Our Church

When St Nicholas Orthodox Parish was founded in September 2006, there was no Orthodox place of worship in which the community could gather together for the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. There was (and remains to this day) a small domestic chapel dedicated to Christ the All-Merciful Saviour attached to the parish house in Headington which was used for the smaller weekday celebrations. Although much loved by the parishioners, the chapel was nevertheless far too small to be a suitable venue for the celebration of the Sunday Liturgy which attracted a much larger congregation than the dozen or so people who could be accommodated there. For the first six months of its existence the parish was permitted to make use of the disused St Luke’s Chapel attached to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, but this arrangement came to an end when the hospital site was bought by the University of Oxford and the area was sealed off for development. The Parish then moved across the Woodstock Road to St Giles Church Hall which became the regular ‘weekend home’ for St Nicholas Parish for the next four years. The hall had to be adapted for Orthodox worship, a process undertaken on The Parish's first 'weekend home' a weekly basis by the clergy and a team of volunteers. Every Saturday evening, an ingenious portable iconostasis was constructed out of interlocking panels and beams and erected in the hall.

Parish Chapel Interior

This, together with the other fixtures and fittings normally found in an Orthodox Church, remained in place until Sunday afternoon, when the process was reversed and all the church accoutrements dismantled and stored away until the following week. Apart from being time-consuming and back-breaking work for the weekly assembling team, this ‘weekend’ arrangement also severely limited parish life which had to be fitted into the six hours rent time allotted to the parish. Baptisms and weddings had to be conducted either within or shortly before or after the Liturgy, and all weekday services were celebrated in the tiny parish house chapel. Naturally, entirely different arrangements had to be made for the celebration of the services of Holy Week and Easter which attracted a much larger congregation than could be accommodated in the Parish chapel. Over the years, a number of Christian communities kindly welcomed the Parish to hold its Holy week services on their premises (read an account of one such sojourn here) but it was especially during those times that our homelessness was most acutely felt. Oh for a home of our own!

The slow journey into the Parish’s own home began in September 2008 when the owner of a derelict Anglican mission church wrote to the parish priest with an offer to sell it to the community for a reasonable (but nevertheless unattainable) £250,000. Built in 1913, the Mission Church was designed as a chapel of ease for the St Nicholas Parish of the village of Marston many of whose residents were beginning to move into an area of Oxford which had come to be known as New Marston. As a daughter church, it was also dedicated to St Nicholas, a dedication providentially also adopted by the Orthodox Parish from its inception. The church was further developed and expanded in 1939 and remained as the hub of the New Marston community until 1965 when a new Anglican parish church of St Michael and All Angels was opened nearby.  After a short stint as a non-conformist chapel, the Mission Church was made redundant and sold on the open market. Over the next forty years, the church was used as a factory, a reprographics studio and finally a general dumping ground for various items of bric-a-brac large and small. With no ongoing repairs, the little church had fallen into a complete dilapidation, the fact much lamented by its immediate neighbours.

In December 2008, with the blessing of the diocesan bishop, the St Nicholas Parish Assembly voted unanimously to purchase the Mission Church on Ferry Road. With no significant funds to its name, the parish could only trust in God’s help and appeal to the generosity of the parish’s many supporters and friends. 

1937 Exterior of St Nicholas in New Marston