A summary of the history of Ilkeston Baptist Church
The following notes are a very brief summary of the various stages in the history of the church. For a fuller account, we recommend the booklet (on which these notes are based) “One Hundred Years of Queen Street” by Cyril Hargreaves, published in 1958 in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the present chapel in Queen Street, Ilkeston.
1. Beginnings (1785 – 1800)
The first Baptist congregation in Ilkeston was started on 22nd May, 1785, by preachers from the Baptist Church at Castle Donnington, a village about 10 miles south of Ilkeston, just west of the present M1 motorway junction 24. The original church building was in South Street (immediately left of the present-day health centre). At its founding in 1785, the church had 53 members. The first pastor was John W. Goddard (pastor from 1787 – 1795).
Shared ministry
From its beginning until 1822, the Ilkeston church was a joint work, and had a joint pastorate, with Smalley Baptist Church, which had also been founded by evangelists from Castle Donnington.
Open-air evangelism
For many years, services were held in the afternoons, at 2.00 p.m. This may have been partly because of the distances people had to travel, but we know that it was also because the church members spent the rest of Sundays engaged in open-air witness. The fruit of this work is seen in the fact that, starting in 1785 with 53 members, the church baptised and added to its numbers in the first 5 years another 72 men and women.
Regional mission
This open-air witness happened, not only in Ilkeston, but also further afield. The elders and members of the Ilkeston church would hold evangelistic services in such places as Heanor, Mapperley, Stanton, Cotmanhay, and even Derby.
2. Development (1800 – 1858)
Church planting
The emphasis on work outside Ilkeston continued. The Ilkeston church was involved in supporting work, and planting new congregations, in such diverse places as Chilwell, Melbourne (that’s a village between Derby and Coalville – not the one in Australia!!), Newthorpe and Sutton-in-Ashfield. In Heanor, a meeting was started in a club-room; this was later to become a congregation renting a disused Methodist chapel. Evangelistic preaching also took place in Stanley Common, Eastwood and Horsley.
Sunday school
One of the most significant early developments in the life of the church was the establishment of a Sunday School in 1807. A lean-to addition on the side of the South Street chapel was the original Sunday School room, and it was designed to accommodate 80 children.
South St chapel, with Sunday School room at the back
Independence
The work at Ilkeston and Smalley grew to the point where both causes were viable on their own, and they agreed to become separate churches, each with its own pastor, in 1822.
Growth
The church continued to grow numerically. In 1823 the membership was 123; in 1845, it had risen to 141. Baptisms had taken place, from the very beginning of the church’s life, in the river Erewash; to judge from the early minute books of the church, these were very popular occasions indeed. It was recorded on 1st May, 1842, “…The seven friends were baptised in the Erewash – about 1,500 spectators who behaved very orderly.”
New building
The congregation and children’s work grew through the first half of the 19th century, until it became necessary to seek separate premises for worship and for the Sunday School. The decision was taken in 1856 to build a new chapel, and use the existing chapel in South Street solely for the children’s work. On Tuesday, 22nd June, 1858, Queen Street Baptist Chapel was opened; it was originally designed to seat 400 people. The South Street chapel continued to be a branch of the work at Queen Street, focusing on children’s work.
It is perhaps worth recording a contemporary local newspaper description of the new Queen Street chapel. “Of the many places of worship which have sprung up in our town, this is certainly the least attractive; some people think it positively ugly and repellent, and we have heard it likened to an engine shed.” (No comment!)
3. Consolidation (1858 – 1881)
These years saw general continued growth, especially in the children’s work at South Street.
Worship
The pattern of morning and evening services was now well established, as was the practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper in the evening. Various radical and, for the time, controversial, innovations had been introduced into the services of worship, such as standing for prayer and singing, and the use of a bass viol (!). And it would be fascinating to know precisely what lay behind the note in the church minute book which reads “Resolved that Bro. J. Hithersay and F. Mitchell and J. Wardle see to the choir being orderly during service.”
Other activities
It had started to become the practice to hold meetings and events other than worship services, which were intended both to attract visitors (what we would today call “pre-evangelism”), and to develop a social side to the life of the fellowship. For example, in 1864, a Mr. T. Cooper held two lectures under the title “The Design Argument from Astronomy: or Proofs of the being and attributes of God derived from a study of the Solar System and of the Stellar Universe”. It was probably not with the same target audience in mind that, in 1876, a tea was held, followed by “A Public Spelling Bee interspersed with singing”; it was minuted, when this occasion was planned, “that at the Bee the words shall be of one sylabble only [in view of the secretary’s apparent inability to spell ‘syllable’, we can understand why!]; that four prizes be given in money, the first to be £1…”
4. Division (1881 – 1918)
During these years, there was an unfortunate split in the church. Disagreements between office-holders in the two chapel buildings led to South Street becoming in effect a separate church. This division lasted until shortly after the First World War.
“Forward movement”
It was probably largely because of this division that the numerical strength of the church declined. In 1895, the membership was 53 (ironically, the same number that the church had started from 110 years earlier!), with 150 children in the Sunday School. An attempt to reverse this decline was made in the last years of the century by the proposal of a “Forward movement”, which aimed at a radical change in the ways of conducting meetings. These changes included the introduction of an orchestral band, the bringing in of special preachers, the use of invited soloists, and “the extensive advertising of special subjects”. These principles (which seem in many ways to pre-figure the contemporary practices of “guest services” and “seeker-services”) were a key feature of the 40-year-long ministry of Arthur Copley (pastor from 1898 – 1938).
Building development
The gallery was built in the chapel in Queen Street. The chapel had originally been a single-storey building. The construction of a gallery had been proposed at various times, and this was carried out in 1882. It increased the church’s seating capacity to 500. And a new extended schoolroom was built (since Queen Street no longer had the use of South Street for its own children’s work).
The new gallery, showing the original organ (top right)