ve been given. Or maybe you simply want to know Jesus better. Whatever brought you here, welcome.

Christ Catholic Church is a small, independent Catholic church rooted in the ancient Christian faith and centered on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. We cherish the Sacraments, the Scriptures, prayer, worship, and the rich spiritual heritage handed down through generations of Christians. At the same time, we believe the Church must always remain open to the movement of the Holy Spirit and attentive to the people standing before us today. We sometimes describe our approach as Generous Orthodoxy.

By orthodoxy, we mean that our faith has roots. Christianity isn’t something we invented, and it isn’t ours to remake every morning according to whatever happens to be fashionable. We receive a faith that has been prayed, celebrated, questioned, struggled with, and lived for nearly two thousand years. By generous, we mean that those roots should produce fruit rather than fences. We believe there is room within the Church for questions, differences, uncertainty, growth, and discovery. You don’t need to have everything figured out before walking through the door. None of us does.

If you want to understand us, begin with Jesus. Not simply the idea of Jesus, but Jesus as we encounter Him in the Gospels: healing the sick, eating with people respectable society avoided, forgiving sinners, touching the untouchable, challenging religious hypocrisy, welcoming children, defending the vulnerable, and reminding us again and again that love of God cannot be separated from love of our neighbor.

We have a particular affection for what Christians sometimes call the Red Letters, the words of Jesus printed in red in many Bibles. Those words keep calling us back to the heart of the Gospel: Love God. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies. Forgive. Feed the hungry. Care for the suffering. Welcome the stranger. Seek peace. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These teachings aren’t the whole of Scripture, but they give us the clearest picture of the One we are trying to follow. Jesus is our starting place and our compass. Christ is the Center. The Gospel is the Way.

We are also unapologetically sacramental Christians. We believe God meets human beings through ordinary things: water, bread and wine, oil, touch, words of forgiveness, promises made in love, and hands laid upon another person in prayer. In the mystery of faith, these ordinary things become places of encounter with divine grace.

Christ Catholic Church celebrates the traditional Seven Sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Reconciliation, Anointing of the Sick, Holy Matrimony, and Holy Orders. At the center of our worship is the Holy Eucharist, the sacred meal Jesus gave His disciples and asked them to continue in remembrance of Him. Here we gather around Word and Table. We bring our joys, failures, hopes, wounds, doubts, gratitude, and ordinary lives to the altar, and there we encounter Christ and receive again the grace of God.

We don’t believe the Sacraments are prizes handed out to people who have managed to become sufficiently holy. They are medicine for the wounded and food for the journey. If perfection were the admission requirement for grace, none of us would qualify. We come to Christ precisely because we need Christ.

That conviction shapes the kind of Church we are trying to be. You don’t have to clean yourself up before coming to Christ. You don’t have to pretend you don’t have questions. You don’t have to hide your past, and you don’t have to become somebody else before God can love you. We welcome people across the many differences that ordinarily divide human beings. Some who find us have been lifelong Catholics. Others come from Protestant, Orthodox, or other Christian traditions. Some haven’t been inside a church for decades. Others are exploring Christianity for the first time. Some arrive with a strong faith. Others arrive carrying little more than the hope that faith might still be possible. There is room for both.

We believe every human being possesses an inherent dignity because every person is created and beloved by God. The Church should therefore be a place where people encounter Christ rather than another place where they must prove that they deserve to belong. That doesn’t mean Christian life asks nothing of us. Jesus calls us to change. He calls us toward forgiveness, reconciliation, generosity, justice, humility, faithfulness, compassion, and love. The Gospel challenges every one of us. But we believe transformation grows from grace. Jesus meets us where we are, but His love rarely leaves us where He found us.

There is also something deeply grounding about belonging to a faith older than ourselves. When we celebrate the Eucharist, hear the Scriptures, pray the ancient prayers of the Church, make the sign of the Cross, light a candle, or sit quietly before God, we join a river of prayer that has been flowing for centuries. We cherish that inheritance, but tradition isn’t God. Tradition is the living memory of the Church. It allows previous generations of Christians to speak to us, teach us, correct us, and sometimes warn us. We listen respectfully to those voices without pretending that every Christian in every previous century understood everything perfectly. The Holy Spirit hasn’t retired.

We therefore take Scripture and Holy Tradition seriously while also valuing reason, conscience, prayer, and discernment. We aren’t afraid of questions because we don’t believe truth needs to be protected from sincere inquiry. Faith can have roots without becoming rigid. Tradition can give us a foundation without becoming a prison. Our faith is ancient, but it is alive.

Christ Catholic Church belongs to the historic Free Catholic and Old Catholic family of Christianity. In simple terms, that means we preserve the Catholic sacramental tradition, worship, ordained ministry, and historic continuity of the Church while governing ourselves independently. We aren’t part of the Roman Catholic Church and aren’t under the jurisdiction of the Pope. But neither do we define ourselves primarily by what we aren’t. We are Catholic Christians because we understand ourselves as part of the larger, universal Body of Christ. We don’t claim to be the whole Church. We are one small part of something far greater than ourselves.

Our particular history reaches back through generations of independent Catholic Christians, and our formal name today is Christ Catholic Church Province of the Prince of Peace, commonly known simply as Christ Catholic Church. There is a much longer history behind that name for those who want to explore it, but you don’t need to learn an ecclesiastical family tree before praying with us. There will be time for history, theology, canons, and all the rest if you’re interested. What matters first is Christ.

Perhaps the best way to understand Christ Catholic Church isn’t to read another page about us. It is simply to explore. Read the Gospels again, especially those Red Letters. Pray with us. Ask questions. Come to the Eucharist. Sit quietly with God. Talk with us. Explore the Sacraments. Bring your doubts along with your faith. There is no entrance examination, and we aren’t looking for perfect Christians. We’re looking for fellow travelers.

Some of us have walked this road for decades. Some have wandered away and returned. Some are still trying to figure out exactly what they believe. What holds us together isn’t that we’ve all reached the same place. It’s that we’re trying to follow the same Christ.

So if you’ve been searching for a Christian community that loves the ancient Sacraments without closing its doors to the present, that takes Jesus and His Gospel seriously without demanding that everyone think exactly alike, and that believes the Church should be known more by the love it gives than by the boundaries it guards, perhaps there is a place here for you.

Come as you are. Bring your faith and your questions, your wounds and your gifts, your certainty and your uncertainty. Bring the person God has made you to be. Together, perhaps we can learn a little more each day about what it means to love God and to love one another.

That’s really what we’re trying to do.

Jesus Cares. Christ is the Center. The Gospel is the Way.

And there is a place at the table for you.