100 Years of Milton Baptist Church

Celebrating God’s faithfulness from 1926 to 2026

 

Milton Baptist Church began not with a grand plan, but with an evening service on a warm August Sunday in 1926, the 15th to be precise, held in a modest building on Salisbury Road. It was Revd Drake of Clarence Park Baptist Church, along with fellow pastors from Wadham Street and Bristol Road, who first brought the work to Milton. Morning services followed the very next week, and what started as a mission from neighbouring churches gradually grew into something the community could truly call its own.

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For the first few decades, the church leaned on the support of Clarence Park and a succession of lay pastors who gave their time faithfully. Men like J.W. Lawrence and G.F. Finney held things together through the 1930s and 40s, years that saw the congregation outgrow Salisbury Road entirely. A new site was purchased on Baytree Road in 1933, and by 1938 a proper church building was complete, built by John Dyer Builders for £3,280, a considerable sum at the time. It was in that same year that the old Salisbury Road building was sold.

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The church came into its own in 1950 when Revd W.J.H. Hitchcock became its first independent pastor, no longer a mission, but a fully-fledged church with its own diaconate and membership roll. The decades that followed brought growth, enlargement (the building was significantly extended in 1965), and a Sunday School so well-attended it needed a rented building across the road just for the overflow. In 1972 this moved to a morning Junior Church, a format that continues to this day.

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When the old building came down in 1998, services moved temporarily to Worle School while a new church was constructed on the same Baytree Road site. It opened after Easter 1999, and it is the home the congregation has worshipped in ever since. Through nearly a century of change, new buildings, new pastors, new generations, what has remained constant is the community itself. The Monday afternoon Ladies' Meeting, started by Mrs Thompson back in 1931, still meets to this day.

 

By David Fry.