Worship is the beating heart of the church, not one activity among many. Before we are a community, a mission, or a movement, we are a people gathered before God — to praise Him, to pray, to hear the Scriptures, and to break bread together.

We worship in both our languages, because God is honoured in Cymraeg as fully as in English, and a hymn sung in the old tongue carries something no translation can. Our worship is not performance but encounter: unhurried, reverent, and real, open to the moving of the Spirit.

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”John 4:24

What it looks like

• Regular gatherings for worship and prayer
• Sung praise in Welsh and English
• The breaking of bread together
• Open, unhurried space for the Spirit to move

We were made for one another, and the great plague of our age is loneliness. It falls heaviest on men, who so often have nowhere to bring their burdens and no one to carry them with. The church answers that not with a programme but with a family — people who share life, not just a service.

That means shared meals and shared work, prayer and honest conversation, walking the land and training together. We want to be a place where a man who would never darken a church door finds brothers, and through them, finds Christ.

“Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”Galatians 6:2

What it looks like

• Shared meals and open tables
• Gatherings especially for men
• Martial-arts and training as discipleship
• Walking, working and praying together

Jesus told his followers plainly: heal the sick. We take that command seriously, praying with expectant faith for those who are ill — while caring for them practically, and always alongside, never instead of, proper medical care.

But healing is broader than the miraculous. So much of what breaks a person is addiction, isolation, shame, and despair, and God heals those too — often slowly, through community, prayer, honest work and time. We mean to be a place of healing in every sense: for the body, the mind, and the soul.

“Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.”Matthew 10:8

What it looks like

• Prayer for healing, in faith and with care
• Walking with the sick and the suffering
• Support for those recovering from addiction
• Care for mind and soul, not only body

Christ announced his ministry as freedom for captives — and captivity wears many faces: addiction, debt, fear, bitterness, the quiet despair that tells a person nothing will change. We believe no one is beyond His reach, and that real, lasting freedom is possible.

Freedom is not only a moment of prayer but a road walked with others: honest accountability, practical help, work that restores dignity, and a community that will not let go. We want to be the hands that help people out and the family that keeps them standing.

“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”John 8:36

What it looks like

• Walking with people out of addiction
• Prayer, accountability and honest support
• Work and purpose as part of recovery
• A community that stays for the long road

Cymraeg is one of the oldest living tongues of these islands. Its roots reach back to the old British language once spoken across much of Britain — though its own people never called it by the scholars' word “Brythonic”; they called it Cymraeg, the speech of the Cymry, the “fellow-countrymen”. It is the language of the saints, and for many iaith y nefoedd, the language of heaven. We mean to see it live again not as a museum piece, but as a living language of worship, prayer, and witness.

And we carry it as a gift to share, not a flag to wave. An English speaker who learns to pray a line in Cymraeg is a small reunion of an island that was one language long before it was two. The language builds the community; the community heals the shyness; and both draw people in.

This is also our most measurable work. We can count it honestly — how many people are learning, and how their confidence grows from a first bore da to holding a conversation. We run learners' circles, online and through partner churches, point people to the best free resources, and we learn alongside you — our founder included, in the open, from scratch.

“For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD.”Zephaniah 3:9

Start today — free resources

• Dysgu Cymraeg / Learn Welsh — the National Centre's free courses and resources
• Duolingo Welsh — free, daily, a few minutes at a time
• SaySomethinginWelsh — learn to speak from the very first lesson

Dysgu gyda'n gilydd — learning together. Our founder is learning Welsh in the open, to stay accountable and to show it can be done from scratch. Follow the journey on Duolingo →

Sisters of the tongue

Cymraeg is not alone. It is the strongest survivor of a family of sister languages, all descended from the old British tongue — the P-Celtic, or Brythonic, branch. Closest are Kernewek (Cornish) and Brezhoneg (Breton); beyond them lies the wider Celtic family — Gaeilge (Irish), Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) and Gaelg (Manx).

Some are thriving; some are fighting for their lives; Cornish was declared dead and is now being raised again from the very silence that took it. We mean to be a friend to them all — to lend what strength Cymraeg has recovered to its weaker sisters, and to stand with everyone labouring to keep an ancient tongue alive. Every language saved keeps open one more door for a people to call on God in the words of their mother.

What it looks like

• Learners' circles — online and hosted through partner churches
• Worship and prayer in Cymraeg and English
• We measure it: how many are learning, and how confidence grows
• We learn alongside you — our founder's own journey, in the open, to keep us all accountable
• Friendship and help for the sister languages — Cornish, Breton and the wider Celtic family
• The language offered as a bridge, never a barrier

Long before the great cathedrals, these islands were home to the llan and the Age of the Saints — a Christianity of enclosures and holy wells, of scholars and hermits and sea-going missionaries. Most people have never heard it. We mean to teach it, and to let it inspire what we build now.

We teach it honestly, holding firmly to the difference between fact, tradition, and legend — because a faith built on truth has nothing to fear from honest history, and everything to gain from it.

And it is older than England itself. British bishops sat at the Council of Arles in the year 314; Alban was martyred here in the Roman era; and the Britons — the ancestors of the Welsh — held the faith centuries before the Anglo-Saxons came, before England was a kingdom, and more than a thousand years before the King James Bible. The faith of these islands was never forced upon them by a later crown. It was here from the beginning.

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it.”Jeremiah 6:16

The book that saved a language

When William Morgan gave Wales the whole Bible in Welsh in 1588, he did more than translate Scripture — he gave the language a dignified, standard form at the very moment it might have splintered and died, as Cornish did. For centuries after, chapel and Scripture were where ordinary Welsh people read, sang and prayed in their own tongue. The faith carried the language.

And the people loved it fiercely. In 1800 a girl named Mary Jones walked some twenty-six miles barefoot to Bala, having saved for six years, simply to buy a Welsh Bible of her own — a story that helped inspire the founding of the Bible Society four years later.

What it looks like

• Teaching the early British church and the saints
• An honest firewall: fact, tradition, legend
• Pilgrimage to the old holy places
• Content that recovers a forgotten story

God likes simplicity: more trees, more bees. We are building toward a self-sufficient community on land in Cymru — orchards and woodland, hives and growing plots, and a place of retreat where the weary and the recovering can work the earth and be restored.

Trees clean the air, hold the soil and outlive us all, and companies seeking to plant them may help fund the work while it greens the ground. Bees turn the smallest flowers into sweetness that keeps — and a church that grows its own food can be generous because it is not desperate, and honest because it owes no one.

“...a good land and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey.”Exodus 3:8

What it looks like

• Growing food, and giving the surplus away
• Tree-planting — and corporate and work-experience days
• Beekeeping, honey and mead
• A place of retreat and restoration

There was an age on this island when holy men and women were the fiercest people alive — fierce not with the sword, but with themselves. They founded the llan, healed the sick, and changed a nation by their lives. We honour Oes y Saint, and we pray toward a new one.

That means building living testimonies of transformed lives, and seeking and welcoming the gifts of the Holy Spirit — that the works of God would be known again in our own day. Not for show, but so that the same power that raised up the old saints might raise up new ones.

“...since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with endurance the race set before us.”Hebrews 12:1

What it looks like

• Honouring the saints of these islands
• Building and telling living testimonies
• Seeking and welcoming the gifts of the Spirit
• Discipleship that forms saints, not spectators

We are at the very beginning — forming the community, gathering those who share the vision, and laying the foundations properly and honestly. If any of this has stirred something in you, wherever you are, in Cymru or further afield, we would love to hear from you.

Come to pray, to help, to learn a little Welsh, or simply to follow the journey as it unfolds.

Prefer to write? Email us at hello@churchofthewest.org.

“Gwnewch y pethau bychain.” — Do the little things.Dewi Sant · Saint David

A church in formation. The Church of the West is being founded now, with its trustees being appointed and a charity constituted; until that is complete and trustees are accountable for every pound, no donations are sought — the ways to give and to build will open here in due course.