The church started in the 1980s and began with a group of people from Southampton Community Church (now New Community Church). Martyn and Gaynor Dunsford came to lead the church in 1984. We met in Hedge End Village Hall and, even from these early days, the church had an international ministry supporting churches in Eastern Europe and launched the charity Care and Relief for the Young (CRY).

In 1992, God started to speak about buying the land that the building in Hedge End is now built on. In 1999, the first building was opened after it was built by members of the church which consisted of about 100 people at the time. Over the coming years, God added to the church numerically but also in the breadth of ministry. Martyn’s leadership of CRY and the wider international work grew as did work in the local community with the establishment of a pre-school, food bank, job club, kids club, youth group and elderly people’s ministry. As the church expanded, God started speaking again about increasing our building capacity and we opened a new auditorium in 2011.

In January 2017, Andy Johnston took over the senior leadership of the church from Martyn. Over the next few years, our heart to see the Solent transformed by Jesus continued to increase with people joining the church from across the region.

In 2017, we were gifted a community centre, The Hope Centre, in Weston by Life Church Southampton. This gave us the opportunity to run ministries in a different part of the city. As part of our vision to see the Solent transformed, we launched Hope City, a church-plant, in 2024, serving people in the Weston area.

In 2019, we started another site in the west of the Solent with Tom and Ali Williams moving to Totton to lead the team. With this new site, we became one church in two locations. In September 2025, our Totton congregation became its own self-governing church under the name of Bridge Church Totton.

In 2020, the COVID pandemic caused us, along with the rest of the world, to change drastically how we functioned. This involved, amongst other things, the introduction of a live-streamed Sunday meeting. We are now a diverse church that gathers 1,000 people in attendance for two meetings on Sunday mornings in Hedge End.