Gateway started life in 2002 with just seventeen people in the front room of a home in South Willesborough. The church has steadily grown since then as we have sought to stay true to our vision and values.
From day one we wanted to be a church expressing God’s outrageous grace and modelling something of Jesus’ servant heartedness to others. We have been very privileged to have had some profound prophetic words spoken over the church from Keith Hazell who is a recognised prophet and greatly loved by the church here. These ‘blue-print foundational words’ live with us and continue to form the basis for our strategy, our prayers and how we channel our resources.
We believe that we have been called to be a house of healing, both to the broken-hearted and to those that are physically unwell. Jesus went about ‘doing good and healing the sick’, we think that this is such a great mandate to embrace!
Our Furniture and Baby Equipment Ministry was established in 2007 and is one example of demonstrating God’s grace in very practical ways.
In 2008 we launched Lydia Counselling, a professionally recognised Christian Counselling service.
More recently, we have been working hard to develop a debt advice and money management initiative, designed to help people better manage their finances and to offer the best available advice through partnership with Christian Against Poverty (CAP).
The world needs more healthy churches!
Our focus is not solely on the Borough of Ashford as important as that is. Through our association with Newfrontiers we have a passion to plant more churches – it’s in our DNA! We also believe God has a calling on us to have some future involvement with Poland, Germany and France.