Grace Baptist Mission is perhaps unique in being very much a church based missionary society. Part of the way this plays out is that once a year they have a day of meetings, usually in London. I always enjoy the meetings if I can get to them. That's where I was last Saturday. Sorry not to have reported sooner.
It was good to be there in the very convenient and adequate Friends Meeting House near Euston Station. The pastor was there and Ellen and it was nice to see many old friends, including some former members.
The first part of the day is taken up with a business meeting where all churches involved are able to send delegates (I was there to represent Childs Hill). Our chair is now Tom Forryan, formerly pastor at Hitchin. This year's meeting was a little more protracted than usual as the committee wanted to make two changes. One was a change to the doctrinal basis. They wanted to make clearer where we stand on gender issues. This was flagged up some time ago and was accepted by the churches. More difficult was a change to the constitution aimed at streamlining things. Not everyone was entirely happy with this but the change was passed by majority vote.
The rest of the day was taken up with meetings at which the various missionaries spoke, closing with a plenary worship meeting at which the preacher was Jason Murfitt, currently working on the island of Madeira. We took the opportunity after the delegates meeting to go and hear Reuben Saywell. As he warned me, it was more or less what he had had to say in Childs Hill but it was good to hear it again and to see one or more new slides and to hear questions asked. Nice to see Cathy and their latest child too. The family have now returned to The Philippines and we pray that the encouraging work will continue to go forward.
We then went to hear Andrzej Kempczynski from Legionowo near Warsaw in Poland. His wife Monika was also around. Again it was encouraging. They have a lovely new meeting place (the local library) and have joined the Baptist denomination, which brings some advantages.
After this there was a plenary session with Nathan and Urpha Javed. Nathan pastors an Urdu/Hindi speaking congregation in Bradford and most of them were there to sing to us in the style they use there. There were also testimonies from Nathan, Urpha and others and lots of slides on the screen.
After all this I was rather overloaded and as we had family visiting back at home I skipped the final session. Among those I did not hear - James Hammond (Bordeaux), Adrian & Abigail Yeboah (Amsterdam) Phil & Carolyn |Reid (West Africa).
Perhaps you will want to come next year and see what God is doing in different places.
