Our Story

New River Church was officially launched in September 2004. The church has been planted out of City Gates Church, an independent evangelical church that meets in central London. Small groups, or ‘cell groups’ from City Gates Church had been meeting in people's homes in the Islington area for a number of years. In 2004, about twenty people in two cell groups were sent out by City Gates Church to become a new church that would undertake mission to the thousands of unreached people who live in Islington.

The church began to hold Sunday celebrations each week in the church hall of what was formerly the local Anglican church. The parish church building itself had been shut down and sold and is now no longer a church. The local Christian community and ourselves included were thrilled to have a new, lively expression of church meeting on the same ground that only years previously had appeared to indicate another failure of Western Christianity in the 20th/21st Century.  

Since the launch in 2004, the church cell groups have worked (with God's help) to build Jesus-centred communities that are reaching out locally with expressions of Christ's love to friends and neighbours. One of the cell groups has multiplied and new groups have started in response to new people either coming to faith, coming back to church or joining the church.