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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2021
In 1943 a twenty-six-year-old Pentecostal pastor arrived in Slough, a fast-growing industrial town that many church leaders found spiritually tough. Over the next thirty years Billy Richards built a thriving church with six hundred adult members and a thousand children attending groups across the town. His ministry extended beyond Slough through books, radio broadcasts, correspondence courses and international speaking tours. His methods embraced modern media, new forms of worship, conservative theology and a focus on the active work of the Holy Spirit. One local newspaper characterized it as ‘Old-Time Religion in a New-Fashioned Way’. This article explores the inspirational aspects of Richards's ministry, how these took institutional expression in his lifetime, and why that institution continues to be influential today. His ministry provides one example of how local churches could adapt successfully to the changing social and cultural landscape of late twentieth-century Britain. This has implications for the understanding of urban mission and the contribution made by the agency of organized religious institutions to twentieth-century secularization.
1 Dedication Magazine [hereafter: Dedication], November–December 1974, 21.
2 ‘Pastor Richards: “A Man of Vision and Inspiration”’, Slough Express [hereafter: SE], 20 September 1974; ‘Joyous Farewell to Pastor Billy’, Slough Observer [hereafter: SO], 8 November 1974.
3 Dedication, November–December 1974.
4 Pawson, David, A Commentary on 1 & 2 Thessalonians (Ashford, 2015), 27–32Google Scholar.
5 Ibid. 31–2.
6 Ibid. 31.
7 Morris, Jeremy, ‘The Strange Death of Christian Britain: Another Look at the Secularization Debate’, HistJ 46 (2003), 963–76Google Scholar; idem, ‘Secularization and Religious Experience: Arguments in the Historiography of Modern British Religion’, HistJ 55 (2012), 195–219; Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2001).
8 Morris, ‘Secularization and Religious Experience’, 197,219.
9 See, for example, Cox, Jeffrey, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Green, S. J. D., Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Sarah, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Jones, Ian, The Local Church and Generational Change in Birmingham, 1945–2000 (London, 2012)Google Scholar; Goodhew, David and Cooper, Anthony-Paul, eds, The Desecularisation of the City: London's Churches, 1980 to the Present (London, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 For example, Brown, Death of Christian Britain; McLeod, Hugh, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, S. J. D., The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c.1920–1960 (Cambridge, 2012)Google Scholar.
12 For example, Brierley, Peter, ‘Religion’, in Halsey, A. H. and Webb, Josephine, eds, Twentieth-Century British Social Trends, 3rd edn (New York, 2000), 650–74Google Scholar, especially 654–5.
13 William Kay, ‘A History of British Assemblies of God’ (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 1989), 198–200; Dedication, November–December 1974, 13.
14 Dedication, September–October 1974, 16.
15 Stephen Hunt, A History of the Charismatic Movement in Britain and the United States of America (Lewiston, NY, 2009); Kay, ‘Assemblies of God’, 198.
16 W. T. H. Richards, ‘Build my Church’: A fascinating Story about the Pioneering & Establishing of a Church through Personal Evangelism (Slough, 1964), 10.
17 Ibid. 16–17.
18 Grant Masom, Local Churches in New Urban Britain, 1890–1975: ‘The Greatest Challenge’? (Basingstoke, 2020), 63. For Betjeman's sentiments, see ‘Slough', in John Betjeman's Collected Poems (London, 1958), 21–3.
19 Slough, its Present and its Future: ‘The Basis for Reconstruction’ (Slough, 1943), 3–4.
20 A. D. K. Owen, ‘The Social Consequences of Industrial Transference’, Sociological Review 29 (1937), 331–54.
21 ‘Church Assembly: Problems of the New Areas’, The Times, 19 June 1935.
22 For how to characterize membership across different denominations, each of which have different understandings of the term, see Brierley, ‘Religion’, 652–6.
23 The Roman Catholic Church is not included in this discussion, as Richards's ministry focused primarily on other sectors of the community. However, Catholicism was another exception to any general story of institutional marginalization and attenuation. For an analysis, see Masom, Local Churches, 96–8, 212–15.
24 Brierley, ‘Religion’, 654–5; Masom, Local Churches, 78–9.
25 Grant Masom, ‘Parishes under Pressure: The Church of England in South Buckinghamshire 1913–1939’, Journal of Religious History 42 (2018), 317–42.
26 Brierley, ‘Religion’, 654–5.
27 For a fuller discussion, see Masom, Local Churches, 81–108, 171–80.
28 Church extension was the term commonly used by denominations for the setting up of new churches and congregations, including the provision of buildings, clergy and Sunday Schools, as well as external support and finance.
29 ‘The Church in Slough’ SO, 24 August 1956.
30 ‘Ald Bowyer at Baptist Church’, SO, 3 October 1941.
31 Victor Chudley, The People of Windsor Road: The History of Slough Baptist Church, 1894–1994 (Slough, 1994), 115–16.
32 Reading, Berkshire RO, DMS69/2A/1, Methodist Central Hall, Slough, Minutes of Leaders Meetings 1949–72, 1 March 1972.
33 Berkshire RO, DMS69/8/20/13, Methodist Central Hall Pastoral Newsletters 1957–8, no. 13.
34 Ibid. 17.
35 Ibid.
36 For example, Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977); Doreen Rosman, ‘Sunday Schools and Social Change in the Twentieth Century’, in Stephen Orchard and John Briggs, eds, The Sunday School Movement: Studies in the Growth and Decline of Sunday Schools (Milton Keynes, 2007), 149–60; Jones, Local Church.
37 Masom, Local Churches, 227–8; ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 18 June 1954. This Sunday School had attracted around two hundred children in the pre-war years.
38 ‘That Old Fashioned Religion in a New-Fashioned Way’, SO, 13 September 1974; ‘Around Slough Churches’, SE, 8 November 1974.
39 ‘Aim no Stones at Ald. Manning, but Blame Churches’, SO, 19 February 1954.
40 ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 5 November 1954; ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 21 February 1958.
41 ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 1 January 1954.
42 ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 30 April 1954.
43 ‘Success Story of a Church’, SO, 22 November 1963.
44 ‘Preaching through the Pops’, SE, 28 May 1965.
45 For example, ‘One Minute Sermon’, SO, 23 March 1956; ‘Monthly Message’, SO, 14 January 1972.
46 ‘Sixteen good Reasons for Services to go with a Swing’, SO, 11 December 1959; ‘The Church that began with One Man and a Leaky Hut’, SO, 26 June 1964.
47 ‘Old Fashioned Religion’.
48 ‘The “Observer” investigates “The Place of Miracles”’, SO, 13 June 1952.
49 ‘Faith – and Four Men and a Girl’, SO, 11 September 1953; ‘Church in Slough’, SO, 1 April 1960.
50 Dedication, November–December 1974, 12.
51 ‘Britwell: Sunshine Corner attracts 70 Pupils’, SO, 26 July 1963.
52 ‘Church in Slough’, SO, 11 July 1969.
53 ‘Puppets lead Children in Gospel Songs’, SO, 28 January 1955; ‘Britwell: Sunshine Corner’; ‘The Pied Piper Sunday School of Britwell’, SO, 10 February 1967; ‘Gospel Express takes Slough's biggest Sunday School Outing’, SO, 23 June 1972.
54 Guy Daniel, The Enemy is Boredom (London, 1964); ‘No Room for Gloom at this Sunday School’, SO, 25 September 1953.
55 Dedication, November–December 1974, 12.
56 ‘No Room for Gloom’; ‘Success Story’.
57 ‘Success Story’; ‘Puppets lead Children’.
58 Richards, Build my Church.
59 Dedication, September–October 1974, 8–9.
60 Dedication, May 1969, 7.
61 ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 1 June 1956.
62 ‘Jehovah's Witnesses get Land for Church’, SE, 23 July 1965; ‘Bibles in Hand – The Mormons are in Town’, SO, 19 May 1961; ‘They aim to Collect from every House in four Towns’, SO, 24 March 1972.
63 For example, ‘One Minute Sermon’; ‘Monthly Message’.
64 ‘Around and About: Controversial Priest’, SO, 3 February 1956; ‘Vicar challenges Ban on Divorcees’, SO, 8 November 1957; ‘Colnbrook: Vicar criticises Crusade’, SO, 6 May 1966; ‘Letters Extra: The Pill for Teenagers’, SO, 24 January 1969; ‘Letters: Vicar offers Pastor a Debate on Virgin Birth’, SO, 5 September 1969.
65 ‘Blame Churches’.
66 ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 7 May 1954.
67 ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 1 February 1963; ‘Letters: Pastor won't debate with Vicar’, SO, 12 September 1969.
68 ‘Off to USA – With a Bible in his Pocket’, SO, 27 March 1953; ‘Travelling Pastor converts 100 Americans’, SO, 24 July 1953.
69 Dedication, November–December 1974, 39.
70 Kay, ‘Assemblies of God’, 199–200.
71 Dedication, November–December 1974, 22.
72 Dedication, October 1970, 8–10.
73 Dedication, November–December 1974, 27–34.
74 Ibid. 34.
75 Ibid. 39.
76 ‘Slough Central Hall: Departure of the Rev. R. Brighton’, SO, 13 August 1937.
77 Dedication, January 1971, 10–12.
78 ‘A Man of Vision and Inspiration’; ‘The Pentecostal Fire inspiring human Leadership’, Dedication, November–December 1974, 12.
79 Dedication, November–December 1974, 11.
80 Dedication, April 1970, 18–19.
81 For example, Dedication, March–April 1973.
82 Dedication, July–August 1974, 12–13.
83 ‘Built their own Church’, SO, 15 November 1946; ‘Tabernacle Rebuilt’, SO, 6 May 1955; ‘After only 16 Years Gospel Tabernacle is a £25000 Building’, SO, 13 May 1960; ‘Tabernacle's Boom Plans’, SE, 11 January 1974.
84 ‘Boom Plans’.
85 Dedication, September–October 1974, 16.
86 Dedication, November–December 1974, 12.
87 ‘The Church in Slough’, SO, 5 March 1954.
88 For example, Dedication, October 1970, 4–6.
89 ‘Church in Fulcrum attracts New Faces’, SE, 21 October 1977.
90 See: <https://kcionline.org/about>, accessed 30 July 2019. Wesley Richards, Billy Richards's son, is now the church's leader, although he was not one of the assistant ministers at the time of his father's death.
91 Morris, ‘Strange Death’, 975.
92 Morris, ‘Secularization and Religious Experience’, 197, 219.
93 ‘Old Fashioned Religion’.
94 Dedication, November–December 1974, 21.