Church Services
Services in the Benefice for each Sunday can be found here: Sunday Services
Welcome to our Benefice
Wychert Vale Benefice is a network of churches serving a group of vibrant and growing villages between Thame and Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Our leadership is team-based with many lay and ordained people working together.
Building together for Mission
When seeking a name for our benefice we found that our local building material, ‘Wychert’, is unique to the villages in our part of the Vale of Aylesbury. Taking the name Wychert Vale reminded us that, in our lives and mission together, we are building a dwelling place for God’s Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:10-16). Follow the link here for a reflection on our name.
Our vision and values
Wychert Vale was formed by joining the Haddenham Benefice with Stone and Dinton with Hartwell. Wychert Vale became a new benefice on 1 March 2016 after many years of prayer, planning and getting to know each other. We held a service to celebrate our new benefice on Palm Sunday evening, 20 March 2016, where we formally signed a Covenant agreement. We have been enjoying doing more together in the last few years and continue to see great potential for growth as a larger benefice.
The Wychert Vale Covenant emerged from our discussions and prayer together. It sets out how we want to relate to each other and gives our vision and values:
We agreed four Covenant Principles for working together:
- To share resources of all kinds.
- To get to know one another and to work with, listen to, support and value one another.
- To determine to play our part gracefully in the improvement and strengthening of communications throughout the new benefice upwards, outwards and benefice-wide.
- To commit ourselves to ongoing prayer.
We discovered three emerging Covenant Purposes:
- Worshipping God
- Serving Community
- Sharing Life
These help us to focus our role as the Body of Christ in our villages and have become the ‘motto’ or ‘strap line’ of the new benefice.