in Christ: Andrew Fountain's blog

We visited Jubilee Church, Enfield (North London) on July 15th 2007. When the church needed to expand from their previous location, there were some prophetic words about a large building with lots of glass windows and about people coming from the north, the south, the east and the west. Not only does the Cineworld cinema complex where they now meet have a huge glass front, but is it located at a major intersection with roads off in the four directions of the compass.

Here is a close shot of the front of the building. In the church is in a period of tremendous growth and is truly multicultural. They describe themselves as "an, informal, multicultural church with people of all ages represented. Whatever your background you should find a warm welcome!" One of the reasons we wanted to visit them is that our goal is to build a multicultural church in downtown Toronto, and so we were very interested in seeing what it looked like. Another reason is that it is the home church of our good friend Adrian Warnock.

Around 300 people completely filled the cinema “screen”, with extra seating at the front for the children. (On most Sundays they are able to use a 500 seater.) They also use several other screens for children’s meetings. This picture does not really capture the diversity of cultures and ages within the church.

The worship time was great, and being a cinema, there wasn’t a problem finding a place to project the words. We were show some pictures of a community event they had run the previous weekend.

The church is led by Tope Koleoso. I was very impressed by his gentle and gracious spirit. He preached a really encouraging sermon from the story of Jericho. He called people forward at the end who wanted prayer for their own personal “Jericho”. I went forward (my Jericho is the city of Toronto!), and was very blessed to have Tope pray for our work in Newlife Church.

Immediately following the service there was carrot-cake and fellowship offered to everyone in a reception area at the front of the cinema. However, since it was our first time, we were invited to a monthly “meet the leaders” buffet lunch in one of the private rooms. Here we experienced a warm Newfrontiers welcome and spent an interesting half hour talking with Tope and several others who introduced themselves to us.