Inside new church building – Towyn
WE JUST KEEP ON GROWING
Set in picturesque North Wales, North Coast Church has extended its building for the second time in the past six years – and it may not be too long before the builders have to be called in again!
SIX YEARS AFTER EXTENDING ITS building, North Coast Church has continued to grow – and now it has expanded again. Today it houses a 300- seater auditorium, has a new foyer, reception and offices.
The first extension came at a time of change for the church. ‘Around five or six years ago, I felt God prompted me to change the outlook of the church,’ explains pastor David Rowlands. ‘We had got to a point where the only difference between the Sunday morning service and the Sunday evening outreach” service was that we had communion in the morning.
The same people came to both services, there was nothing changing. So l to felt God was telling us to go on the doors and ask people when they would come to church. If the majority said Friday night or
Saturday night then we’d have to change something.
‘Ninety per cent of the people we asked said they’d be most likely to come to church on a Sunday morning. So we decided that we would swap the services round, having the outreach service in the morning and taking communion together in the evening’.
This change meant the church in the seaside resort of Towyn outgrew its building, and an extension was needed to accommodate the growth.
We are seeing new families come every single week!’ David says. ‘We have now dropped the evening service and run church over the morning. It starts with breakfast at nine before a prayer meeting and a Bible class, run simultaneously at ten. And the main event starts at 11. After then service we have lunch as well.
‘We have also started reaching out to the community. There’s a playschool and toddler’s group, kid’s club on Wednesday and youth on Fridays, and a day for single mothers to come and be pampered.
‘We had a look at our community to see what is needed and noticed there are a lot of elderly people around. We started a lunch for them on Tuesdays, which regularly sees more than 50 people attend.
We’re starting another lunch for them on Thursdays.
‘The toddler group is not somewhere for people to simply use as a baby-sitting service. We get in there with the parents and help teach them how to parent. We’re very heavily involved in the community now and people know the church.
‘I am actually privileged to be the vice- chair of governors at a local school, and am a governor at another. We have folks sending in prayer requests from the community around the church’. Testimonies abound of families coming to Christ and David says, ‘we have been standing on 2 Samuel 5:20 as a church, praying for a breakthrough in people’s lives.
‘We had one lady whose blood system was out of sync. She had been to the doctors who had done some tests and she was ready to collect the results. We prayed for her and the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her’.
The church is growing so quickly that they are already discussing the next extension. The children currently meet in our original hall, but they are already too big for it, so we’re talking about adding on a new extension to help accommodate them,’ David notes.
It’s amazing that a church with a recent extension project just completed can be in a position to consider further building work, but David says, ‘We got a £200,000 grant from the Welsh Assembly towards the building work. We also got a great mortgage from Kingdom Bank. It’s miraculous’.
Next on the agenda for the church, is its first conference. Aimed at its own church members and other churches in the area, David is excited about the prospect of hosting the event in October.
‘We did what we felt God had said and there are new families every Sunday, its fantastic enthuses David. The church is definitely growing. I’m excited about hosting our first conference and look forward to seeing what God will do’
Barnabas Ministries UK 