History (Cont)
To be or not to be?
In 1994 there was an empty block next to the Ashburton Baptist Church. The nuisance of living out of our cars as they moved from place to place gave the WellSpring team's dream of a "home" for WellSpring some urgency. They looked at all sorts of ideas—some good, some not so good and some plain awful!
"We went to auctions; looked at unused churches and wondered about different houses. I remember a group of us standing on the empty block questioning each other. Would it be too small? Too noisy? Could we finance a centre? What if it was built and no one came?"
By this time, the Ashburton church was seriously engaged in discussions over how to redevelop its buildings to accommodate the new ministries that were developing. Ken Edmonds, one of the deacons and an architect, was invited to draw up preliminary plans for an overall development of the property. This included provisions for linking the Elsie Salter House Alzheimer's Day Care Centre and the student house with the whole complex.
It also raised the possibility of developing a new building on the recently acquired block to the north of the church—the "WellSpring Centre." This was the site that Peter Walker and Jill Manton had been looking at on the day years before when Peter had first raised the idea of establishing the "quiet place" dream.
Many
months of discussion, healthy debate and prayer ensued as the church community
considered the different proposals put forward. Ken remained patient and
calm in the midst of all the swirling ideas and went back to the drawing
board again and again as ideas changed and evolved.
Eventually, the plans reached a stage where there was enough agreement for them to be displayed over quite a period of time, in order for the church community to examine them carefully and continue the process of discussion. The plans included the proposed WellSpring Centre.
Finally at the end of the year, it was decided to have a church meeting in February of the following year, when hopefully the people would feel confident enough to make a decision one way or the other—either to take courage and go ahead with the proposed development, or to modify it, or not to proceed in that way at all.
It was not
at all certain yet that WellSpring would have a "home" of its own.
