IN 1967 Albania was declared an atheist state and people were executed for expressing religious beliefs. In the early 1990s a former East Lancashire priest and his wife went there to re-establish a church.

A children's home followed. Dale Barton, inter-faith officer for Churches Together in Lancashire, took a holiday in Albania with his wife Beverley and their three children.

He tells a story of hope from the journey to reporter Donna McKenzie...

DUDLEY and Jenny Powell were visiting a local hospital when they found him. We knew him as Georgy.

He was nearly four years old, in a nappy; washed down occasionally and fed, but otherwise ignored.

He could not speak. Nobody had ever spent enough time with him for him to learn. An abandoned child.

The year was 1992. Twenty three years earlier, Dudley and Jenny had come to Blackburn as newly-weds. Dudley was to be ordained and then to become the new curate at the Church of the Saviour near the Infirmary. They would stay for three years then move to a parish in Bristol.

Now they were facing a huge challenge. They were planting a church in a country which, for over 40 years, had tried to stamp out all religion, indeed killed people who stood in their way.

Since 1967 Albania had been the only officially atheist state in Europe. Soon after the doors opened in 1991 Dudley and Jenny had walked through with the news that God is not dead.

Tony Treasure, from Epsom, had joined Dudley and Jenny to help re-establish the church. As they prayed, Tony sensed that God was calling them to open a children's home, one that would function like a Christian family for children like Georgy.

They had no resources, but with donations from friends in England they bought a house and Tony fixed it up. Georgy, was one of their first children. With two years of love and care he began to speak.

But the bureaucracy was a nightmare. The home swung back and forwards from being 'child stealers' to an example to other institutions.

Staff had to be taught how to care for and love children who were not their own. And in 1997 Albania crashed into anarchy; guns and looting.

But somehow Georgy's home continued as a safe and stable environment with the backing of the church, which continued to meet week after week for worship.

Dudley and Jenny returned to the UK last year due to ill health and The New Beginnings Children's Home is now staffed by Albanians.

There are nine children and hopes for another two in the near future.

Last month, our family of five from Blackburn spent a weekend with an Albanian family, part of that church in Berat.

The church was lively, vibrant and full of young people. My wife told how she had been praying for Albania for 25 years, and had visited the country five times in the atheist period. The people clapped, and they could hardly believe it. No one present had been a Christian for more than eleven years.

But the sweetest thing of all was that it was Georgy, now 15 years old, who showed us round his beautiful and ancient town, acting as our guide and translator.