Building Appeal Update (31st July)
Due to amazingly generous and sacrificial pledges from within and beyond Hope Church, we were able to make a bid on the building, and our offer has been accepted by the vendors. This is thrilling news!
We will update this page as there are developments. If you’ve made a pledge and the purchase goes ahead, our treasurer will be in touch with you.
To God be the glory.
Will You Help Us Buy This Building?
We are a 13-year-old, Jesus-loving, bible-teaching church in the Reformed Baptist tradition, with a Sunday morning attendance of about 140 people. Our congregation is diverse, consisting of a wide variety of backgrounds, ages, and nationalities.
We are located in Huddersfield, and the opportunity to purchase this building has come as an answer to years of prayer. It meets all our desired specifications: it is situated right in the town centre, it has a strong presence, and with slight modifications, it has the capacity to hold over 300 seats. It can accommodate all our children and youth activities, offices, and includes space from which we might be able to serve the community in practical ways.
Our hope is that this building would be used by God as a place for us to grow into and from which we could plant more churches in the surrounding Huddersfield region. Huddersfield is lost, in urgent need of spiritual renewal, and we are eager to follow Jesus in building His church for His glory.
The timing has been beyond our control and events have progressed very quickly. We need to place a bid by 12th July. To make a competitive offer, we are seeking to raise an additional £420k between now and then. We are far too small to achieve this alone, but our God is massive, and we believe this is precisely the kind of story He loves to write. Will you join us?
All contributions will be used solely to purchase and renovate this building.
If you cannot contribute financially, will you still pray for us? ‘Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gift that came to us through the prayers of many’ (2 Cor. 1:11).
Contact
If you would like more details please be in contact with David Dent on 07908943070 or david.dent@hopechurchhd.org
The Building
We have been praying for a number of years that God would provide a building for us that was centrally located into which we could grow into a church planting church. We wanted somewhere with a meeting space capacity of at least 250, good transport links for accessibility to those unable to drive, parking, as well as room for all our children’s and youth work. Ideally we wanted somewhere that could also provide office space along with room from which we could serve the community in practical ways. This building has met all these criteria very very well.
The current top floor would need some internal walls removed for us to be able to accomodate 300 or more and our initial visit from a structural engineer has yielded very positive results.
The middle floor is currently an open space that we would seek to partition in order to create multi-use rooms for children’s ministry, prayer meetings etc. The ground floor will provide a great space for youth ministry and we hope will also be suitable to use as a base from which we can serve the community in practical ways. On the very top floor is currently an apartment which has the potential to be converted into offices either for pastoral ministry and/or as a space for a Christian charity.
There are some areas of the building that we will need to do some further investigation on in order to do our due diligence in making sure the building has integrity and can indeed be made useable for the purposes for which we desire. So far things are looking positive and we feel confident that if our bid be accepted we shouldn’t encounter any insurmountable obstacles.
There are two ways to give….
Unconditional Gift to the Building Fund
If you would like to contribute an unconditional gift towards our building fund then use the give button below. Gifts given in this way will be used to place a bid on this building. If our bid is unsuccessful the gift will remain in our building fund for use on any future building opportunities. There is no limit to how much you can give in this way.
A Gift Conditional On Our Bid Being Accepted
Gifts of more than £2000 can be arranged so that they are conditional on our bid for this building being accepted. If you would like to give in this way then please contact our treasurer at treasurer@hopechurchhd.org for more details.
NB: conditional gifts given in this way can only be returned to the giver if contact is made in advance with our treasurer to discuss the means of returning funds. If no contact is made in advance with our treasurer we will not be able to guarantee a return of the gift should our bid not be accepted.
Huddersfield
Huddersfield is located in north of England between Leeds and Manchester. It is a town in great spiritual need and the urgency is real. There are over 100k residents in our town, and over 400k in the Metropolitan Borough of Kirklees. There is a small number of evangelical churches here which means our witness is absolutely tiny by comparison to size. We could plant 10 more churches with capacities of 1k each and we would still not even be scratching the surface of the need in this town and region. The region is desperate and we need Jesus.
Our Vision
Why do we want a building? Three reasons.
The first is size. We are outgrowing our rented space. In this building we have the potential to grow to 300+ seats. This is good because we believe that from that size we are better resourced to plant more churches in our surrounding region. We could send 50 adults with children for a strong start to a plant without the same level of disruption that would occur if we were to do that from the size we are now. We need a big vision to match the big need.
The second is legacy. In our town and region the buildings large enough to hold a congregation are gobbled up by developers or converted into mosques. What future do we want to live in? To live in a future where buildings exist, inwhich medium to large gatherings of Christians can worship Father, Son and Spirit, the saints need to invest in them.
Third is service. We already have various mid week activities as a church which currently happen in different buildings at different times. We would love to bring together these separate spaces into one, and add more service to that which we already do. Our hope would be that alongside outreach and discipleship ministries we could use the building in some way to practically serve the community, such as CAP, or our own local mercy ministry.