I really enjoyed speaking at Hope Community Church, Wymondham last Sunday. I brought a new message called “Rejoicing on earth and in heaven” from Luke 15. It was wonderful also to stay with Grantley & Floss Watkins, who pioneered the church, and to hear first-hand their remarkable stories. First of all Grantley explained that he’d been born and brought up in a betting shop in Gloucester and that he’d had no Christian upbringing, and hadn’t even attended a wedding or a funeral. But Grantley noticed that there was something different about the R.E teacher at school. (Little did Grantley know that this R.E. teacher was the son of a notorious gambler and drunkard who had been converted in the Welsh Revival of 1905!). Anyway, the R.E. teacher was offering a school trip that included an Indian meal. The main reason why Grantley signed up for the school trip (apart from the fact that he liked the teacher and found R.E interesting) was because he’d only ever eaten the standard British meat and 2 veg, so he was fascinated by the chance to eat Indian food. As it turned out the “school trip” was actually to a stadium in South Wales to watch a TV relay of Billy Graham’s 1967 Earl’s Court crusade. Grantley’s conversion was part of a major move of God in the school, with hundreds of pupils subsequently attending meetings. Grantley arrived at university at UEA having already seen many come to Christ as a schoolboy, and it was amazing to hear the inside track on Eric Delve’s famous ‘Down to Earth’ mission in Norwich, which was at a time where Grantley and Floss explained that the largest church in Norwich was around 200 people. This in and of itself shows how much things have changed. Today there are several much larger churches in Norwich such as Soul Church, St. Thomas Norwich, and King’s Community Church. Floss and Grantley then told me a fascinating tale of life with Youth For Christ in Norfolk and then numerous Newfrontiers church plants around the county culminating in the journey that Wymondham Baptist Church took on its journey into Hope Community Church and their new state of the art building.