Welcome to Bethel's web Page.

On this web pictures will generally be 'thumbnailed'.  To see them full size click on them.

This page was updated 02 June 2008

About Bethel, Leigh Park.

This is a small church in the Leigh Park Estate on the northern edge of Havant in Hampshire UK. In the late 1950's Jim and Eileen Kerr (Click for a picture) who were then living in Bedhampton started to evangelise the new houses being built on what would become the Leigh Park Estate.

What's it like -  It is nicer inside than it looks from the outside!  Click here to see some pictures.  Besides the room we use most of the time there are smaller rooms, a kitchen and toilets downstairs and similar rooms, except the kitchen, upstairs.

 A General Description of the Church

The church is a small one, indeed very small, both as regards its membership and buildings.  It is located in a huge ‘overspill’ estate that was built from the early 1950s onwards to accommodate people displaced from the city of Portsmouth .  

The Church is affiliated to the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC) and the FIEC are the Trustees of the church premises.  Theologically it is baptist and reformed and stands apart from ecumenical and charismatic trends.  

Bethel is a fairly typical Free church in its idiom with the usual two services on Sundays and a mid week meeting.  Other meetings and events are described later.  

The church can be described as conservative, reformed and baptist, based on the labels that the majority of members would accept.  The church is not involved in the Churches Together movement but plays its part fully in the local FIEC group and is in touch with other similar churches.  Preachers come from a wide-ish spectrum and the weekly ministry is good.

Location and Environment - LEIGH PARK.  

As already indicated Leigh Park is a large estate on the northern edge of the town of Havant just inside the Eastern edge of Hampshire.  While Havant is a town in its own right it tends to be over shadowed by the nearby City of Portsmouth .  This is because of the respective sizes of the two towns and more particularly because of the origins of many of Havant’s inhabitants.  Many Havant and Leigh Park people will visit Portsmouth regularly for shopping or tp watch Pompey - the currently very successful football club.  

The Estate was built on what had been attractive countryside and remnants of this survive in green avenues through the estate, mainly along streams running to the South.  It is surrounded by attractive woodlands to the North and coastal suburbs of Havant to the south.  

Communications are excellent.  Havant railway station has frequent services to London , Portsmouth , Chichester and Brighton and Southampton and Bournemouth .  There are even trains to Bath, Cornwall, the midlands and South Wales .  London is a little over an hour away by the faster trains.  Roads towards London and along the coast are excellent and the urban motorways of Havant, Portsmouth and Southampton make it very easy to move about by car.  The Estate is served by  good bus service some of which pass the church.. 

There is a range of housing in the estate including a lot of the controversial factory built style of ‘reema’ houses - indeed the church is of ‘reema’ concrete construction.  Many of the houses have been sold under recent Government policies encouraging such sales and this is, as is common, detectable in the way many houses and some parts of the estate show improvement in the care and condition of the houses etc.  There are one main and many smaller shopping centres in the estate, numerous pubs, primary and secondary schools and the usual range of churches.  

The other churches on the estate include large Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, a Baptist Church , Methodists and a divided Community Church.  The Baptists are trying a church plant north of Bethel and we are helping them  abit by allowing them to use our building occasionally.

History of the Church.

 Recent and Current Endeavours

 The church has regularly engaged in leaflet distribution in the immediate environs of the church.  From Christmas 1995 to Christmas  2006 each of these seasons was marked by the distribution of 1,500 to 2,000 leaflets around the church.  There has been some but minimal response to these leaflets but they were part of what was intended to be a long term strategy.  We get our best response at Christmas.

In 2005 we delivered 2,500 flyers with a short gospel content and invitation to come to the church's services.

Door to door evangelism has been undertaken in the past and was carried on in 1996 and 1997 under Ben Tannett’s encouragement.

Personal invitations continue to bring a few people to special services (e.g. Christmas and Easter) and to Harvest Suppers (see pictures) and a few of the contacts are now regular or occasional attendees.   We also get one or two 'outsiders' to our regular monthly tea on the first Sunday of each month.

Every Thursday the church is open for people to drop in for coffee and this has led to a few good contacts and two people becoming attenders in one case very regularly.  

Others drop in for services and we are encouraged that this still happens. 

Preachers

We are so grateful to God and the men concerned for those who willingly come to us on Sundays to preach.  Our services are sometimes conventional and sometimes less formal and we enjoy them as we seek to worship a great God.

We do hope to find a pastor and are actively searching for the right man.  We can probably afford to pay a reasonable salary.