In September, Cornerstone Evangelical Church, Nottingham celebrated the 40th anniversary of Peter and Valerie Lewis’s ministry there.
The story of Cornerstone tells how God can have plans for a small, back-street church in a Midland city which has touched thousands of lives and reached to the ends of the earth. No one should underestimate the potential of small churches, but we can also rejoice in the strategic role of larger churches in Britain today.
First move
When Peter and Valerie came in 1969 the church was a small Baptist one in Hyson Green, a district in downtown Nottingham. Peter was 24 and Valerie 28. The church then had about 40 members, most of them middle-aged or elderly. Through the 1970s they saw a new church develop. Valerie had a strong vision for student work and gradually students from Trent Polytechnic and the University of Nottingham trekked across the city and a number of young professionals joined them. Peter wrote his first book, The Genius of Puritanism, and began to speak more widely.
