Our Story
About Us
Telford Elim developed out of an earlier Pentecostal work, Assemblies of God (AOG), a church plant in Hadley in the 1940’s. Elim took the work over in the mid to late 1950’s, and installed and opened a wooden building on 31st October, 1959. This building served as the church’s meeting place, except for a time, around the turn of the century, when it was elsewhere in rented accommodation. That building was demolished in September 2011 & the new purpose-built church centre opened in May 2012.
As the church was planted, a particularly successful children’s/youth ministry, called ‘Sunshine Corner’ had a huge impact on many young people in the area introducing them to the Gospel and Christ. The early leaders, as we still do, sought to make the Church more contemporary in style, less traditional, more vibrant and inclusive. In 2019, we appointed our first Youth and Young Adult Pastor, Ben.
After Ben’s departure in September 2020 – in March 2021, we appointed two new Next Gen Ministers, Samuel who as Youth Pastor focusses on the church young people, and Alisha, as Young Adults and School’s Pastor, who focusses both on the Young Adult ministry, while also engaging with HLC Secondary School.
In 2019, we began the building of a new 75sqm Annexe and Community Hub – it is called ‘The Hub,’ and was opened in 2020. It is used for Community Engagement Projects, and in supporting our mission in Telford. As a church we are thankful for our history but firmly believe our future will be even better in Christ.
As part of the church’s response to Covid-19, and its impact on what we could do – in 2020, we began to move all our services online. This included eventually moving to Livestreaming our Sunday morning service from the building. We made a significant investment in new tech to do so. Since then, we have created a hybrid church with a mixture of online and in person content and services. This has brought in lots of new people into the building, and also, new people to join us only online.