Sunday 21 December 2008

Preparation for next post

I am writing a little bit about me to set the scene for a post that I am writing currently in relation to something Dave Warnock (42) posted on his blog the other day. I did post a response there to most of his points but there was one I did not.
My walk with God began at the age of four when I was sent to the Sunday school at the local Brethren Chapel where I attended regularly until I was 14. During this time I learnt much of the Bible and I was taught by some very godly men but I don’t believe I ever heard the gospel, or if I did I did not recognise it or respond to it.
I then spent Around 10 years away from church and was brought back initially by a persistent young man inviting me to go and hear a gospel rock band. I went to hear them and this led to the same young man inviting me to go to the youth group at the Methodist Church. I went along and began to attend services and then joined the church becoming road manager to the band and assistant youth leader. I very quickly seemed to get a number of roles including ,door steward, church steward, family committee secretary and representative to synod. In my first attendance at Synod I was elected as a representative to the conference in Plymouth in 1982.
Not long after marrying Shirley I moved to the Elim church in West Bromwich because I felt that was where God was calling me and had a great deal of peace about this move. We stayed here for around seven years and then felt that God was calling us to another Pentecostal Church in Darlaston and again we stayed there for seven years. At both these churches we were involved in a number of activities.
I had been a visiting preacher on the Walsall plan for some time and we both felt we had reached a point in our lives where we were not at peace and started to look for a new place of worship and tried one or two for a number of weeks until we arrived at Pleck one night at 6-20p.m. for a service we thought started at 6-30p.m. (that’s what the plan said) but it had been going for 20 minutes. The service stopped while we were welcomed and extra chairs added to the circle for us to sit on. We felt a real peace about being in this church and ten years later that is where we still are and we believe that we are in the place that God wants us to be.
You will see from this that I have been involved in five different churches during my lifetime and much of what I will be writing in my next post will be based on my observations of these various churches and wider things such as circuit meetings and synods.

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