The Church on the Heath: Two Baptists Help Plant a Miracle

|PIC1|When Graham and Jenny Cowdery took their step of faith, their grown-up children were surprised. "I think they wondered whether we knew what we were doing!" says Graham.

Graham was treasurer at Fleet Baptist Church in Hampshire when he joined a committee of Baptists, Anglicans, Methodists and United Reformed Church members to look into planting a church on a new housing estate just outside Fleet called Elvetham Heath.

The local council had approached them after Euan Calthorpe, who was selling the land on which the estate would be built, insisted that provision for a church should be included in the legal agreement.

"He did that because he was a Christian," explains Graham. "We believe that The Church on the Heath would not have come about without his foresight."

With a lot of local opposition to the housing estate the committee met for seven years to plan how an ecumenical church plant would operate, not knowing if Elvetham Heath would ever be built.

"We had about a seven year period which was vital to us because it enabled us to look at this project in depth, to do a lot of planning and also really get to know one another and work out any differences. It was only in the latter stages that we knew it was going to happen."

|PIC2|Building work started in 1999 and it was then that Graham and Jenny took their step of faith and decided that they would move onto the estate and become part of the new church. "My wife and I thought quite a lot about the project and the idea of not only having a Christian presence on the estate, but building a new community was something that we felt God was calling us to.

"Our family had grown up and left home so we were left in a situation where we had a reasonably large house that we no longer really needed. It was an obvious opportunity to break away and do something different."

|PIC3|On 16th August 2000 Graham and Jenny moved onto Elvetham Heath. The seeding group for The Church on the Heath started to meet in their house three weeks later and the church had its inauguration service in the estate's community centre in December 2000.

Six years on, about 1,000 people attended two services in the church's brand new building on its opening day last December. The Baptist Union of Great Britain provided a Home Mission Grant towards ministry costs from 2000-2005 and a loan towards the church building.

Graham has been treasurer of The Church on the Heath since it was established and is also a house group leader. What has he learnt from the experience so far?

"I have learnt what God can do if we are prepared to follow his plan," he shares.

"In the early days, when we went around welcoming people to the estate and telling people that there was a church that was being run ecumenically, many people's attitude was 'but I thought you were all at war with one another?'

"It has certainly shown me the effect that being united has on our witness to non-Christians."




[Published on Christian Today with the kind permission of the Baptist Union of Great Britain www.baptist.org.uk/]