Epuni Baptist Church - Fairfield

Our Story

Epuni Baptist Church has been active in Lower Hutt since the 1940’s, when the church was planted as a Sunday School for children during the post-war housing boom.

We have always been a church who value being a part of our local community. We are open to anyone and everyone, and are a pretty relaxed and welcoming group.

We are a part of the Baptist Union of New Zealand. If you’d like to find out more about what that means, you can find out more here.

Our Vision

We want to be a church that grows disciples.

To do that, we focus on a simple process…

Life with each other. Life through Jesus. Life to our world.

We want people to feel like they belong in our church family, and we want to always be growing in our relationships with one another. Epuni Baptist is a welcoming community, where there is space and grace for every person. We seek to be people who love, support, and forgive one another, and who walk the journey of faith together. Where, as Romans 12:5 says, “in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”

We also want to see people meeting Jesus, and growing in their faith; in worship, in prayer, in obedience. Jesus taught, in John 6:35, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” We want to be people who are captivated by Jesus, and who are increasingly grateful for the life we’ve found in him.

Finally, we don’t want to just focus inwardly. We believe God calls each of us to participate in His mission in the world. Each of us has a vocation, and we want to be a church family who are engaging in this missional calling. We believe that, just like the Israelites were in Jeremiah 29:7, we’re called to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city”. We want to be a blessing to our neighbourhood. We strive to do this by meeting practical needs, by being a faithful presence wherever God has placed us as individuals, and by sharing the good news of the gospel in word and deed.

Our Statement of Beliefs

The church is a community of those who believe in God the Father, in God the Son Jesus Christ and in God the Holy Spirit – one God; who are repentant of their sin and who have been saved by personal faith in Jesus Christ through His atoning death and resurrection; who publicly proclaim their faith and are committed to the church’s vision, aims and functions.

The church believes in:

• The true humanity and deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.

• The atonement made on the cross by our Lord for the sin of the world.

• The person of the Holy Spirit as the one who sanctifies and who sets apart, empowers and imparts spiritual gifts to the church.

• The inspiration of the Bible and its authority in all matters of faith and practice.

• Salvation by faith in Jesus Christ alone.

• Membership of the church being for those who have received salvation.

• The immersion of believers as the scriptural form of baptism.