Coming back to my own story back in mid-1980, somewhat shell-shocked, I arrived at Bedmond.
As I have mentioned, the church was split more or less geographically, with people in the Watford area going on Sunday morning to the newly-acquired Garston church building and those from the Hemel Hempstead area going to the original Bedmond church. In the evening the service (which all church members were expected to attend) was at Garston. I went to Bedmond in the morning as it was closer to where I lived.
I have to say that this heralded the most bleak and lonely period in the whole of my life. Smarting at the injustice done to me and cut off by the ban put on me from all the friends I'd had in St Albans and with the people from the new church living almost entirely in Watford and Hemel Hempstead my life seemed very empty.
The life in the church was busy, together with two meetings on Sundays, there was usually a meeting on Fridays together with a mid-week home group meeting. In those days I was commuting to London to work and at least twice during the week gulping down a quick meal and driving half a dozen miles to the meeting. This didn't allow me to think much. But the days when nothing happened were silent and empty, so I turned up at all the meetings. I didn't stop and think whether anything made sense. It filled the time and we were whipped up to think we were soldiers in a huge battle.
Alan Vincent used to rail at people for the poor attendance at the week day meetings. Of course, not having had a proper job for ages, he was in a poor position to appreciate that people who had worked all day (and to cope with the 23% of pre-tax income tithes demanded, a lot of work was needed!), perhaps with a couple of hours commuting each way as well, were not in a fit state to turn out to a meeting lasting most of the night.
He used to speak at about 90% of the meetings apart from Sunday mornings when he would alternate between Bedmond and Garston. He is a very good speaker, although some of his facts, which he uses as illustrations, are often not quite straight. I particularly remember that he always got the explantation of how an aeroplane flew wrong. The thrust of his message was and as far as I can see from recent descriptions including 2 or 3 books, is still heavily into "spiritual warfare" against the powers of darkness and the importance of faith and prayer. This emphasis very much transmitted itself to the other leaders in the church and the whole attitude of the church was one of intense spiritual warfare.
Much of the life of the church, what passed as a personal life and my work were all interleaved, so I shall describe the next few years in turn.
1981
Very early on in 1981 Alan Vincent presented his picture at a meeting during the week for the development of the church in terms of "strawberry plants" with "runners" moving out and planting "living churches" in adjacent towns. He had an overhead slide of a strawberry plant with runners labelled "St Albans", "Hemel Hempstead" and so forth. He envisaged that once planted, the new churches would separate from the original but be the source of new plantings in the future.
This particularly stuck in my mind. However Alan Vincent was to totally backtrack on it later.
As I have said the promised meeting in 1981 with Ian Meredith and the others to review the action taken against me never took place. It was actually arranged for a particular day although I wasn't told about it until after it had been cancelled. What caused it to be cancelled was that Ian Meredith's wife Shirley made a suicide attempt after a man she wanted to have an affair with refused her.
In the aftermath of this an elder from the Bedmond church, Pete Byers, came and took over Ian's Elim church whilst he and his wife attempted unsuccessfully to repair things. Many of the people there got on well with Pete and missed him after Ian got back and started to filter over to Bedmond. My situation was never really resolved at the time, gradually though people I had known before started to speak to me again.
My work was going through a state of flux. I had left GEC Computers in 1979 and gone to work in a small company, Cocking and Drury, now long defunct, in the Mayfair district of London. A year later I had met up with the brother, a certain David S, of a good Christian friend from Cambridge and at the second part of 1980 had gone into business with him. He proved to be a difficult person to work for. Despite being a church leader he was, as I have always said since, the most dishonest person I have ever met in the whole of my life. More than one person said of him "if you shake hands with him, count your fingers afterwards". However at the time it seemed a way forward to start my own business. However instead of having 50 out of 100 shares, he set the company up so I had 50 out of 1000 shares instead, forging my signature on documents to agree to this. I wasn't to discover this for 6 years. But I unwisely got involved with him then; there was no one to advise me.
Towards the end of 1981 a school building became disused in an area of Hemel Hempstead called Bourne Valley. The building was owned by Hertfordshire County Council (in England the county councils are responsible for education services) but the council had no immediate plans for its disposal. After a minimal consultation with the church members, it was agreed that the church would lease the building, I believe initially for 30 months until the end of July 1984. It was decided that a new church would start there in January 1982 and also that a Christian school would be started. At the same time it was decided that a new church would start in St Albans, as by then a large number of the former Elim members had moved to the then Bedmond/Garston setup.