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Dereham Road Baptist Church,
before the war
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The date was 1995. The significance of that date was that it was one year after 1994. It is now fading into the mists of time, but 1994 was the year when the "
Toronto Blessing" (I like to call it the "
Carpet Blessing" for obvious reasons) appeared on the scene and was subsequently promoted by many Christians who regarded it as "
God's New Thing". It took about a year before someone somewhere thought that our church was "up for it" (more like "in for it"). So, the spring of 1995 was the date when touts in favour of the "blessing" arrived at Dereham Road Baptist Church determined to revive us during a church weekend held on DRBC premises. Well, the weekend did inspire me, but not in the way that would register on the revivalist scales of these touts. It resulted in my writing an essay called "
High pulpits, High Priests and The Bedford Blessing". This essay can be downloaded from
here (See the "file" drop down). A spin-off from this essay was a photographically illustrated work on the meaning of the pseudo Gothic architecture of Dereham Road Baptist Church: This latter work was completed in 2007; the "blessing" was then well into the past, its historical memory no longer relevant and so I extracted the bits from
High pulpits, High Priests and The Bedford Blessing that focused on DRBC's buildings, added some more text and illustrated it with photographs. This work, called "
Sermons in Stone", can be downloaded from
here
