It has been an incredible season of change and growth in the last 8 months. We have changed our name from CrossWords to Grace Christian Church, Armadale (in a unanimous vote) to better clearly express to the wider community what we are all about and that is that we are a community that holds to the doctrines of grace and that people are welcome to come to us as they are, but not to stay as they are, as the gospel changes us all and this is all by God’s grace alone (Eph 2:8-9).
And because of the wonderful growth that we are experiencing, we started a children’s church ministry called “Grace Kids”, which has now taken on a life of its own where we are seeing the young disciples among us really engaging with the stories of the Bible and being encouraged with their faith with where they are at in life (Matt 19:14, Eph 6:1-3).
We have also seen a couple of new connect groups start, which means we have four in total and we are looking to start a fifth in June. The feedback from these groups has been overwhelmingly positive, as people have been getting together during the week and either going through questions from the sermon or working their way through a book of the Bible and then eating and praying together.
We also now have a website that we use to get sermons out there to the world (as well as a podcast channel). The website is also a great tool for the church to use to help people who might be enquiring of us about what we believe and why we believe what we do. We also now have a social media presence so that people can keep up-to-date with what we are doing during the week.
We are also very happy to welcome the Richards family who will be joining us over the next year as Tom will be assisting me in some preaching and also share his years of ministry wisdom that he has gained on the mission field so that we as a church might navigate these exciting times of growth and change well. And as put forward at the recent AGM, we will be training Andy Waggnar as our new deacon to be ordained later this year.
There are so many wonderful things to report on and new things are being looked at and prayed about as we speak and all this is happening as the goal of Grace Christian Church (as we heard at our recent camp together) is to become a gospel centric community, which means that we seek to hold Christ as centre among us more and more so that we wont fall into the error of leading people into a man-centric culture or make a denomination, or even ourselves, the main focus but to lead people to the living God who has put us together.
We want to be a church that makes disciples of Jesus so that we can go into the world and proclaim the gospel and make disciples as we have been told to do in Matthew 28:19. And that is where the focus has been for the past few months. We have been focusing on what it is to be a community of disciples of Jesus so that when we do go and the gospel does work(Rom 1:16) we can bring people to a church that knows who and what we are…to put it simply, we are kind of working the great commission in reverse at the moment. Jesus says go and make disciples (Matt 28:19), but at the moment in this season where we find ourselves, we are learning what it is to be a community that disciple’s one another so that we can go and make disciples of others. And that should be the ultimate goal of any spirit lead and Christ centred church. That we are a place that loves Jesus and loves people so much so that we don’t just seek the truth or speak the truth but live the truth and disciple one another in that truth (Jn 14:6).