Our Roots

It all began in 1999 when a young family stood on the steps of a small church in Southport, Merseyside, homeless.

They came begging for help and Green Pastures was born. The years since then have been some of the most wonderful that we have experienced in the service of God.

In 1997-1999 we offered temporary accomodation in our church building to homeless individuals and families. We used our fellowship room, a garage that we had converted, a caravan on the church site and the church cellar. "All these places we had sought to make as pleasant as possible, but the local Environmental Health department informed us that, though we were providing a valuable service, it was contravening the law. We were doing it because the local Council officers were unable to provide the greatest necessity of any homeless person and that is a roof over their head. So in March 1999 we purchased two flats and Green Pastures was born.

Our first tenant, a single mother aged 21, had been living in one room with her baby. What a joy it was to be able to help her, to fulfil God's word, and to stay within the law!

Three years later we felt that God encouraged us to form a not-for-profit limited company. This was so that other Christians could invest in the poor of our nation and take back the responsibility that Christ had given to the Church, a responsibility that we had passed onto our local Councils. We paid our first dividend in March 2005, in bonus shares.

In Galatians 2:10 Paul writes: 'They desire only that we should remember the poor: the very thing that I was also eager to do.' It had appeared to us that the 21st Century church was not so eager to help the poor as the early church had been. Perhaps through Green Pastures we shall be able to encourage that eagerness to return.

Just 9 years later we are housing over 240 souls and we are receiving regular enquiries from other Councils enquiring if we can buy property in their areas to help them solve their homelessness problem.

We have seen some amazing changes in people just because we have been able to give them a key to their own home. Alcoholics are now free from their alcohol addiction; drug addicts are now free from their drug addiction; unemployed young people with life skills problems are now working. Mothers who had been brutally beaten are now housed with their children in secure accommodation; people with mental health problems are housed and cared for. But most wonderful of all is the number of people who have come to Christ, not through our preaching of the Gospel, but by our doing the Gospel.

Pastor Pete Cunningham