On 19 September Emmanuel Church in Handsworth, Birmingham gave thanks to God for the completion of their church building project with over 200 people gathered from churches around the Midlands region as well as other parts of the country.
The pastor, Juge Ram, shared a brief history of the church and how ‘their times have been in God’s hands’. He explained that the church was initially planted by WEC missionaries in the 1970s to reach the local South Asian population in Handsworth. The work slowly grew over the following years under various leaders, all of them WEC missionaries. The church became an independent evangelical church in 1997 under the current pastor.
Reduced price!
They originally met in a church hall which belonged to a Holiness Church. It was a wooden shed-like structure which was freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer! But then the Holiness Church decided to close the work and sell the building. The land and the building was valued at £118,000; but the new church had only £10,000 in the bank. However, the godly trustees of the Holiness Church decided to sell the premises for £10,000! They wanted to see the gospel flourish in a largely Hindu and Sikh area.
