‘Is there a place called C-O-V-E-N-T-R-Y?’ Dr Kriengsak Chareonwongsak stopped in the middle of speaking at the first of our biennial leadership Conferences at the Brighton Conference Centre held in early October 1990. ‘I see a funnel between heaven and earth, and great blessing being poured through it onto great crowds below’. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. He knew nothing of our recent prophetic leading.
Acting on the prophetic
Adrian Willard and I (Adrian had started working with Terry and the Newfrontiers team a few years earlier) had recently visited the National Agricultural Showground at Stoneleigh, just outside Coventry, in response to a prophetic word given in a prayer morning at Terry’s home a few weeks earlier. ‘Start a new Bible Week in the heart of the nation’. We had immediately opened a map and pored over it knowing there was a large showground in the Midlands but not knowing where it was. Indeed, when Adrian and I first visited we ended up at the Massey Ferguson Tractor factory! But once we had found the Showground we realised that it was ideal in many respects and had subsequently made a booking for the following year.
The Stoneleigh years
And so began a new season for Newfrontiers. The Stoneleigh Bible Week was held from 1991-2001, growing from 8,500 (which was the closing number at Downs) to 28,000 across two weeks. Kriengsak’s word to us in Brighton became true in abundance! Much blessing was indeed poured out which propelled us as a growing international movement to help equip many thousands of men, women and children, and to serve 
churches as they gathered to camp in church sites across a vast space normally used for showing cattle and growing sample crops of cereal. 
The many buildings on site made life much easier than had been the case with marquees at Downs. Having large cattle sheds for the main meetings proved ideal – except for the lingering smell of its former residents! And, for children’s ministry, buildings belonging to many farming-related businesses who used them only for the period of the annual show were to prove invaluable.
From foundations to building
I will come back to Stoneleigh in future blogs but that, of course, was not all that was happening in the 90s. In the conversations with Terry Virgo which I posted on this blog a few weeks ago Terry said that he now realised that the 80s had been days of laying a prophetic foundation for the Newfrontiers family while the 90s were days of consolidation and expansion.
As I have looked at my spreadsheet of key events in our history, I realise that this shows up clearly. Although there were many initiatives in the 90s, much of the activity was seen in expansion:
- Church planting around the world, many into new (for us) nations
- Training at all levels, from young people taking a year out to leaders
- The poor, towards the end of the decade
- The growth in conferences, which included annual gatherings in several nations, some related to leadership development such as the Brighton conferences and Elders and Wives weekends, and so on. But the biggest conference was the Stoneleigh Bible Week.
I will say more about Stoneleigh next time.