The Guiding Light—

A New Church Takes Root In Newtown

By Kaaren Valenta

A new church, The Guiding Light, is meeting in Newtown at the Edmond Town Hall every Sunday. The interdenominational Christian church founded by Pastor Ernestine Urquhart began holding services six weeks ago.

Founding the church was a realization of the call that she first felt more than ten years ago while she was a member of the Turners Faith Temple in Bridgeport, which is affiliated with the Church of God in Christ, a worldwide Pentecostal church headquartered in Memphis, Tenn.

Ernestine Urquhart, who now lives in Sandy Hook, was licensed by the church to preach.

“For the past four years I have been going into the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury as part of a Kairos program. Kairos means time away with God,” she said. “I have also taught Bible study at the Norwalk shelter for four years, and at Bread of Life in Norwalk, a drop-in center for men and women in transition from drugs and prison.”

 “God sparked something in me,” she said. “God would give me what to say to a person and they would tell me it was exactly what they needed to hear. It seemed like [God] put me right on the path, but I was not confident.

“I’d say, ‘God, I can’t preach. Who am I? Who would listen to me? What could I say?’”

“But God told me ‘preach what you have written.’”

At the time Mrs Urquhart was president of Women of Excellence at her church, and doing a lot of writing about the value of women in the family and society.

In a dream she was told to send a very specific amount of money to a church in the Midwest. After she did, the pastor of that church called her. “She asked me how I knew the exact amount of money — to the dollar and cent — that she needed to pay a church bill,” Pastor Urquhart said.

Signs like these and the vision in a dream of a small church with stained glass windows on Route 7 eventually convinced her that she needed to do more.

“About ten years ago one of my sons was attending the Canterbury School [in New Milford] and I kept seeing an old country church when I was driving up there from Norwalk, where we lived at the time,” she said. “So later, when one of the persons in the Kairos program invited me to go with her when she preached, I thought it was the same church on Route 7 that I had passed. But when I got there, it was a United Methodist church.

“So I went to a nearby gas station and asked where the church was that I was looking for. They told me that it was one block away, around the corner. It turned out to be the exact church of my dream. Everything was the same, the pews, the back staircase, even the burgundy carpet inside and the musty smell.”

The church had only 11 members. “I asked them if I could rent the church but they turned me down because they are a different denomination,” Pastor Urquhart said. “Eventually they got a temporary pastor. I don’t know what the future of that church will be, but my dream must have meant something, so I will just wait and see.”

The experience was enough to convince Mrs Urquhart and her husband, Norman, who works for IBM, to sell their house in Norwalk and move further north, a move they made six months ago when they finally found a house that was just what they were looking for in Sandy Hook.

“I work as an assistant teacher at a preschool in Greenwich,” she said. “When we moved to Newtown I joined the Newcomers’ Club. I have felt so welcome here. It seems like doors are being opened.”

She went to Edmond Town Hall to register her church and asked about renting space. The old courtroom on the lower level was available.

“I started the church this month,” she said. “We meet every Sunday from 9 to 10:45 am for morning worship, then have fellowship from 10:45 to 11:15. This is a nonmembership church. We take all kinds of people from injured lives — people who need prayer, who are depressed and feeling lonely, who need healing, who need guidance and hope — and we empower them. The Guiding Light guides them in the path they should go.”

She also started a women’s discussion group that meets at her home at 23 Split Rock Road on Friday evenings from 7:30 to 8:45 pm.

“We talk about issues concerning our lives and applying Biblical principals that are proven to work,” Pastor Urquhart said. “It’s free, fun, and fascinating.”

For more information, call Ernestine Urquhart at 270-8882 or attend the Sunday service and fellowship at Edmond Town Hall.