We'd finally found our perfect house and have been happily here for a couple of years. Recently however, our nice neighbours next door moved and in have moved some people who belong to the Jesus People / Jesus Army, complete with very large minibus with the Jesus People scrawled across it.
Whilst the new neighbours themselves have pretty much kept to themselves, we do get incovenienced by the fact that they do get lots of visitors so there are invariably cars and/or minibuses parked on our part of the drive (albeit a part that is outside their house and is a part that provides communal access for several houses, not just ours, making it very difficult to park outside our own house. And there are invariably cars and minibuses for them parked on the road, making access into / out of the drive difficult and dangerous (you can't see what's coming until too late).
I don't know much about the JA/JP other than they started in a village near where I grew up and they had a very bad name then (this is going back 20-30 years) for turning a nice village into a very strange village for the ordinary residents. It was definitely seen as a cult - communal living, handing over wages, cutting yourself off from family and friends, only talking to non cult members if trying to convert them, etc etc.
Have done a quick look on the internet and they now seem to have turned into quite a big organisation and gone slightly more mainstream but still look fairly dodgy. And they seem to interpret some nice normal christian beliefs in a fairly extreme way - for example, taking drug addicts or ex convicts (or other society undesirables!) into their home in order to rehabilitate (ie turn into members of the cult) them. The sort of people that with a young child you don't want to be living next door to, even if going through 'rehab'.
So I guess my questions are:
1 - does anybody else have experience of living next/near to these sorts of people and how has it affected your everyday life
2 - has anybody tried to sell their house with neighbours like this - and has it affected the sale at all? Either by reducing the sale price or the number of people that would have otherwise bought the house?
I know that, had they been here before we bought, it would have been a serious factor against buying and may well have put us off. We've also discovered that now that they have bought the house, it actually belongs to the cult rather than to them, so even if they 'sell' it may well remain as a cult house rather than go back to somebody normal.
Sorry this has been a long post! Just feeling rather sick to our stomachs that our dream house seems to be turning into a bit of a nightmare situation that has wiped a chunk of value off the house and even if we do end up having to move we'll suffer as a result of having lost the equity.