Students

Our student groups meet at 6pm after the main service.

Our Sunday services are relaxed (we sit around coffee tables) but we are serious about wanting to be transformed by the Word of God.

One of our aims at Emmanuel is to “learn less but learn it more deeply.” That is to say, we are very conscious that it is possible for you to go to CU and be part of a hall Bible study and belong to a local church (which are all great things to do!) and feel so overloaded with Christian input that you end up feeling paralysed.  All that you have learnt from God’s Word ends up just being filed, rather than put into practice.  That is why in our student group you will look again at the passage of the Bible that we were all looking at together in the main service and want to make sure we help each other not just to take in God’s word, but to connect it with the issues that you face in the student world and help each other to live it out during the week ahead.

At Emmanuel we are also convinced that the way for you to thrive as a Christian at university is to be rooted in the wider church family.  We are not a huge church and our size, coupled with the fact that we sit round tables during the service and all have tea together afterwards means that there is strong family feel.  Families are keen to “adopt” students and give them a regular slice of family life and our younger people have particularly enjoyed sitting down with and learning from our “senior saints” over a slice of pizza after the main service.

In all that we do we want to make sure that those who are unfamiliar with the Christian faith feel at home - we do all we can to avoid being cheesy. But the best way of getting a feel for what we are about is for you to visit us or contact our student team leaders (Jim & Claire Walford) using the contact form who would be very happy to answer your questions about why we do things the way we do.

Feel free to come and check us out without any compulsion to come back again.

Click here to download a talk that Mike Cain, our senior minister, recently gave at the Bristol University Christian Union.  It is an attempt to tell the story of the whole Bible in 35 minutes and will give you a feel for where we, as a church, are coming from.