On 2 June 1867 Josiah Spiers spoke to fifteen children in the drawing room of Thomas ‘Pious’ Hughes’ home at 309 Essex Road, Islington, London, pioneering a new approach to sharing Christ with children. Josiah taught the children hymns and choruses and told them stories of Jesus in a way that they could understand.

It was also so lively, so informal and so very different from the boring sermons they had sat through in their churches that all the children returned the following week with some of their friends.

By 17 November, the Hughes’ had a capacity crowd of fifty children in their front room. They needed a larger auditorium, so on 8 December the Children’s Special Service Mission (CSSM) opened in a school-house in Islington with sixty-five children attending. Tom Bishop, a civil servant, had begun running similar meetings for children in South London. He met Spiers in 1868 and they began working together under the CSSM banner.

On 26th August, 1967, Josiah was on holiday at the seaside at a place called Llandudno in North Wales. Holidays by the seaside were a new fashion in Britain at the time, and the beach was crowded with children. So Josiah saw an opportunity. He called a group of children to him and suggested that they should make a text in the sand. He marked out the words “God is Love” and encouraged the children to decorate the letters with shells and seaweed. When the text was finished, he told Bible stories to the children. The first Scripture Union beach mission was born.