Contents

Introduction.

Lliswerry Baptist Church – The Beginning.

Lliswerry Baptist Church Ministers.

Lliswerry Baptist Church Survey.

Exalt.

The Sunday School .

Bible Club.

Camp.

My Model

Introduction

As part of a year 6 project in 2007 one of our young people chose to research Lliswerry Baptist Church. Below is an extract of that project reproduced with her permission.  

As long as I can remember I have been going to Lliswerry Baptist church. My mum and dad first took me as a baby and I have been going to various activates from crèche all the way up to bible club and exalt. A lot of my relatives also go so I decided that it would be interesting to find out about how the church started and some of the people involved in it over the years.  

Lliswerry Baptist Church – The Beginning

Before the church at Lliswerry was built a number of people from the area went to Nash Baptist church which was built in 1821.

In 1889 it was decided to build a church in Lliswerry. This was completed in September 1889.

When the church was first built it had wooden pews. My dad said they were very uncomfortable and made his bottom numb when he sat on them. The pipe organ which was built in 1929 can be seen in the picture.

In 1981 the church was extended again. My granddad helped with the work as he worked in the steel works and they were on strike. The pictures show the builders and the building work.

Front of Lliswerry Baptist Church as it is today.

The front of the church was change in around 1980 when the organ and pulpit were removed and replaced with an electronic organ and stage with a movable pulpit. The picture below shows how it looks now.

The picture below is the newest part of the church. It is at the bottom of Camperdown road just across from the main church building. It was bought about five years ago and is used as the church office. The other rooms are use by various other activities during the week.  

Lliswerry Baptist Church Ministers

  For the first ten years Mr Thomas De La. Haye was the minister of both Nash and Lliswerry Baptist churches.

In 1911 the Rev S. Thomas became the next minister of Lliswerry until he retired in 1925 during this time the original church building was extended as more room was need for the Sunday school.

In 1928 the Rev. J. C. Redman became the third minister for Lliswerry Baptist church. . He stayed until 1930 when he moved to a church in Taunton .

Mr B Stratford became the forth pastor in 1931. Over the next three years the church was once again extended to allow for the growing congregation.

The Rev T Hubbard was pastor from 1955 to 1963 he was originally a member of Lliswerry during the time of Mr Stratford and took over from him.

The Rev Downs was the minister from 1963 to 1973. He was the minister when my dad first started going to the church. He was a relative of a number of the people who still going to the church.

Rev Woolley was pastor when I first went to Lliswerry. The picture below shows him at the back on the right. Rev Woolley was inducted at Lliswerry in 1973 part of his induction invitation can be seen below. Rev Woolley married my mum and dad and dedicated me as a baby.

His son Harry shown back row on the left took over as Pastor of the church when he retired after 27 years in 2000.

The Rev Harry Place is the current senior pastor of Lliswerry. The church also has a pastor the Rev Jim Thomas shown below playing the drums.

Lliswerry Baptist Church Survey

I wanted to find to out what type of people came to my church. I wanted to know whether they were mostly old or young, if they lived locally and if the church was made up from families. I designed a questionnaire to answer these questions. (Appendix 3) I printed out 30 question sheets and I took them to church on a Sunday Morning. I asked people as they came in to church to complete the questionnaires. Once all the sheets had been returned I used Microsoft Excel to count my answers and draw graphs from my results these can be seen below   

Question 1

The first question I asked on the questionnaire was the gender of the person completing it. The graph below shows that there were a lot more females than males who answered the questions.

Question 2

I then found out the age range of the people who I gave a questionnaire to on that morning service. The graph shows that that most of the people asked were between 26 and 65 years of age.

 Question 3

This graph shows that 21 out of the 31 people asked have been coming to the church for more than 10 years. It also shows that the church has been having new people coming in recent years.

Question 4

This graph shows that most people live less then 1 mile from the church. Nobody lives more than 21 miles away.

Question 5

Before I did the questionnaire I thought most people would go to church 3 times a week. I go 2 – 3 times depending if I go on a Sunday evening. The graph shows that most people come to the church 2 times a week and lees people come more than 5 times.

Question 6

This graph shows that only 8 of the people come to church by themselves. The others all come with at least one other person.

Question 7

11 of the 31 people questioned bring children aged between 0 and 16 years with them to church.  This shows that there are a lot young people in our church.

Question 8

This graph shows the number of relatives the people questioned have in the church. Five of the 31 people do not have relatives that attend and there are eight who have more that seven.  

Question 9

This graph shows that 19 of the people questioned do not bring their children to any of the children’s activities. Of the others some attend more than one of the activities.

Exalt

Exalt is Lliswerry Baptist Churches (LBC) youth group. We meet every Wednesday night during school term time. There are four groups:

Exalt youth ~ 10~13 year olds

Exalt seniors ~14~16 year olds

Exalt kids ~3~5 year olds

Exalt juniors ~ 6~9 year olds

I go to Exalt youth. We have lots of fun, we play games, do craft. And have a bible time. During the year we go on trips the last one we went to Oakwood.

The Sunday School

 When the church was first opened children used to go Sunday school in the afternoon. Mr James will’s (taken from 50 Glorious Years) was the first superintendent. (person in charge). There were 6 teachers and 10 children in 1988. In 1917 there were 11 teachers and 180 children. During the war the Sunday school tea was cancelled due to lack of food! In 1937 a new building was built for the Sunday school this was where my mum and dad went when they were children. This building was knocked down and replaced with a new building called the Corner Stone in 1992 about this time it was decided that the afternoon Sunday school would be renamed to bible club and would take place during the morning service.

In the church I took pictures of some of the plaques on the walls. The three shown below are for people who went to the Sunday school.  The one man was only 20 when he died in the war in 1945.  

  Below are pictures of Sunday school classes in 1957 and 1968.

When a girl or boy was three years old they were given an invitation to join the Sunday school. The one below was given to 1959.

Bible Club

Every Sunday morning at church the younger children go out half way though and talk about Jesus and Father God. We go out into different classes and sing songs and crafts.

Camp

When Rev Woolley became pastor he started the first church camps.

The first camp was at Hereford in a field, sleeping in tents with water supplied by a hose pipe. In later years they camped at Woodcroft near Chepstow still in tents but with a house with sinks toilets and a kitchen.

Since I was 7 years old I have been going to camp. The first 3 years I went to Woodcroft.  Now we don’t sleep in tents we sleep in dormitories. Last year we went to new place called Dyke House.

In camp we have lots of fun. We play games, sing songs and stay there for 5days but my favourite thing is the gunge tank (pictured above). Last year we had Christmas Day with Father Christmas, Christmas dinner and presents. Sometimes Mum and Dad help so it’s like a holiday.

My Model

 I decided to build a model of Lliswerry Baptist Church . At first I deigned it on a piece of paper. Then I found 3 boxes and I took pictures of the church and scanned them into the computer I then printed them and stuck them to the boxes. My Granddad gave me a sheet of cardboard that I used for the base.