A Brief History of FEBE / ABE

In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Jack and Dorothy Hoad started taking groups of Christians on holiday to the continent; they named their enterprise ‘Christian Companions’. They travelled frequently on the Continent and started to look for like minded churches. They made contact with the church in Mulhouse, eastern France, which is part of the ‘Association of Evangelical Baptist Churches of the French language’ (AEEBLF) and the pastor Frédéric Buhler who was a fluent English speaker.

It was also at this time that the ‘Baptist Radio Crusade’, which had studios based at the Angel Baptist Church, Islington (north east London), were producing radio programmes and Christian transmitters were airing them to the U.K. and further afield. Those involved were Jack Hoad, John Cooke and Percy Crees and they wanted to explore the possibility of putting together programmes in European languages.

Following these contacts, a few fraternals were arranged between French and English pastors to share fellowship together and also to look into further possible contacts and to widen this fellowship. FEBE was then envisaged and a first FEBE pastors’ conference was held in Brussels in the early part of 1965 between pastors of the AEEBLF and Strict Baptist Churches (Grace Baptist Churches these days.) Later in the 1960s, contacts were being made between the Irish Baptist Union who was also looking at mission work in France and a meeting was held in France between some English pastors and Irish pastors.

The first open FEBE conference was held with French (also French-speaking Belgians and Swiss), English and Irish participation at the London Bible College in 1967. Then two years later a second conference was held in Mulhouse.

It was agreed that conferences would be held every two years, alternating between the different language groups. The Spanish involvement began in the late 1960s through a contact with Guy Appéré (of Geneva) and a Spanish pastor, Sanchez, who ran a Bible school at which a young man called Roberto Velert was a student. He became the pastor of the Valencia church (in the east of Spain) after further studies at the Bible Seminary of Toronto. Another link in the ‘FEBE’ chain: Roberto married Betty, a member of the Mulhouse church who was also a niece of Guy’s wife!!

Subsequently, due to closer contacts and fellowship, teams of young people/students were organised from the three language groups. In the 1970s, under the guidance of Bror-jens Berge (pastor of the Brussels church), these teams helped small churches in their outreach and also got involved in new church plants. The new work in Villefranche-sur-Saône, (south of France) hosted a team as did the church in Brussels; another team helped the new work in Mons, Belgium.

Over these early years, quite a number of churches became ‘members’ of FEBE, giving them the option to send ‘delegates’ to FEBE’s bi-annual Business meeting. From this meeting, a ‘steering committee’ is elected whose main task has been the organisation of the conferences and generally making FEBE known among churches across Europe.

© Roger Cook 2008