YWBC People

Select stories and testimonials from our members. Here's two to begin with;

Carsten and Emily

Carsten and Emily got married at YWBC in Aututmn 2010.  However, the church means much more to both of them that just being the place where they had their wedding ceremony.  Carsten grew up in Kings Heath and starting coming to YWBC as a young teenager; it was a great place for his faith to build as he grew up.  He then went away to university for four years where he attended the Christian Union and a much more student-focused church.  This was great for building his faith, but he was quite worried about how he would adjust to life outside the student environment after graduating.  However YWBC provided exactly what he needed; the people were very welcoming and with good bible teaching he had little problem transitioning out of student-focused life.  Emily's story is quite different.  She too grew up in Birmingham but became a Christian while studying away at university.  After graduating she moved back to Birmingham and started going to YWBC with Carsten.  The church was very welcoming and has helped her faith grow more and more.  Now Carsten and Emily are married and very much enjoy being part of the church family at YWBC."

Roger Bauckham

Church had never really been a part of my life until I met Sue in 1983, she had been brought up in a Christian family and after we married in 1987 and moved to Kings Heath, Sue started to go to Yardley Wood Baptist Church. I was happy to go to services or other events that the church led and each time I visited the church I was always made to feel welcome by everyone there.

I was a non believer at the time, not an atheist, as I believed that there was some form of higher being, but I wasn’t sure that faith had anything to offer me personally. At Yardley Wood I felt that the people there accepted me as I was and there was never any pressure from anyone to discuss my views on faith. Having said this, if I ever did have any questions, then they were always answered in an honest and sensitive way.

As time went on, we both went to services regularly and took our two children and I was happy for them to be at the church and for them to enjoy the same welcome as I had. At that time, still with no desire to explore my beliefs further, I said to myself that I went to church for the children but it still did not have anything for me.

Only when I was challenged by Sue to attend an Alpha course run by the church did I start to ask myself about what exactly I did believe, then when I started to do this, I realised that God’s spirit was starting to enter my life and sometime around year 2000, I became a Christian. To say that the old “me” died and I was reborn sounds very dramatic, but that is what happened and although in some ways, I have not changed greatly, my life is different now to how it was for the first 40 or so years of my life.

In many ways, I was “afraid” of church in those early days and was always surprised at how “ordinary” the people at YWBC were . This was a place I could come to, to make friends and build relationships - not a place where religious beliefs were forced on me. But of course, God knew this as now it is clear that, for all those years, he was working in my life, patiently waiting for the time when he could have a personal relationship with me, and that time is now.