It has been a while since I updated the blog, and I know you have been on the edge of your seat waiting to hear about what’s been going on! If that is the case… let me remind you that the best way to get regular updates is to sign up to receive our monthly prayer letter (you can do that here). We make sure this goes out every month, and it is often much more detailed than we’re able to be on the website.
But for now let me catch you up a bit…
New Team member!
We had shared that as well as the Ferrira’s moving up from Worthing with us, there was also someone else thinking about joining us. We can now share that that person is Rachel Bass! We are so pleased, and it is a massive answer to prayer that God has brought Rachel to join us! Rachel currently lives in Manchester and is a member at City Church, where she has also served on staff. Rachel comes to us with a lot of pastoral experience, a love for Jesus and a heart for Halifax, as well as experience in church plants. Rachel isn’t able to move to Halifax immediately, but will be joining us for launch team meetings on Sunday afternoons splitting her time between us and City as she transitions over to Halifax.
Launch Team
As we have settled into life in Halifax, we are super excited about reaching people with the Good news of the gospel, and we can’t wait to launch and start in earnest. People ask if we have a launch date yet - we don’t - we really think we need to have a few more folks join the launch team before we can really think about setting a date. This is one of our biggest prayer points at the moment - and we would love you to pray with us for this. We really want to see growth through conversion, but having mature believers in the church who are able to disciple new converts is so important. We would love it if you could share what we’re doing with your church and even consider yourself whether God is calling you to move to Halifax to join us - if there is any interest in that at all - please do get in touch!
Plant North
I have started doing the Plant North course held at City Church Manchester, and thats been really fruitful already. Great to meet with other pastors and planters - and great to learn from Ralph and others on strategies and philosophies for church planting.
Church Visits
In the past few weeks we have really benefitted from spending some time in other churches. As a team we spent a Sunday at the Grace Baptist Church in Halifax, and at City Evangelical Church in Leeds - although Hope Hudds is our home right now, it’s really important for us to see how other churches do things in order to learn and see different expressions of church. As well as visiting churches as a team, I have had the opportunity to preach a bit the past month or so. Halifax GBC had a visiting speaker take ill one Saturday, and so it was a real privilege to be free to step in and serve them from the pulpit that Sunday. As well as that I preached at Hope Hudds a couple of Sundays ago on Kindness (you can listen here) and then taught one of their key doctrine slots one evening on the doctrine of guilt. I also had the privilege of teaching on a CY youth weekend in Garforth a few weeks ago - CY is a youth group from Middlesborough.
FIEC Leaders Conference
Next week I’ll be in Torquay for the FIEC Leaders Conference. If you’re going to be there and you want to meet up to talk about what we’re doing - drop me an email!
Thats all for now folks - I’ll try and be better at updating the Blog and just sharing with you what we’re doing.
Soli Deo Gloria