My Story Talk 13 Ministry at Colchester (1962-68) Part 1
Our time at Colchester saw the arrival of our first two children, Deborah in 1964 and Sarah, fifteen months later in 1965. Apart from the birth of the girls, the most significant aspects of our time in Colchester were the growth of the church, my ministry beyond the local church, and the lessons the experience taught me. In this talk I’ll be dealing mainly with the growth of the church, but first a word about practical things like employment, housing, holidays, and transport.
Employment, housing, holidays, and transport
Before we were married, Eileen had been working in the Dagenham education office, and on moving to Colchester she found an excellent job in the education office there, which was within walking distance of our new home. She was soon promoted to a highly responsible administrative position which she held until shortly before Debbie was born.
As for me, although the church was contributing £5 a week towards the rent of our bungalow, it was essential that, for the time being at least, I find full-time secular employment. For the first year, the nearest RE (Religious Education) teaching post available was in Braintree which necessitated a thirty-mile round trip every day.
However, a year later a post became available in Colchester at the Alderman Blaxill Secondary School, a little over a mile from our church and a similar distance from our home. In those days the RE syllabus was based almost entirely on the Bible, so lesson preparation was not difficult, and I became very much aware that teaching 300 children every week was an important part of my ministry. I will say more later about how the Lord remarkably blessed that work, but how in 1966 the Lord called me to give up the teaching job and give myself full-time to the work of the church.
The rent for the bungalow we were living in was about £28 a month, which sounds ridiculously low by today’s prices, but it didn’t seem so then bearing in mind that my monthly salary as a teacher was only £60! However, we soon discovered that some new houses were being built nearer to our church and that as a schoolteacher I could get a 100% mortgage to buy one. The monthly repayments would be just £18, £10 less than we were already paying in rent.
The only problem was that the builders required a £20 deposit to secure the plot. Eileen had £20 saved up to buy a hoover, which we desperately needed, and we were wondering what to do, when my mother, not knowing anything about our plans to buy a new property, phoned to say that she was buying a new hoover and asked if we would we like her old one, which was in perfectly good condition. We saw this as a clear sign that the Lord was prompting us to make the move, and we paid the £20 deposit and moved into our new home in August, 1963.
My parents also moved in 1963. They had been living in Hornchurch since before I was born, and now I was married they decided to move to a new bungalow in Eastwood, not far from Southend-on-Sea.
So when the children came along we were grateful for our holidays to be visits to our parents who were equally pleased to have an opportunity to spend time with their grandchildren. Eileen’s parents were still living in Hornchurch, and it was always good to see them, but my parents’ home in Eastwood, with its proximity to the sea and the beautiful view of open countryside to the rear of the property was especially inviting. We usually travelled there on a Monday and returned on the Saturday so as not to leave the church unattended on Sundays.
But that brings me to the subject of transport. During the course of my ministry, I have owned or had the use of some fifty different vehicles, ranging from my first car, a Ford Prefect, which I bought during my final term at Oxford, to my recently acquired nine-year-old Mercedes E-Class saloon. The Ford Prefect broke down in the cold winter of 1963 when the snow lay on the ground throughout January, February and most of March.
I was on my way to school in Braintree when it happened, and I quickly decided that I needed something more reliable. That was when we bought our fourth Lambretta scooter, reliable because it was new, but extremely uncomfortable and at times difficult to control in that freezing weather. So it wasn’t long before I was back in a car again.
In the summer I borrowed an old Bradbury van from the father of some of the children coming to our meetings. He said we could have it for the day to take them to the seaside. Unfortunately, it broke down on the way home and I was left with about a dozen kids on the roadside. As I was wondering and praying what to do, a man came by in a Humber Hawk and asked if he could help. It was a large car and somehow he bundled all the kids on to the back seat and, with me beside him in the front, kindly drove us all back home.
But that gave me an idea. Maybe I should get a Humber and use it for children’s work! I looked in the local paper and saw an ad for a Humber Super Snipe, even larger than the Hawk. It was over ten years old, but I had read somewhere that if you’re buying a second-hand car it might be wise to get a big one. It might cost a bit more in fuel, but the engine was more likely to be reliable! Which has been my excuse for buying big cars ever since!
So I bought it for £80 and discovered that it did 11 to the gallon in town and, if you were lucky, 19 on a run! But it did the job, and I remember on one occasion squeezing eighteen kids into it to get them to Sunday School! It was only a short distance, and I realise now how potentially dangerous that was. But in those days ‘risk assessment’ had not been invented and there was no requirement to wear a seatbelt. In fact, there were no seatbelts. Piling people into the back of a van or lorry was quite common, but of course there was far less traffic on the roads back then. And if it did enter our head that something might be risky, we just trusted the Lord to take care of us!
But it soon became obvious that we needed something more suited to the task, and I traded in my Humber for a 12-seater minibus. And before long we were running four minibuses to bring people to the meetings as one person after another, following my example, exchanged their car for one.
Everything we have belongs to the Lord, and if changing our car for a minibus will lead to more people coming to Christ, we should surely be prepared to do so. The commitment of such people was undoubtedly one of the reasons for the growth of the church while we were there, and that’s where we turn to next.
The growth of the church
The Full Gospel Mission, Straight Road, Lexden, was nothing more than a tin hut with the potential to seat at most eighty people. When Eileen and I arrived, there were only twelve regular attenders, and that included a family of four who emigrated to Australia not long after our arrival, leaving us with a congregation of eight. By the time we left, the church was packed every Sunday with eighty regular attenders, which, in the 1960s was considered rapid growth, and my main purpose in this section is to explore the reasons why. But first, a word about the church programme.
Church programme
When we arrived in Colchester we inherited what was a typical programme for AoG churches in those days. On Sunday mornings there was the Breaking of Bread service, otherwise known as Communion. There was a Sunday School for the children in the afternoon, and on Sunday evenings there was the Gospel Service where all the hymns and the sermon were designed to bring people to Christ, and after which there would be laying on of hands and prayer for the sick.
Midweek on Tuesday evenings there was a Children’s Meeting from six to seven followed by a Prayer Meeting at nine, and on Thursday evenings there was Bible Study. There was no meeting for young people until we started one on a Friday, but more of that later.
The attendance at these meetings was far from encouraging. In fact, during our first year at Colchester, the Sunday School and Children’s Meeting were attended by only a handful of children, and the midweek meetings for adults were hardly better. On Sundays, if we had visitors, numbers might rise to fifteen. I faithfully preached the gospel every Sunday evening, but in that year we saw not one single decision for Christ, largely because most Sundays everyone present was already a Christian.
Apart from the weekly programme, there was the church’s Annual Convention when a guest speaker would be invited for the weekend and friends from surrounding Pentecostal churches would come for the two meetings held on the Saturday. It was good to see the building full and to hear some of the pioneers of the Pentecostal Movement like Howard and John Carter. But while these occasions were a real encouragement, they hardly made up for the weeks throughout the year when so few were attending. So what made the difference in the remaining years where we saw our numbers multiply significantly?
Reasons for growth
It is the Lord who builds his church, and in my view, the major reason for the growth of the church was, without a doubt, the fact that he strategically placed me as an RE teacher in a local school where I was free to teach the young people about Jesus. That, combined with the fact that he sent me key people to help me start a Youth Meeting on a Friday night, resulted in dozens of decisions for Christ, many of whom started to come on Sundays.
It all started when I received an invitation to preach at the Youth Meeting in the Colchester Elim Church. After the meeting a couple of people in their early twenties asked me if we had a Youth Meeting at our church, and I said that I’d like to start one but that I had no musician. To which they responded by offering to help me. David Fletcher was an able guitarist and John Ward an excellent accordion player. Together with their fiancées, Jean and Sandra, who were good singers, they made a great group for leading worship and were, quite literally, a Godsend.
All this, in the providence of God, coincided with my starting teaching in the local school and with a girl called Corinne, one of the children from a family in our church, starting there too. She provided the link between my RE lessons and the local church. I told the children about Jesus, and she told her friends where they could find out more.
So we launched our new Youth Meeting by hiring a couple of coaches to provide transport to the church from just outside the school gates. My new friends from Elim provided the music and I preached. In school I had been able to tell them about Jesus, but I couldn’t make a gospel appeal in RE lessons! Now, in church, I had complete freedom, and on the very first night, when I made the appeal forty-one children made a decision for Christ.
And when a number of them started coming on Sundays, on one occasion eleven of them being baptised in the Holy Spirit, there was a new sense of expectancy among the older members. They were thrilled to see young people in their meetings, and that began to attract people from other churches too, including David and Jean, John and Sandra, who decided to join us because of their work with the youth.
Of course, our attempts to reach people with the gospel were not limited to the young people. I produced a quarterly newsletter which we called The Full Gospel Mission VOICE. We distributed thousands of these to the homes in the area, using my minibus on a Saturday morning to transport ten or so young people to deliver them street by street throughout the area. I can think of only one person who came to Christ through that ministry, but at least we knew that people had had an opportunity to read the gospel even if they never came to church.
After I had given up my teaching job, I also conducted two evangelistic missions in our church. Each mission lasted from a Saturday through to the following Sunday. We leafleted far and wide, each leaflet containing a message about healing as well as salvation, and, of course, details of the meetings. The meetings were well attended, but mainly by Christians who wanted prayer for healing, and although there were a few decisions for Christ and some healings, I have no memory of anyone being added to our church as a result.
And an SPF mission we conducted in Wivenhoe, a village near Colchester next to which the new University of Essex was about to be built, fared little better. It was a great experience for the students who participated, but there were very few local people who attended.
Apart, that is, from Ian and Janet Balfour, a couple from a Strict Baptist background, who came to support us, got to know us, were baptised in the Spirit as a result, and decided to move to a house less than five minutes’ walk from our church. They had four children all under the age of five, one of whom was Glenn, later to come as a student to Mattersey Hall, and, for a time after my principalship, its principal. The Lord clearly had a purpose in our going to Wivenhoe, even if, at the time, we felt rather disappointed with the results.
And Ian and Janet were not the only people added to our church as a result of receiving the baptism in the Spirit. Alan Coe, who was a work colleague of John Ward and had recently become a Christian, came along to our meetings, received the baptism, and joined our church. He proved a very faithful member, and when I was in contact with him recently was still attending regularly. David Littlewood, a former Methodist, later to become an AoG minister and a member of Mattersey’s Board of Governors, was also baptised in the Spirit in our church while he was a student at the University of Essex.
But the ministry the Lord had given me of praying for people to be filled with the Spirit was not limited to those who would become members of our church. I had the privilege of laying hands on Reginald East, the vicar of West Mersea, and on Mike Eavery, the minister of the local Congregational Church and seeing them both baptised in the Spirit in their homes.
So the Lord was blessing us in ways that perhaps we had not expected, and if the results of the evangelistic missions we conducted were rather disappointing, he was showing us that the key to growth was to follow the supernatural leading of the Holy Spirit. Miracles happen as he determines, and I was certainly not expecting what happened one Saturday evening.
But I’ll tell you about that next time.
