June 10th 2007 - a significant day in the life of our church

Today is a significant day in the life of our church: it is our last service at the Perth Bible College, before moving to the SDA church at North Beach. It was on Nov 21, 2004 that we held the first service in the chapel of the Perth Bible College. Forty two people (including the children) attended that first service. Among the congregation were a significant number of supporters from the

Willetton congregation. From memory, the families Melvill, Conradie, Holmes, Pelser, Somerville, Voogd and van Rooyen, who are still with us, all pledged their support to help develop Grace CRC. (There were others present who have moved on, including the Family Fouche who moved to Queensland)

For the first year of the life of Grace CRC (till end 2005), I was still full time at Willetton CRC, and so was only able to devote a day or so a week to the church, besides taking the service and running a fortnightly home group. It was through the hard work, commitment and determination of those pioneer families, who invited friends to come along, and the website which Basie van Rooyen set up, that brought a steady flow of visitors. Under the guiding hand of God the church

has continued to grow.

On October 16th 2005, we held our first Membership Sunday, where we formally welcomed into membership all those who had committed themselves to being members of the Grace CRC by signing the membership covenant. The document that everyone signed read in part: “We have covenanted together to work under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the leadership of our pastor, Rev Peter Abetz, to build a self supporting Christian Reformed Church congregation, for the purpose of wining the lost to Christ, building believers to maturity in Christ, sending them out into Kingdom service.”

God in His grace has allowed us to grow not only in numbers, but also in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord has given us 3 elders and a pastoral care assistant. He has also given us people with generous hearts, who give of their time by serving in various ways and give of their financial resources, so that we are getting very close to being financially self supporting.

We are deeply appreciative of the wonderful way in which the board and staff at the PBC have welcomed us. There have been some great synergies of having our services in a Bible College. I wonder how many of our people would have considered doing courses at PBC, had we not met in the PBC? The very reasonable rent made it financially possible for us to get started, and also helped the finances of the college. We will miss that close connection with PBC once we move to

the SDA church, but I trust that the good contact will continue through the on going involvement  of some of the staff as members of our congregation. As we move to our new venue, which will allow us to accommodate more people in our services, let us keep in mind our vision: “To build a healthy, mission minded, self supporting church, that is open to everyone, but has a special calling to reach the migrant communities in the northern suburbs who are of Reformed  background. “

Next Sunday we commence a new series of sermons in the book of Acts. Acts is in many ways a book on missions. While Acts is largely descriptive, telling us what the early church did, and how they did things, we can learn much from it to help us in our mission task. It is my prayer that this series of sermons will help to motivate and equip us in our calling to make Christ known.

Pastor Peter