CHURCH RISING FROM ASHES
Worship continues in temporary home as restoration plans take shape
IT WAS a warm Friday afternoon in early summer and Mark Seymour was getting ready to go to church. Mark, who has been a member of the Bethel Community Church congregation for more than 10 years, spends every Friday holding a social evening for refugees and asylum seekers at the church’s Gap Centre on Stow Hill.
The evening is one of many valuable community services the church and its associated charity offer to the people of Newport.
But as he readied himself, 49-yearold Mark received a frantic phone call.
“I was just on my way to a social evening for refugees and asylum seekers,” he said.
“One of the refugees rang me and said ‘Mark – Bethel Church is on fire’.”
From an upstairs bedroom window of his house in Caerleon, Mark said he saw thick smoke rising from Stow Hill.
Mark got in his car and drove across the city to the church.
There, on June 15 last year, Mark stood with dozens of members of the congregation, church leaders and local residents as flames tore through the 140-year-old Grade-II listed building – utterly devastating it.
While firefighters spent hours scrambling to fight the blaze in Bethel Community Church, and the former Zanzibar nightclub where it started, they stood dumbfounded.
By the morning of June 16, the church and its neighbouring nightclub were completely gutted.
One church member described the “heartbreaking” experience as “like watching your home burn down”.
Questions were immediately raised as to whether the remaining structure of the church could be salvaged.
But the congregation, church leaders and volunteers spent little time licking their wounds, and sprang into action.
“The Friday night when we all stood and saw the church burn down was a challenging night,” Mark said.
“But we are quite a resilient group of people and within days we had a place to meet and we were back to some form of functional level.”
Soon after the fire, Pastor Andrew Cleverly said that churches from all over the city had offered the congregation a temporary home in their buildings.
Hundreds of people turned out in support of the church at two open-air services in Newport.
Eventually, they settled at Havelock Street Presbyterian Church where they now hold their weekly Sunday service.
Fortunately, the church’s charity, The Gap Wales, is run from a building next door to the historic Bethel Community Church and survived the blaze, allowing them to continue their community work.
Architects Caroe & Partners were selected to draw up plans to restore the structure to its former glory in November last year.
Pastor Cleverly said it is hoped the exterior facade and the church’s tower may be saved, albeit with a new three- or four-storey interior and an increased capacity main space for worshippers.
The work will be covered by the church’s insurance and generous donations from the community have helped the organisation weather the storm.
Pastor Cleverly said planning is currently in the early stages, but detailed drawings of the refurbished church are expected in the coming months.
“To me, I’m pretty positive anyway and I look at a glass half full rather than half empty,” Pastor Cleverly said.
“It was strange. Even when I was standing there watching it burn I thought there is something in there somewhere.
“I’m not saying God made it burn, I don’t believe that, but I believe that God can take a bad situation and make it good.
“A lot of people were upset for a long time – especially people who have been in this church for 40-odd years.
“The building meant a lot to a lot of people.
“But as I keep saying: the church is the people, not the building.”