Celebrating church

I’m not very good at being vocal about what is good in our church, or at least not often enough. So in preparation for coming off the leadership team from midnight this Sunday (we step down as student ministry team leaders as part of a full change of the leadership team), here’s a summary of what’s been going on that is good:

• Recent weeks have seen a number of people deciding to believe in and follow Jesus, which is already to concrete changes they have decided to make to how they live, and how they serve others.
• The number of people choosing to publicly express that faith and tell their stories publicly, as they take part in a symboli act of being baptised, has been pretty steady with another few this month and a few already up for next month.
• Lots of people are coming, including a lot of people who are new to church, or extra encouragingly for me given my own story, people whose faith has been re-awakened. Many of these are choosing to serve, to join the family, and to get stuck into a small group.
• The staff team is massively expanding (entirely appropriately) and we now have a senior pastor, a discipleship and training pastor, an executive pastor, a pastoral counsellor, a youth pastor and a youth worker, we work closely with and held fund a worker with Christians against Poverty, office staff, a personal assistant to the senior pastor, and a student worker. I’m hopefully not missing anyone out! The team a couple of years ago was around 3-4 full time people so this will make a big difference.
• I’m hearing of person after person who is becoming involved in 1-1 discipling. Yes, we can do more here to train and develop others, but lets celebrate where we are.
• In flat numbers, we’ve been really blessed as a church - which has then facilitated multiple bands, including one with 16 people. Seriously. Overall the church has probably grown over the last 2 years from 300 to 600 people. There are 180 students as part of that, compared to 10 only 5 years ago.
• The community ministry raised £55k to fund a school for the Dalits, and training for workers in AIDs ridden communities in Kenya. This area has also been really blessed with a DIY team (do it yourself) to help rennovate and decorate the flats of people who are needy and this has had a big impact.
• The church has begun to reach out to youth in the streets nearby, having a street team that walks the communities in the evening, just talking and befrieinding with no hidden agenda.
• And not least we have been blessed with a great senior pastor who communicates very helpful truth in a relevant way and who God appears to be using mightily. Exciting to be a part of it,

Every single Christian in the UK could tell you why their church is not perfect. That’s the easy way out. Culturally it’s difficult for us to celebrate the good. But this is just a little reminder to us all that there are some amazing things happening, and we need to celebrate that. It seems to me that God is doing something in our city at the moment, as lots of new churches are being planted, and new churches are really growing. We need to work out where that is, get stuck in alongside Him, and praise Him for what he is doing.