Our Community

Harbour Churches is home to a varied community that is active in church life in many ways.

We have around 350 electoral roll members across both church parishes, West wittering and Birdham with Itchenor. Our joint parochial parish councils have around 20 to 30 trustee members and two treasurers.

Our ministry team works with two safeguarding officers, two church wardens, several prayer leaders, youth workers, musicians and organists, singers and choir members, florists, churchyard, buildings fabric and grounds people.

Our churches can hold congregations of 100+ people, and now that we are through the Pandemic, we are seeing a return to pre-pandemic attendance numbers.

After the Pandemic we restarted community activities, particularly youth work. We were surprised and pleased to find that around 30% of new volunteers had recently moved to the Manhood Peninsula. Many new volunteers do not regularly attend church but do support a host of community and church fellowship activities. Our community members organise and install flowers for our churches, support the ministry team during Life Event services such as funerals and weddings, collect foodbank donations and take them to Chichester foodbank warehouse, host refugees, help to run the Pump Room Café, Ducklings, Amblers at the St James Centre, or Soup Lunches at the Church Room; and make sure that our buildings are clean and tidy. A popular holiday destination, we enjoy surges of worship attendance numbers on high days and holidays which would not necessarily be ‘plain sailing’ were it not for the love and support of our community.

Please do visit our churches, they are open daily during daylight hours.

Itchenor, St Nicholas, Itchenor Road, Chichester, PO20 7DA.

West Wittering, St Peter & St Paul, Pound Road, PO20 8AJ.

Birdham, St James, Church Lane, PO20 7HG.