Hope Church was opened in 2017 but as with all things that God does, they have their beginnings long before they are seen physically. Dave and Jan Collins had moved to Shaw from Beverley in East Yorkshire in 2014 to help work with a church in Oldham. They laboured as part of the Leadership team for 2 years but because of a number of issues within that leadership team God closed the door and they were left wondering why God had brought them to Shaw. As a consequence of this, they began meeting, with a number of other Christians whom God had brought alongside them, in their lounge on a Sunday evening for worship and Bible study. This was the inception of Hope Church in Shaw.
During 2016 Jan had been thinking about the Card shop on Eastway in Shaw and as she is always buying cards for some occasion she was in there quite often. She had always said that the property would make a great church and its position was ideal as it was centrally located in the town. Early in 2017 she had gone to visit our daughter in London for a period of time to help her out after the birth of her second child and she had prayed to God “if you want us to build a church in Shaw then let this property be on the market for sale when I return from London”. God is truly amazing in the way He answers our prayers and sure enough on her return the shop was actually up for sale. We arranged a visit with the Estate Agent straight away. As we visited, we could see how the building could be set up as a Church and we felt that God was leading us forward to buy this property. Following Dave’s retirement, he had continued to work with a group of ex-colleagues delivering training to the chemical industry. This has allowed them to build some savings and he had wanted to invest in property to bring a return on these savings. But God challenged him about not building a physical house but a spiritual house where God would dwell by His Spirit. These savings became the seed money for the church.
God had brought them this far but the next step was how could they buy it? Their personal savings weren’t enough to buy the property even at the significantly reduced offer they had made for the property. They needed to raise some additional finance. In order to deliver the training that Dave had done after retirement, he had set up a private company, of which he was a director and through which he worked. This company was the perfect way that they could execute a mortgage to raise the additional finances. They went to the Bank to speak to them about taking out a loan. The Bank manager was surprisingly helpful when they said they wanted to buy a commercial property and convert it into a church and he agreed in principle to a mortgage for the full outstanding balance.
However, there were a number of conditions that were put in place for the release of the money. One seemed to be a ‘deal breaker’ in that it required them to have a commercial lease agreement in place with the church before they would lend them the money. At that time there was no church legal entity that could enter into such an agreement, in fact there was no real church yet, just the group of 14 meeting in a front room. They left the Bank encouraged but wondering how on earth they were going to meet the Banks conditions. About 2 weeks later, whilst they were away on holiday, they received an email from the Bank saying that they had reviewed our case and had agreed to drop all the pre-conditions of the loan. This could only have been God. (It actually took them until September 2018 to get the church established as CIO and registered as a legal entity, it was only then that the church would have been able to enter in to those commercial contracts the Bank had initially wanted). They applied for the loan and purchased 30 Eastway in Shaw on 16th August 2017. Hope Church now had a building! But there was a lot to do before it would become a functioning church. Here are some pictures of what the building looked like on the day we picked up the keys.
The path of converting the building into a church building was not easy, to say the least, and many times we have had to stop and wonder if we had got it right! God had provided for us people and resources to carry out the necessary work and at times it was daunting but we continued in prayer and with the encouragement of people offering their help and expertise. We were so thankful to the Lord who prompted them to help build into His Kingdom here in Shaw. Offers of material goods that we could not have afforded to buy kept coming in and we were blown away by what was happening!
The work has been much greater than we had ever envisaged and so also was the cost too but with the generous donations of time, energy and money by our brothers and sister in Christ, this project has got to where it is today! The acknowledgment of struggle and sometimes failure should not overshadow the truth that God is building His Church, not us, and that the Church is made up of sinners, daily dependent on God’s Grace to do what we need to do! Relationships can be messy but they are also what God uses to rescue us from ourselves. Through our relationships in the body of Christ, God shows us our inability to love others without first finding our strength in our relationship with the God who created and redeemed us!
Here is what the building looks like now and it’s all thanks to God.
