John Bunyan Baptist Church

In 1963 the buglers of the 1st A Birmingham Boys’ Brigade lined up at the door of a brand-new church on the Kettlehouse estate and sounded their instruments for its opening. Civic leaders came to see it opened. Rob Clarke kept the photographs, and they are in our archive: the buglers at the church door, the guests, and the plain, bright interior of the new John Bunyan Baptist Church.

It had taken the congregation a quarter of a century to get there.

From Hockley to Kingstanding

The church began as a mission from the People’s Chapel in Great King Street, Hockley. In the 1930s, the Victoria County History records, the People’s Chapel led Baptist mission work in the city’s new estates, and Kingstanding in particular. In 1939 its members started a Sunday school in Kingsland Road School. In 1948 the John Bunyan Hall, seating 200, opened on Lambeth Road, and in 1951 a church was formally founded there with 35 members. By 1956 it had 62.

The Boys’ Brigade came the same way. The 1st A Birmingham, based at the People’s Chapel, started a Kingstanding branch in the 1930s, meeting at Kingsland Road School and attached to the John Bunyan church. In the 1960s the Kingstanding boys became independent and were renumbered the 11th Birmingham. William Nolan and his younger brother Ian were in the 11th from 1969 to 1973, when the family lived in Kingsland Road.

Weddings and youth club

For Hazel Bean the two places were one family. She had grown up at the People’s Chapel, where her father had been in the 1st A when Sir Donald Finnemore was captain, and on 11 March 1967 she married at the John Bunyan chapel. C. Davies met her husband at the youth club in the hall at the back of the church, and they married there in 1972. Danny Morris went for many years and was in the 11th Boys’ Brigade.

Patrick O’Regan, who belonged when it was still called John Bunyan Baptist Church, said he “learned lots of Christian truths there”. Going back after its name had changed, he found big changes, but the same faithful Christian witness.

A new name

A Boys’ Brigade writer on Voices of Kingstanding believed the Lambeth Road church had changed its name to The Link Church. Today a congregation called Cedar Church meets on Lambeth Road. How the names follow one another, and whether the 1963 building is the one in use, needs checking with the church itself.

The church was named for the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Patrick O’Regan urged anyone interested to read it. The congregation made a pilgrimage of its own: a borrowed classroom in 1939, a hall in 1948, and in 1963 a church, opened to the sound of bugles.