In Depth:  Michael Lockwood

Arthur Stone entered consciously into God’s presence on December 10. Born in Hartlepool in 1924, his father George Stone (known as Jack) was the minister of Thornton Street Baptist Chapel. When war came, like many of his generation, with the help of his dad’s stolen / borrowed trench coat and trilby, he lied about his age and signed up with the Durham Light Infantry.

He was involved in the Normandy landings and, after ten days of non-stop fighting, he collapsed and was invalided out of the war zone with shell shock.

Getting on for two and a half years ago, Michael Lockwood moved from Thornhill Baptist Church with his wife and two daughters to join with four believers in fellowship at Hall Green in Haworth, West Yorkshire. He tells us what happened...

We went with an awareness of some of the inherent difficulties of life in a small church and prepared as well as we could for the hardships ahead. What we were not prepared for, however, was the enormous blessings we would experience, not despite the church being small but because it was small.