Dunne and dusted!

As Paul Dunne prepares to retire from ministry this month, the church he leads is celebrating its 70th anniversary. Here he looks back at Longton Elim’s fruitful past and its flourishing collection of new ministries today.

As we mark our 70th anniversary we see God’s footprints in our history as a church and give thanks for his faithfulness. But in our present-day church we also celebrate how we’re following Jesus as he guides us into new ventures. We find joy in the lives the Holy Spirit is impacting with God’s love via several new ministries which are bringing blessing, hope and growth in our church and community.

Our hope and prayer is that through them, our church family and community friends, just like Paul, will realise “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Ephesians 3:18) and find salvation, hope and fruitfulness for their lives.

Happy Hub

For decades we were blessed with a very successful Luncheon Club serving 20 to 30 people on a weekly basis. But after surviving the Covid season with meals on wheels and four driving teams we finally had to let the ministry rest for 18 months for lack of a cook.

Then a lightbulb moment came in the middle of a time of “fuel poverty” for our community and we decided to launch our Happy Hub, providing free homemade soup and a roll.

I had been praying for some weeks about how to reach our community with love and care. I asked one of our ladies to pray about the venture, only to be told she had also been praying along similar lines!

With a moderate start we now see close to 40 of our community joining us each week.

Messy Church

After prayer, we as leaders strongly felt we had to bring the good news to our community and friends. We needed to provide an easy pathway for them to hear about the love of Jesus.

One of our members, Joy Carpenter, had asked me for a reference as she applied for a role as a Messy Church coordinator with another church. After being accepted, however, she didn’t have peace about the position being offered. I also thought, “Why aren’t we launching this venture when we’ve put so much prayer into it ourselves?”

We released Joy to bring together a team of volunteers to prepare a programme for our own Messy Church, to see our community blessed.

The Guitar Club

Kenny Beech loves to see people learning to play the guitar, so I suggested to him that we give our church family the opportunity to do this.

Starting with around five folk meeting together on a monthly basis, the group has now grown to 13 with ages ranging from eight to over 80!

Now renamed “Strummers and Hummers”, the guitar club brings a composition of music in our family services!

We started each of these community projects in faith. They have had small beginnings, but by the grace of God we’ve seen them grow.

As the Lord said, “Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin” (Zechariah 4:10a).

We are so grateful to Jesus for the way we’ve seen lives blessed and transformed by his love as we have ventured out.

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.