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Statement supporting the proposal to redevelop Queen's Road Baptist Church

For just over 100 years the fellowship of Queen's Road Baptist Church in Broadstairs has made a significant, valuable and valued contribution to the life of the town and local community. Beginning in a small meeting room in 1899 the work soon developed and expanded and led to the building of the present 'sanctuary' which took place in 1907.

The work of serving the local community as a thriving fellowship with a social concern continued throughout the last century and some forty years ago it was recognised that additional premises were needed to meet the expanding work within the local community. A neighbouring house was purchased and eventually demolished to make way for the erection of the existing church halls.

Queens Road Baptist Church is continuing its work in and among the local community and in recent years we are meeting the needs of a wide range of groups in the town through our GAP Community Project, (which we established to spearhead our work in the community). Through GAP we provide a wide variety of activities for all ages and serve over 500 people each week. Many of the families and young people come from disadvantaged and needy backgrounds. We are the only youth provision of its kind in the down town area of Broadstairs. Many of our young people now give service in other groups and we have also established a link with an orphanage just outside Moscow which a group has visited to carry out practical building and decorating work.

Incidentally, this is not the only international work which we have undertaken as a church. Through Global Challenge, our overseas mission charity, we are actively involved in supporting Sorroti, a town in Uganda both financially and practically. We have funded the building of a church and a secondary school in the town and each year send out work parties of Thanet folk to work with the people in a variety of areas.

All this is evidence of a valuable contribution, spiritually, socially and practically which we as a fellowship seek to make to the lives of many people of all ages in this country and abroad.

As all this work has developed and expanded we have had to recognise that our present premises and facilities are inadequate and inefficient for this work. We therefore decided that we needed to take a radical look at our premises and resources to seek a way forward which would provide us with a new building which would meet our needs both as a worshipping Christian community and also as a caring and serving Christian community meeting the needs of people in the local community and in the wider world.

This proposal for redevelopment will be mainly funded by the fellowship itself with little or no recourse to public funds.

Our present plans were drawn up bearing in mind several important principles:

1. We agreed that if possible we should remain as a strategically placed 'town centre' church which could meet the needs of the local community at the heart of the community.
2. We agreed that as a busy church with four full time staff employed we need to provide adequate office provision for them to carry out their work.
3. We agreed that we need a modern worship centre which could accommodate our growing Sunday congregations but also provide a venue for our mid week worship and teaching meetings in a way which the present church with its fixed pews could not do.
4. We agreed that such a modern 'auditorium' could be a useful and welcome facility for other groups in the town to use for 'appropriate' events - e.g. music and drama or training.
5. We agreed that we needed more appropriate facilities for our work among children, young people, senior citizens and other social groups in the town who already use our facilities. We believe that we are making a valuable contribution to the needs of the local community in this way.
6. We agreed that we wanted to provide a more efficient and environmentally friendly refreshment facility for the groups that use our facilities. We were not, and are not, intending to set this up as a commercial business in competition with local traders.
7. In order to provide some continuing link with our past in a way which would meet the approval of our own fellowship and the local community we agreed not to demolish the exterior of the present sanctuary but to convert its interior and to sympathetically add new space to it with the proposed new building.

It was with these principles in mind that we commissioned Philip Graham of the Duncan and Graham Partnership to draw up plans for our new building. As part of this process we consulted widely within our own fellowship, informally with members of the TDC Planning Department, with other churches nationally who had undertaken similar major projects and also offered our neighbours the opportunity to meet us to view our plans and to make their comments on our proposals.

In submitting our redevelopment plans we recognise: