Giving Thanks to God and Looking Ahead
I want to encourage you to join together in praising God for all he is doing among us in recent times. He is of course always worthy of praise. And each year we look back on the last 12 months and have so many reasons for thanksgiving. But this last 12 months seems special. It seems the Lord’s work among us is overflowing.
We’ve grown significantly. You can feel it. There are so many people coming to us wanting to know about the things of Christ. 37 adults and 83 teenagers have put their faith in the Lord over the year. We now see 1350 people gathering in growth groups each week. Add to this the number of youth joining together in their small group structure of GTeams. This is evidence of how many people want to go deeper and care for each other.
Our fellowship has grown in size, but also in spiritual depth. Lives are being changed. And more! The care right across church is something to behold. We long that every single person is personally loved and supported through whatever they’re going through. It’s all part of our family experience together.
We continue in the work of raising up men and women and sending them off, to Bible College, and to other ministries, and churches. It is hugely costly but exactly the right thing to do.
On very practical matters, we’ve had teams of people working hard behind the scenes to keep developing our property so that it is useful to the work of discipling our region. Each week great numbers tune in to watch our services. We’re particularly thrilled to have the generous service of our Auslan interpreters who provide an almost unique ministry to the deaf community
All of this and so much more is cause for thanksgiving.
But there is so much more to do. We’re surrounded by great crowds of people who don’t know Christ, and so are living without God, without hope. This ought to deeply concern us; as I know it does. We dare to hope that we might see something astonishing over the next bunch of years, that we might see 10% of the Central Coast, and Australia, won to Jesus. This is not beyond what our God can do. And he seems to be saying to us – I’ve got this. Keep going! Keep pushing! Imagine!
Andrew
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