History of Grace & Light

The story of Grace & Light begins with Patience Chule, who was born in Jos, Nigeria in 1977. She had a difficult childhood. Her parents separated when she was very young, and after that there were frequent moves, with separation from brothers and sisters, changes in parenting, and hardship.  It was almost certainly while boarding at senior secondary school that she became infected with HIV.

After leaving school in 1997 she got a job at the library of the Theological College of Northern Nigeria.  It was there that she met a student, Ayano Chule, and married him in February 1998. The preacher at their wedding was Mark Hopkins, the founder of Grace & Light.

In the first half of 2002 Patience started to lose weight and suffer increasing ill-health.  In November her health became much worse, and she was hospitalised, severely ill, early in December.  Most of her last three months were spent in hospital.

On 17 January she finally received the positive result of an HIV test and that same day Ayano led her to a true faith in Jesus.  When Mark first visited her the next day (Ayano had only alerted us to their situation a few days earlier) he found her looking to Jesus.  She was able to forgive everyone, something she had previously found impossible.  For example, she had fallen out with her neighbours so badly that she had insisted on taking the case before the bishop; when she didn’t get the result she hoped for she was then determined to move out.  Yet shortly after her conversion she called these neighbours into the hospital to reconcile with them.

By late February she was in heart failure, and all the heart drugs prescribed for her seemed powerless to bring her out of it.  Breathing became a struggle, and she died on 4 March 2003, ready to enter into Christ’s glory. That was the way it had to be for her real work to begin. Hundreds gathered in the cathedral for her funeral, at which Mark Hopkins preached the gospel and talked openly of her AIDS.

Ten days later the vision for Grace & Light came to Mark. It was to be a movement based on the three principles of the gospel, openness and love that he and Patience had learned together over those weeks. Without Patience Chule there would be no Grace & Light.

The work started in a small way with a pilot project testing people in five churches in May-June 2003.  Tassie Ghata was involved right from the pilot project stage but officially started work as Grace & Light's first Coordinator in January 2004.

Grace & Light was registered with the Nigerian government early in 2005 and a plot of land was purchased to build the future headquarters in 2006.

International expansion of the work began with training of teams outside Nigeria as follows: Chad 2007, Liberia and Sierra Leone 2008. Grace & Light was established in the UK in 2005, in the USA in 2008 and in France in 2009.