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Grosvenor Hall: The Mission to the Masses

The story of the beginnings of the Grosvenor Hall congregation and Belfast Central Mission as shared with our Reflective Pilgrimage last Sunday afternoon continues...

A tent is not exactly conducive for winter meetings... so towards the end of October they started to look for a new home, and found it on the site of what is now Belfast's Grand Opera House. It first opened on 23rd December 1895 (and contrary to popular opinion the opening show was not a pantomime starring May McFettridge). It was designed by the most prolific theatre architect of the period, Frank Matcham, and was originally called New Grand Opera House and Cirque. The term Cirque referred to the fact that the building that stood here before that, called the Hermon Hall, was one of a range of Halls across Britain and Ireland owned by the Ginnett family (often miss-spelt as Ginnet in Belfast histories, including the original published history of BCM), who were theatrical and circus promoters. Ginnett’s own circus toured around the country using these venues when in town, and other events were staged in them in between, or they were hired out. Indeed most of them, including the Hermon Hall, were popularly known as Ginnett’s Circus. This particular hall was a huge 2000 seat barn of a place, and Crawford Johnson saw it as a perfect place to decamp to from the tent in Hunter Street where he had been conducting his evangelistic mission since the middle of September.
So after a period of negotiation, including assurances to Mr. Ginnett that the hire fee would be paid up front and that the tenants would be of a “respectable nature”, on the 10th November 1889 the Mission met here for the first time in what was advertised on posters as a "Mission to the Masses"... This is the date that Belfast Central Mission has generally taken as its foundation (although it was formally constituted earlier in the year) and the Grosvenor Hall congregation has latterly observed as its anniversary... And this year it ceases to worship together 1 day shy of its 136th birthday.
On the first night, the minister of Sandy Row Methodist Rev W.H. Quarry and his congregation, decided to cancel their evening service and come round to support this new venture... But by the time they had got here the place was full to the doors and they had their own open air meeting on the street outside...
This reminds me of the story in the Gospels where the place where Jesus was teaching and healing was so full that some people had to cut a hole in the roof to get their paralysed friend in... And so I wrote:

Are we purveyors of respectable religion,
or a spiritual circus that is there to entertain?
Is Jesus on the inside with the great unwashed
or on the outside with the upright 
faithful who realised far too late
that God was at work elsewhere?

Or is it the other way round today?
How has the world changed so much?
There is now no need to cut a hole in the roof
to get in to where the action is.
Perhaps its time to get back on the streets
at the risk of being less respectable.
David A. Campton 2025
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