A five minute read

istory

Where this church came from, and how a living room prayer meeting grew into a worldwide fellowship.

1971

The beginning

Pastor Samuel Reid starts a prayer meeting in his living room with a handful of people.

1984

A first home

The growing congregation moves into a permanent building of its own.

1996

Sending out

The church sends its first couple out to plant a congregation in another city.

2009

Worldwide

Partner churches open across three continents.

2021

Millbrook

A couple is sent out to start Northgate Chapel in Millbrook.

How the movement began

Samuel Reid was born in 1938 in a mill town, the third of six children, at a time when the factories were closing and the churches were emptying. He left school at fifteen and spent nine years on the shop floor. After he married his wife Edith, and after they lost their first child to pneumonia, the two of them took their first hesitant steps toward God. For a while faith stayed a habit rather than a conviction. It was only when a stranger stopped him in the street and asked him what he actually believed that Reid realised he could not defend a single thing he claimed, and began to read the Bible for himself.

His calling to preach came a few years later. His own pastor advised him to go to Bible college, and Reid went, but found it was not what he had imagined. Instead of learning how to bring people to faith he was handed administrative theory and doctrinal argument. He came away with a solid grounding in the Word and almost no preparation for the reality of daily ministry.

His first posting was as a youth pastor, where he managed mostly to upset the respectable members by preaching plainly about sin. Then came the offer of a small congregation with a difficult history. There he learned, from evangelists and from other pastors, the things nobody had taught him at college, and found the principles that actually made a church grow.

During a service in 1965 Reid was filled with the Holy Spirit and, like the apostles at Pentecost, began to speak in other tongues. He knew almost nothing about it beforehand, which convinced him all the more that God and not his own understanding was at work. He came out of that service with a conviction that God would move, as he put it, in the countries of the world and the islands of the sea.

For the next few years he was moved from one struggling congregation to another, always to clear up what others had left behind. Over time his view diverged from that of the leadership. He became convinced that programmes do not win people. The leadership’s attention went to Sunday schools and summer camps. Reid came to see those as support for a church, never the centre of its ministry. From then on he stopped sending promising young men away to college and trained them himself, in the work.

In 1971 Reid was offered yet another troubled congregation, and took it. Thirty-five people remained. What he found there, for the first time, were people willing to make themselves useful and to reach out to those outside. In those same years a revival was moving through a generation of young people who had gone looking for meaning in every other direction first. The town sat on a well-travelled route, and the church reached a great many of them with the gospel.

Reid trained the people of that congregation out of his own experience, and in time the church was strong enough to send some of those men to other cities to start new congregations. That was the foundation of a movement that kept widening. The churches sent out from there grew strong enough to send couples of their own, and the work opened up abroad as well.

Coming to this country

The work began here in 1979 as a Bible study of about thirty people who wanted a pastor of their own. One of the disciples took the lead, and Reid supported him in building the church, bringing him over regularly to the twice-yearly Bible conferences. That is how the vision of the fellowship was planted here. The congregation later moved to a larger city and began to grow, and in time it too was strong enough to send men out.

People keep coming because the preaching brings them into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and because the church still holds to the same commission: to preach the gospel through discipleship, evangelism, music and drama, and by sending couples into the mission field.

History in Millbrook

Northgate Chapel was sent out from that fellowship at a Bible conference in early 2021 to start a church in Millbrook. The first services were held in a rented hall on Halston Road, and on Wednesdays in the living room of the couple who had been sent. Today you will find us at 128 Warren Street.