Drawing from the same well

Luke Goodway shares how two North Bristol congregations came together as The Well, creating new opportunities to reach their communities.

Almost three years ago, Samantha and I felt God’s call to plant a church near where we live in North Bristol. In the process of preparing to plant, we connected with an independent church whose leaders asked if we would consider partnering with them in this task. The church met in a social club, with sticky floors, pictures of Elvis on the walls and fewer than 40 people attending each week.

We moved the church into a new community centre and positioned it to face outwards, prioritising mission, infrastructure and team building. We felt God gave us a vision, which was not to build one church under one roof as big as possible, but to be a church that empowers its people to reach into local communities through mission, becoming one church across multiple sites. During this time, we were able to start the process of becoming an Elim Network Church.

We welcomed a younger leader, Bex Stock (now a Minister in Training), to our pastoral team. Our team is made up of part-time leaders, enabling us to make progress even at our stage of development. Bex has brought a different grace gift to our team, helping to ensure people are cared for and discipled as we have pursued localised mission.

Bex said: “Joining the church in this season felt like a tip of the iceberg moment. It was so evident to see that God was doing a new thing in this community and in individuals’ hearts too. It has been so encouraging to journey with people, seeing them step into what God has for them.”

“It is wonderful to see that our community now represents every decade!”

The church was growing, primarily with young families, and we started working with a couple of other local independent churches on things like community events and Alpha courses. We recognised that we couldn’t achieve these things on our own, but did not want that to excuse us from trying to engage in outreach and evangelism.

One of these churches was an older congregation, led by Richard and Kim Brown, with plenty of enthusiasm for mission but lacking younger people with the energy to help make it happen.

Richard said: “I had been burdened for some time regarding the lack of growth for New Life Church. The church itself was functioning well in terms of Spirit-led worship, teaching, caring for one another, etc., but we simply were not growing.

“God said to me back in 2025 that if I wanted to see growth, then we needed to change, and one of the routes I felt God wanted me to explore was collaborating, or even merging with another church. This is when I started linking up with Luke.”

As our churches were similar in terms of our charismatic practice and our relationship deepened, we came to conclude that God may be drawing us to work more closely together. This led to us ‘testing the water’ by joining together on Sundays for worship services, helping us discern whether this was a partnership worth investing in through both mission and ministry activity.

After a lot of work behind the scenes, we concluded that we should formally merge under a new name, ‘The Well’. This builds on the independent identities and histories of the two churches, Waterbrook Church and New Life Church, and takes inspiration from this verse for our shared future:

“but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14, ESV)

One fantastic outcome of joining together has been combining resources so that we can be even more intentional about outreach. We were able to employ a missional youth worker, Caitlin Boyce, who was finishing her degree at Regents Theological College and is now pioneering outreach work for teenagers in the area. We now also lease a shopfront on the main high street in our part of the city, where we run community groups and are accessible to members of the public every day of the week.

As we did not want to be present in a community just for a Sunday service, we have always been looking for premises from which we could carry out local outreach. Close to where we now worship, thousands of houses are being built with no community infrastructure in place. The closest church building to this area, in Lockleaze, was being used by a local charity but no longer had a worshipping community.

We presented our vision to the church that owned the building, and they offered it to us free of charge to plant a new church and establish a missional presence in the area.

We now work out our vision by welcoming everyone to play a part in the church and by being present in multiple communities, allowing us to connect with new areas and people who have yet to be reached.

We now have another young leader on the team, Luke Ireland, who has just graduated from Regents Theological College. He has joined as our missional worker, lives in a flat connected to this church building, and is now helping to establish student Alpha courses and young adult groups, while building local connections from this new location.

Luke Ireland said: “I couldn’t shake an overwhelming love and growing spiritual hunger for a place I barely knew: Lockleaze.”