The members and congregation of Hearsall Baptist Church today said a sad farewell to the church’s home of 96 years in Queensland Avenue.

Today’s Easter Sunday service is the last before they vacate the church, opened in 1961, and larger 1928 edifice known as the ‘schoolrooms’. The church has been at the heart of the Chapelfields community going back to the 1860s when the first chapel and Sunday School was opened in Lord Street.

Some of the congregation will attend the new Sherbourne Community Church based at the former Holyhead Road URC, others will move to other Baptist churches in the city or to other places of worship.

ECHO sends its best wishes to all of those people, wherever their individual journeys take them, and remembers also those pioneers before them who built the church, both spiritually and in terms of much of its physical fabric, and made it a major part of Chapelfields community life.