Tag Archives: religion

Dec 2 2023

Fruits of revival seen in Portsmouth UK

I thought I’d show you what I have observed over the last few years in my home city of Portsmouth.

This is Langstone Church, I went here in my youth. I remember seeing many people commit their lives to Christ, baptised and married here. In recent years, it got smaller and its future was uncertain. Now its been taken over by Christ Central (in 2022) which is part of New Frontiers church, so its being used to reach the community again.

This is Kings Church. This was my main church from 1998 to 2009. This is a great community which I really loved, which is part of Assemblies of God. That year I left the UK to go and do ministry work in Israel.

They were in a small community centre, then bought an abandoned snooker hall, which then was too small. They got to acquire another church which was facing extinction.

This is Living Waters in Titchfield, a delightful oldy-worldy pleasant village 15 miles from Portsmouth.

This was also previous a different church that became defunct.

This is St Margaret’s Church in Southsea. This is my current church. This was abandoned, empty and in poor shape but revitalised.

So the common pattern I see, is new churches spring up, starting using a rented or less formal type meeting place, and take over large traditional church buildings.

I’ve been part of many churches, which are independent, Assemblies of God, Church of England, Messianic Jewish and Calvary Chapel, there’s multiple subgenres of these groups, as I’ve lived 4 years in Jerusalem Israel, 6 in London and before and now 3 years back in my home town of Portsmouth.

I like bringing people along to church that don’t yet know Jesus, or chatting to Christians not going to any church currently.

If you are in Portsmouth and want to know about my church or my faith, feel free to get in touch with me.

Jun 17 2010

Multifaith room in Heathrow Terminal 5

Just reading a friend Jon B’s visit to Turkey on Islamic culture, reminds me of something.  At Heathrow airport I had a long wait for my flight, and I saw a sign about a multifaith room, a kind of politically correct euphemism for a one size fits all church for any faith.

There is a church in at least one of the hospitals in Portsmouth, there is also a multi faith centre in the recently built £40m Lymington hospital in the New Forest I worked at sometimes about 18 months ago, when I visited this, I was pleased to see judging by the literature put out it was mostly had Christian books and bibles there.

Here is this one in the shiny new and hopefully post-problematic Heathrow Terminal 5, is one of these places, so I decided to take a look, as there’s only so long you can spend reading books and magazines you aren’t going to buy in WH Smiths. 🙂

Firstly apologies to the chap bending over, it was hard to get a quickie shot of this place without appearing to be disrespectful. 🙂  When I went in there and first of all unlike any religious establishment there is no symbol on the wall of any deity, or any centre point to make the room significant apart from the screen reminding passengers of upcoming departures.  There is a wooden cabinets with labels for Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and other holy books.  There are signs asking people to be respectful and not use it as a place to sleep or do baby changing.  The place also smells like a gym changing room as people take their shoes off at the door.   I didn’t bother at first, but there were five Islamic worshippers here at one point and one of the pointed out I should do the same to be respectful so I likewise decided to comply.

Out of the ten people I saw that went in and out of this place nine of them were Muslim, each borrowing a prayer mat from the cupboard, at least two of them were employees of the airport, one was an Indian gent (I think Hindu) with a piece of rope being held in both hands.   With some praying aloud in Arabic, it was a little hard to concentrate when I was reading a bible at one point, but it got me thinking.  There was a message from a Chaplin about that people should ask permission before leaving any literature in the cabinet to avoid causing offence.  I am not sure if the Chaplin has a sit-on-the-fence attitude to the Christian God to try and ‘not offend’,  just a general admin bod employed to keep the places clean and tidy, or someone with a real zeal and love for Christ but wants to be a servant to people not following the Lord.

Where as we could get alarmed at the number of worshippers of faiths other than Christianity being practised in the UK changes our culture, (and oh how the BNP and similar fascist groups and their ilk love to rub this in) but how many of us Christians actually make the effort to go to one of these places and maybe spend time in prayer before a journey or silently pray for the other users of the room for them to find the loving acceptance of Jesus?  Maybe if we did we would have very different faith landscape in the UK.

If anyone in church leadership is reading this, I would like to know what you think.  Is it a spiritually difficult to pray in a room with people with other beliefs or is worshipping Jesus here could be a good way to pray for others, or are these rooms pointless.  Those of you who are Christians travelling to other lands blogging on airport things too.  Please let me know your comments.