Where it all began
I became a Christian in May 1994, was baptised in water in December that year and then filled with the Holy Spirit in January 1995. I was passionate about Jesus and passionate to see the Church experiencing all His fullness.
In 1996, my house group at Corby Baptist Church went for a prayer drive around Corby, stopping at various places to pray before returning to share impressions we felt the Lord had given us. When we turned into Oldland Road, we drove along until the road ended at a big mound of earth. It seemed as though, in the future, this may become the entrance to a new housing estate. All we saw that evening, as we looked beyond, was rough scrubland that covered the vast area where busy steel-working quarries had once been. These quarries had long since been filled-in and now nature had taken over. So we prayed in faith for this area and for the housing estate that would one day be built there; we prayed for a vibrant Christian presence to be established in that community and for God to reveal His glory to the people there. As we prayed, I remember being surprised by a strong impression that I would one day, somehow, be involved in the answer to that prayer.
The Birmingham years
In 1997 I left Corby to go to university in Birmingham. I married Maggie in 2000 and we settled in Birmingham, starting our family in 2002 when Aaron arrived (followed by Sam in 2004). In 2003, after recognising my ministry and helping me to test my calling, my pastor asked me to pray about joining the leadership team of Selly Oak Elim Church. This would involve becoming Assistant Pastor and beginning the journey towards ordination.
In 2007, I was ordained as an Elim minister. That year we felt increasingly drawn back to Corby to plant a church on what had by now become the Oakley Vale estate. At the end of 2007, my parents bumped into Faye Harris’ mum, Carole, at Cheeky Monkeys (a children’s soft play centre in Corby). They told her that we were planning to come back to Corby to start a church. Carole excitedly told my parents that Faye and her family had just moved back to Corby and that perhaps I should get in touch. Details were swapped, emails were exchanged, and at the end of 2007 we became aware that God had gone ahead of us to gather the people who would eventually make up the nucleus of the Hope Church family.
Moving back to Corby
Faye & Andy Harris (with 5 children) along with Nick & Rachel Small (with 1 child at the time) and David & Sheilagh Smith had moved to Oakley Vale and had begun praying together. Faye & Andy had responded to God’s call to leave their home in Devon and move to Corby (where Faye had grown up), without quite knowing what He had in store. They only felt that He wanted them to be part of something new and that it would emerge 'organically’. Similarly, Nick & Rachel and David & Sheilagh moved from Kettering to Corby, both couples sensing a leading of the Holy Spirit but not quite knowing what God had planned. They soon met Faye & Andy and started to pray together on a Thursday evening.
We came over to Corby in February 2008 with Dan & Clem Hawksley and met the three other families. It quickly became clear that God was knitting us together and from April 2008 we made the journey from Birmingham to Corby most Thursday evenings to meet the others for worship and prayer. Over the following several months a number of other people began to join us and Hope Church was born.
The church begins
Our early gatherings in David & Sheilagh’s house were precious times when we would study God’s Word, worship and cry-out to God for Corby. We sensed a call to pray for greater unity between the churches, believing that whatever God was going to do would follow a joining of hearts across the Body of Christ in Corby. We also felt passionately that we were to be a missionary church, embodying and proclaiming the good news of Christ.
In August 2008 the Hawksleys and the Carrs were sent with blessing from the Selly Oak Elim Church in Birmingham.
As soon as we landed in Corby it felt like we hit the ground running! We took services at St. Michael’s and Corby Baptist Church, put on a community BBQ for neighbours of David & Sheilagh (complete with a bouncy castle for kids) and distributed flyers door-to-door across the estate. From October we began to meet together on Sundays in a showroom attached to the Thorpe factory (that is now the 'Hope Centre’!) We experienced some memorable times of worship together and this was also the first time our children were able to join us. Those were really special days and a necessary transition from our small Thursday gatherings (which by now were not so small) to where we would meet next…
Changing venues
We began meeting at Oakley Vale Primary School from November 2008 and launched publicly on 16th November that year. We were astounded at the number of people who came to our launch service and praised God for immediately adding people to our number. It felt as though His favour was very much upon us and that He was showing us, through various answers to prayer, that 'all things are possible for them who believe’.
In October 2010 we said goodbye to Oakley Vale Primary School and moved into our next Sunday venue, the brand new Kingswood Secondary Academy. We felt that God was giving us 'a shoe that was one size too big’, a place with room enough for us to grow…and that is exactly what happened.
In 2011 we took a step of faith and invested in a building for our offices and midweek gatherings. We called this building the Hope Centre and it has been a real blessing ever since.
In 2014, after continuing to grow numerically – and in response to some key prophetic words – we felt God leading us to plant a second Hope Church congregation into Lodge Park Academy. This meant, in effect, that we became one church in two locations. This transition was by far the biggest change to the way Hope Church was structured, and although it wasn’t universally popular, did provide exciting new opportunities to break ground for the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately, at the end of 2016, we felt that the second congregation was no longer sustainable and made the difficult decision to bring both sites back together.
In the meantime, because of some changes to the Kingswood Academy, Hope South had returned to Oakley Vale, where our original church gatherings were held. 2015 saw us move into the Brooke Weston Academy, where the church currently meets.
The Lord has done so much in our midst. He has allowed us to regularly see salvations and people growing in spiritual maturity. He has given us a big vision for our town and our faith is growing to match the bigness of the call. We want to be a church without walls, serving a God without limits, seeing Jesus made famous and our town transformed!
Damian Carr
