That heart went further than just Kentish Town Evangelical Church and New Life Church. Back in the late 2000s, leaders from New Life Church, Chalk Farm Baptist Church, St Luke's Church and Revelation Church were meeting regularly just to pray together. Praying together as churches has been vital to the unity in this area, and it has always led somewhere, joint outreach, the Fleet Festival, real fruit growing out of those prayer meetings.

Kentish Town Evangelical Church made an offer to New Life Church: Come and be part of this. Would you come and help bring fresh life and energy to this church? And at a similar time, New Life Church were already talking with Revelation Church about working together more closely and intentionally. After lockdown it all came together in the most beautiful way. New Life Church joined Kentish Town Evangelical Church, and a few from Revelation Church joined too, becoming The Church in Bassett Street. People from all kinds of backgrounds and church experiences, brought together for one purpose: seeing Jesus glorified.

The churches locally have continued to work together in a meaningful way with Revelation Church. Particularly, we've run a CAP centre, a Food Bank, combined youth work and Christmas outreach together, and continued to pray together regularly. Nick, Bob and Luke have continued to meet with their elders again and again, regularly talking about how our growing partnership is going and how we can look to collaborate on more and more things.

In 2023, Mike Betts, who leads Relational Mission, pioneered London Calling, where we, as churches in London within Relational Mission, prayed together once a month for God to move in this city, to open doors, and to save people. We did this with Revelation Church, Hope Church in Tottenham, and other churches from Relational Mission, faithfully for two years.

As we prayed at London Calling and have continued to pray for God to move powerfully as a church, he has moved. We've seen extraordinary growth, with over 30 people baptised, whole families finding their way in, and doors opening into schools and other corners of our community. We give God all the glory for what he's been doing.

At the London Calling day a prophetic word was shared with us that felt very timely, speaking into so much that was already going on. We were particularly encouraged that it spoke of a season of gathering and celebrating, and that beyond that would come a season of new families being started. It really resonated with us as elders, and it meant we began to look for some way we could meet regularly as one church, something we haven't been able to do because of the two services we've had to run since the start.

As we began to talk and pray about this, we started looking for buildings and opportunities where we could gather and celebrate, and a door opened up at Christ Apostolic Church. This is one of the oldest church buildings in this area, a church whose own heart is to serve this local community faithfully, and who were positive about us using the building in the afternoons. As we met with them to discuss it, it felt like God was really in this connection and a good thing to pursue.

Around this time, we learned that Revelation Church had been carrying their own sense of a season of celebrating before planting, something they'd been wanting to step into as well. We wondered if this was actually a moment to partner in a really intentional way. So we asked Revelation Church, would you come and join us in this? We want to be really clear, this is not a merger, and it's not one church swallowing another. Rather, it's the picture from Luke's gospel of the boats - when one boat's nets are so full they can't cope alone, they call out to their partners in the other boat, ‘come and help us bring this catch in’. That's the heart of joining together for Sunday services, two churches pooling what we have so we've got the energy to go further than either of us could alone, sharing the load, bringing in a harvest together. This isn't even a new idea for us - it goes back to a joint prayer meeting between churches in 2018, a scripture shared with Nick years before The Church in Bassett Street ever existed. God had been planting this seed of partnership long before we could see why. It felt like something, a direction we were already heading in, like God had put us on a similar trajectory to Revelation Church, and this would be the next dot in our journey.

Like Abraham, who set out in faith and obedience without knowing exactly where he was heading, we don't know every detail of what's ahead of us. But we want to faithfully follow God into it, tracing this dot-to-dot picture one step at a time, trusting that this is the next dot he's drawing for us. Practically, we want The Church in Bassett Street to become an extraordinary blessing for the whole community. In this new season, we don't want to stop what God has already been doing, and the dreams he's been putting in people's hearts. We simply want to add to it, so this becomes the most wonderful blessing to the whole community and the whole area, and God gets the glory for it.