A bit of History

In 2007, Emmanuel Baptist Church and Bethania Baptist Church were two independent Churches in the Baptist Union of Wales.  Emmanuel was English speaking and Bethania predominantly Welsh.  The then minister of Emmanuel, Pastor Bernard Haynes, wished to retire and Bethania found itself without a minister.  The practise of Baptist Churches is to work with their Baptist Union to seek out a new minister.  

In due course and after various meetings with Rev Marc Owen, the Church Life Secretary, of the BUW, it was suggested that the Rev Paul Smethurst would be a good fit to minister to both Churches separately.  This took place and on 15th March 2008, Paul was ordained into the pastorate of the two Churches.

Even in the very early days it became obvious that the Churches would be stronger together and many of the activities were combined.  Soon both Churches would worship together on Sunday mornings and then separate for English and Welsh services in the evenings. But as time progressed, the additional work of managig two separate Church organisations and a very close relationship between them just got to be an unnecessary incumbrance and the membership decided to merge into one Church.

So it was that on  27th June 2016, the members of the newly created Hope Baptist Church held their first members meeting.  The founding Deacons wer: Jonathan Powell, Eric Davies, Dilys Ward, Ann Jones and Alwyn Jones with Jeanette Moore joining shortly afterwards.

The merging of the two churches into Hope / Gobaith was particularly beautiful as they shared a similar stem.  Emmanuel split from Bethania in 1896 to form an English Language work.  So the Churches now find themselves reunited as a billingual (actually multilingual) Church.