It's strange really: a big building, a highly formal piece of Victorian architecture. Waterhouse was primarily a commercial architect, and it shows: there is invention, innovation; but it's all so strong and dependable. It's a hard space - more a mountain top than a seminar room. And probably that determines who we are. So who are we: who is St Elisabeth's?

Well, most of us are local - but we welcome people from afar. And few of us are self-consciously anglo-catholic, but we are quite happy with the title. Part of the parish, including the area round the Church, is an Urban Priority Area, but these old mill-workers' houses have been refurbished as part of a renewal scheme and are now mainly occupied by young families. We get a fair bit of trouble from children. But up to twenty come in to Junior Church on Sunday mornings.

We only do, really (or really well) one thing: the Eucharist, or mass, or call-it-what-you-will. It started here when the Church was built in 1883. We never ever have had Mattins or Family Service. Just the mass. Only the mass. And it's here, in this hard place, in the mass, that we meet one another and meet God. We hope that we are sent from here to meet God in others too - indeed, to meet God in all the people we encounter. And because we meet God there, in everyone, so everyone is welcome here, as an image of God. We aim not to discriminate on any grounds, but only to welcome.

Thus we are a Church where woman priests can offer mass, and where lay folk are partners, not pew-fodder.

And so we are a Church were liturgy matters, a church trying hard not to dumb-down, but to reach up. We aim to preach the gospel as best we can. We have a lot of silence. We try not to talk before services. We struggle to provide decent music.

So sometimes, when the sunlight shines through the clerestory windows and picks out rays on the background of incense, we feel that God has in some sense reached down to us and called us and challenged us to see his beauty in the lives of all we meet.

This is the God who welcomes us while we are yet sinners, the God who calls us and sends us out to preach the Good News of his all-redeeming love, a love so much grander and more generous than we can ever imagine.