The parish is mostly urban and excludes rural outskirts, it includes another church, St Mark's, in which the joint clergy provide less formal and family services.

The present building, the oldest in the town, was built in the twelfth century, replacing an earlier Anglo-Saxon church.

Its core is made from the local sandstone, Bargate stone from the nearby Greensand Ridge, which is found close to the town.

[3] In 1086, the Domesday Book recorded that Ranulf Flambard, justiciar of William Rufus, held Godalming church.

[4] The lammas, or common land, complemented a substantial glebe, the funds from which allowed for a grand and spacious structure to be built.

The vicar at that time, known as Dr. Andrews, was ejected from his living in 1640,[4] and the town welcomed the Calvinistic preacher, Thomas Edwards.

First built during the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods, the structure has been proven in ecclesiastical records to have been a redevelopment of an Anglo-Saxon church:[4]The nucleus around which it has grown lies in the centre, the eastern half of the nave representing the simple aisleless nave of the pre-Conquest church, and the central tower its short, square chancel.

This arch still exists, but in 1879 it was lifted up on higher piers...In the thirteenth century, the cruciform church of the Norman England was converted into a rectangle by the construction of the north and south chapels and the widening of the nave aisles.

[3] The church has interior monuments to Judeth Elyott, d.1615: a figure of a lady kneeling before a book on a lectern in an elaborately-decorated aedicule, the cornice surmounted by coat of arms, shields, and end pedestals with skull and hour-glass, and tablet with skull and cross-bones underneath; Thomas and Joan Purvoche, d.1509, John Barker, d.1595 and John and Elizabeth Westbrook.