Xcel Bowl

[00:00:00] Well, Carmarthen is a, a rural market town, um, a farming community. Sometimes I used to be embarrassed. So some of my Christian friends would ask me, Paul, what are you doing now? And I’d say, oh, I’m involved. And, and at some point I’d have to say the words. And I would have church in Carmarthen and we were running a And he didn’t want to say it.

I mean,

we live in a pretty secular society here in Wales and people have got lots of preconceptions about what church is and, you know, what it means to be a follower of Jesus. In [00:01:00] 2009, uh, the church minister at the time, Mark Bennett, had looked at this old, uh, commercial building, which used to be a cheese factory, uh, in Carmarthen, and went to process a local, uh, county council who owned the building to find out if we could, uh, use the building and renovate it into a church hall.

In doing that, we found out that, uh, uh, the council had at one point wanted to run a bowling alley there, and, um, they would give us the building, uh, or we could lease it. Um, but if somebody had come along and offered to run a bowling alley there, uh, they’d have the ability to move us off the site. And so that’s when the crazy idea came about.

When Mark came back to the church and asked the local authority, well, what if we were to do a bowling alley? It was an area of town that, that needed developing, that had not been touched for over 13, 14 years. The building had been empty for quite some time. Why not? Why not? Why, why not use something like a bowling alley to give the [00:02:00] best facility that the community could have?

Somewhere where people could have employment, which is, which makes a difference in community, really changes lives, okay? Why can’t the church provide that employment? Why couldn’t we do that? We started that process in 2010. 2008, you have the big financial crash. And so, uh, people aren’t investing in banks.

aren’t investing in anything, let alone a church that wants to run a bowling alley. There were some people who, um, who were against the project and that’s because the church was running it. I think in some areas, if the church had fully understood back in 2009, the financial obligation of running a project like this, They’d have never started it.

There were times definitely when we questioned, was this God’s plan? 100 percent because there were intense times. It isn’t just the [00:03:00] what we do, it’s the how we do that counts. And we can’t afford to, if you like, serve the community, but at the expense of the people that work for us, it has to be that we provide a work environment that, you know, is the best we can possibly create.

We pride ourselves on the fact that nobody’s excluded from this, you know, and, and If you talk to the staff, you’ll find a sense of pride and a sense of achievement in all of them, whether or not they are from the church community. And what it means is we can keep, give a safe environment to people with mental health problems, other disabilities, and give them an environment where they can test out their, their boundaries, if you like, find out what they can do and can’t do in a safe environment, and try and move them closer to employability and independence.

So from a disabled employment point of view, you know, by making sure we understand what’s required of a job role, we can ensure we’re employing someone who has the ability [00:04:00] to do. And therefore disability doesn’t stand in the way because we’re not employing you for what you can’t do, we’re employing you for what you can do.

There’s certainly nowhere like this around in this part of the world that I know of. So yeah, it’s unique. You know, this is a staff based business, customer focused business, that is run by a church. It’s a different way of looking at business. The business supports the community, which in turn supports the business.

My daughter Lucy has been working here over a year now and has benefited enormously from the experience. When customers walk in I am usually the first person they see. My co workers and the people that I have worked with including my managers and even people higher up, they’ve all just been incredible in helping me feel a lot more comfortable and better within myself.

Even though I’m not kind of religious myself, I do really admire the fact that’s what we stand for. I think one of the things that has stood out for, for [00:05:00] people within Carmarthen is the fact that the model that we have here means there is no benefit to the church whatsoever from what we do. So no profit created by the bowl or any other project can go back to the church.

Money can flow from the church to the projects, but no money can flow back to the church. People see that, that we’re about, you know, what we are doing is for the benefit of the community. Through that, we help develop obviously the food

bank, which helps into people’s lives there. Help out there with the furniture and obviously with the shop as well.

But we could see there was a genuine need. There really is a body of support now amongst the business community for what we’re doing. I think there’s often a misconception in church that I can only serve God by doing ministry inside the church. We don’t live our lives in isolation. I don’t believe there’s a secular world and a church world.

You know, we’ve only got one life. We live here on this planet [00:06:00] and what are we meant to do? I think genuine love always draws people. It gives an environment where people want to be a part, okay? Over a million people have walked into our bowling alley. Over a million people have walked in there. I can tell you straight away, there’s nowhere near a million people have walked into church buildings.

It really does feel like coming to a family and spending time with your friends instead of coming to do a job. Northern has changed because of Exelbo.