Coley Park is a unique area in Reading in that it is a giant cul-de-sac that backs onto the Holy Brook and meadows, where around 5,000 people live. So if you go into Coley Park you go past the large recreation ground, shops, Baptist Church, Primary School, Community Centre and end up looping round the only tower blocks in Reading. The history of how this area grew and the church began are intertwined.
Coley Park is a unique area in Reading in that it is a giant cul-de-sac that backs onto the Holy Brook and meadows, where around 5,000 people live. So if you go into Coley Park you go past the large recreation ground, shops, Baptist Church, Primary School, Community Centre and end up looping round the only tower blocks in Reading. The history of how this area grew and the church began are intertwined.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s today’s Coley Park emerged as the Council and private developers built many houses and the three tower blocks. Some of this was to re-house people in preparation for the building of Reading’s Inner Distribution Road (IDR). In the early 1960s Carey Baptist Church, and the then existing Central Evangelical Church, began to bus and car children from Coley Park to their Sunday schools. This led to Carey Baptist planting a church in Coley Park. The church started in homes until in 1965 a building was completed, in God’s goodness, in the very heart of Coley Park.
The church was then named Coley Park Free Church. The church grew as a local church for a local community, with a strong family feel to it. But like many families, the church family had its ups and downs and suddenly closed in 1993, when it was thought that it would be better to join and work with another church. Most of the members moved to other churches. The building then reverted back to Carey Baptist.
In 1994 Carey Baptist, with some of the previous members, began to replant the current church, with a new name Coley Park Baptist Church. This started with an afternoon service on 2nd January which was replaced with morning and evening services on 6th November 1994. Since then the church has known the Lord’s blessing as it has slowly, but surely: expanded its activities; developed its Vision; completely refurbished and extended its building (completed March 2009); and grown to become a church family of about 40-50 adults and 10-15 children (many from Coley Park), from a cross-section of life, with a mixture of races. However the church’s mission remains the same: to be Christ’s community growing in our local community.
Newspaper Article – Stone Laid
Newspaper Article – Church Opening (1965)
