Tour our site
Keith's Story
I was not born into a Christian home, but I did have two Christian role models to follow. Both of my older brothers, Dennis and Barry have been believers for as long as I can remember, and it was Dennis who first took me along to the Sunday school at Allerford Road Chapel in Bromley, south east London. My most vivid memory is of Pastor Floyd, who was crippled, propping himself against the back of a chair and reading sections of John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress to us before we left the church service to go into our Sunday School Lessons.
When Dennis got married and moved away, I was still only 8, and as the chapel was a bus ride away from our home in Brockley, I stopped going.
God, however does not give us up that easily!
Soon afterwards I started going with my friend Colin to the 87th London Life Boys. This was the Junior Reserve of the Boys' Brigade, and the 87th was part of Brockley Baptist Church, just up the road from us. This involved going to
Sunday School again and it was there that I first made a simple commitment to God, although it didn't really mean much at the time. I went there for two years.At the age of 11, Life Boys were transferred or promoted up into the Boys' Brigade. At that time my parents also moved from Brockley to Catford, not that far, but too far to walk to BB. I was visited by the local BB captain and invited to join their company, but for whatever reason I didn't bother going.
So once again my involvement with the church stopped, but as I said, God does not give us up that easily!
So when I was 15, I was talking to my friend Ian, with whom I had been through infant, junior and secondary school, about the Boys' Brigade. He was a member of the 106th London Company at the Congregational Church, just up the road from my original 87th London Company. So I joined, enjoyed it and stayed.
Some of the boys in the Company knew some of the girls at another church, St. Georges Foxberry Road, and that was good enough reason to start going there for the evening service, having been to the BB Bible Class in the morning.
I found a warm welcome at St Georges in a way I had never experienced before and soon saw that the young people there had something I was sadly lacking, a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Friend.
So it was then at the age of about 17, that I finally made that commitment myself. God had got me at last!
“God does not give us up that easily!”
Trick photography 1950s. Me boxing myself, taken by my brother using an old box Brownie camera.
Registered Scottish Charity no: SC 005986
© COPYRIGHT 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED HOPEMANBAPTST.ORG.UK