Josiah Mee, a student at the
Wesleyan College on Richmond Hill, collected the money to buy, in 1867, the land on which the church is built; it was open for worship in April 1868, when he sold it to Rev. William Fiddian Moulton and eleven others. and it was subsequently purchased by Sidney Ernest Wiles in December 1966. For the next 28 years Wiles ran "Barnes Healing Church" as a Christian Spiritualist Church. It closed when he died in 1994, aged 96. ==Notes and references==