Life Lessons: Dot Butler’s incredible journey from nightclub dancer to Christian leader

One day, when I was two, my father went out to work and dropped down dead from a brain haemorrhage. My mum was left with three children, rent to pay and 25 shillings in her purse. A kind bachelor across the road noticed she was struggling. Christmas was approaching and he asked if she was able to buy us any  toys. The answer was no. So, he gave her some present money and three years later I was their bridesmaid.  

My stepfather was a good man but he really didn’t know how to emotionally connect with his instant family of three. When I hit my teenage years, he was really strict about clothes, make-up, coming home times etc. My mum used to cover for me as I sneaked out to nightclubs and went on dates. I always felt I was looking for the father I didn’t have and dated a wealthy man in his 40s while I was in upper sixth at school.  

I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I wrote to the Daily Telegraph Careers Advice Bureau and asked about working abroad to get a nice tan, improve my French and meet lot of handsome men. Big doors swing on little hinges. Their reply positioned me for an encounter with God.  

“Dear Miss Bainbridge,” they wrote, “your letter was so entertaining we think you should consider career in journalism.” 

Well, I had been interviewed by a reporter while serving petrol in a bikini in Sunderland and I had won a national short story writing competiiton….so I thought, yes! I landed a trainee reporter’s job on the sedate weekly Darlington and Stockton Times, took a part time job dancing in a golden cage in a local nightclub and after 18 months moved to the faster paced Evening Despatch in the same town.     

I loved it! Every day was different. I got by-lines on stories, interviewed some amazing people and thrived on finding news   After a few weeks the editor called me into his office (he and other newspaper executives had stumbled upon me my cage a few weeks earlier!), and announced that he wanted me to write my own column. Dot’s Spot, in fact.   

So, still a trainee, I became the paper’s action girl. I wrestled Big Daddy, I was the top man on the White Helmet’s pyramid of bikes and men, I was a clown in a circus, the front end of a panto horse… it was great fun!  

Plus, I had lots of boyfriends, all with nice cars! But yet, I often felt that something was missing….  

Enter Tim and Lesley, two journalists who had recently become Christians. They talked to everyone about Jesus. Dorothy Bainbridge, they concluded, would be that last of the 109 journalists in the group, to be converted. I was the first.   

My news editor had sent me to interview a Pentecostal pastor who was praying over the phone for anyone who needed healing. I finished the interview and on the way out he said: “Dot, I really believe this interview is a God appointment. Please take this St John’s Gospel and my church is going to pray for you every week!”  

 God’s timing is perfect because right at this time my flatmate Rosie was very confused spiritually.  I asked Tim and Lesley to talk to her. I remember feeling an unusual warmth as they spoke about Jesus.   

 I was invited to a Christian meeting and I marvelled at how clean and shining all the girls seemed to be. I explained to the pastor I that could never be like them. “Oh, he said. “well, the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from ALL sin…” Ah, so it was possible… 

 Shortly afterwards, I woke up one Sunday and announced to Rosie that I wanted to go to church. And that was the day that the 21-year-old Dot wept buckets, said sorry to God, embraced the cross and committed her life to the Lord Jesus Christ. She had come home!  

I was like the woman at the well. I wanted everyone to meet this wonderful man called Jesus. I told everyone at work that I had become a Christian, including Derek who had once asked me out and I had said no thank you. We’ve now been married for almost 47 years – we started dating when he had his own journey with God six years after I said yes to Jesus.  

We’ve had so many adventures in God and have pressed through some tricky circumstances. We hadn’t even been married a year when he nearly died after accidentally taking a medication containing aspirin. My neighbour, who had become a Christian literally the day before, gave him the kiss of life on our sitting room floor while the doctor worked on him. I stood in the hall, then went into the ambulance with him, praying loudly in tongues, doing warfare on his behalf. He needed a miracle. He got one. 

 One of the foundational words over our lives was that, like Cape Canaveral, God was going to to dig us deep but that we were going the moon. And that’s the truth. 

 We have pioneered churches, trusted God for finances, been on church leadership teams and saw our once thriving car businesses close during the 1990s recession.  

 It was round about that time that I went back into newspapers – we had two children aged four and three months, but we needed the income. I became women’s editor on the Sunderland Echo and for ten years enjoyed had a wonderful career, winning five North East Press Awards in the process.  

 Derek spent four years doing anything that helped make ends meet. Then one weekend an American prophet called Cathy Lechner (she went to be with Jesus a few years ago) was speaking at our church. It was her first time in England. On the Friday evening she said asked me to stand up and said she saw a pen in my hand and that what I wrote impacted the reader. “But God wants to use you on a city-wide and county-wide basis with politicians!” she pronounced.  I thought: “She’s got that wrong!”  Yet within a year a door opened at Sunderland City Council and I set up my own specialist writing/publishing consultancy business. I worked for many private sector and public sector organisations and yes, I sat alongside politicians and chief executives to deliver many prestigious projects. 

 But on the Sunday morning she called us both out. Derek wept as she said she saw his hands full of keys, car keys, and that a business was going to be put in his hands. She said that God now knew that he would serve him if he had everything or if he had nothing. She said he would give cars to men in ministry and that God was going to put back in his pocket that which had been taken. Her words came to pass within four months and God prospered us both.  

 Derek eventually came out of the car business, although the car thing with men in ministry still happens. So, in 2005 we were living in a beautiful home, I was working flat out with all my consultancy clients, Derek had started building a portfolio of rental properties – and in the July a letter arrived from someone we barely knew. 

 “Dear Derek and Dorothy,” it read, “I had to write because I had a dream and in that dream I was prophesying over your both. I saw you working with children and young people, like a Sunday school but not a Sunday school, and there was a door within a door…” 

 We shrugged our shoulders and put it in our folder marked Prophetic Words. Three weeks later I went to speak at Darlington Women’s Aglow and a woman turned up I had not seen for 30 years.  She had become a social worker and said the fostering agency she worked for might be for sale and would I write a brochure for her if she bought it?  

 Derek and I ended up making the purchase. Zoom forward to today and, alongside our well qualified daughter Sally, we run ROC Group which consists of: five about to be seven children’s homes (four Ofsted Overall Good, one Overall Outstanding); 15 houses for individual care leavers who need additional support to transition to independence; respite  support for children with disabilities (CQC Outstanding); a property company; and a property management company. Oh - and the door within a door is ROC Solid, our supported housing charity which we started in 2007 when we saw the poor outcomes for care leavers. Today it has more than 100 units of accommodation and we support unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, care leavers, young families, people coming out of prison etc. We have scooped national awards across the charity and businesses and our 200 team members are simply amazing.  

 Yet none of this was ever on our screen. Neither was my being church warden at St Thomas’ Church in Newcastle which is seeing scores of young people come to faith in the “quiet revival”. 

 But one day, back in 1994, the late Wynne Lewis who once led the Elim denomination, took hold of our hands and asked us three times: “Do you take the limits off God?” Three times we said: “Yes.” He then looked at us then said: “Well, God is going to blow your minds with what he is going to do.” 

 The man of God was right. And God isn’t finished yet!