Found a church!!!!

We are sooo happy today :-) We found a new place to call our church home! We visited Newsong Fellowship Church and felt so welcomed and so comfortable with their teaching and worship. It is a place where we felt quickly loved and yet you can also tell that the church emphasizes challenging discipleship and spiritual growth. The leadership does not desire to have the pews filled with a bunch of onlookers or consumers but rather with maturing, God-loving disciples- and with those who do not yet believe in Christ as their Savior but would be drawn to place their faith in Him by hearing the good news from the Word.

We were quickly greeted by a number of people and even invited to a small group already this week! It meets on Thursdays, so we won't be able to go this week. That showed me that the congregation sees it as their responsibility to welcome people into the body of Christ just as much as the leadership.

We also really liked the building. It is a smaller sanctuary, seating at most 300 people in each service (I think) and it has a wood paneled ceiling that meets in a V. It also has stained glass windows. Then you look down and you see carpeted risers and microphones and a piano/guitar/bass, etc setup for worship and teaching. The seats you sit in are the cushioned chairs lined in rows (so not official pews.) Just thought I'd give you a glimpse of what it was like in there.

I can tell that I really resonate with a church when I tear up at some point in the service. It tells me that the Lord is working on my heart and that the message is relevant and truth filled. Today's worship was focused on the joy of Heaven and the fact that there will be no more tears, pain, or death there. If that's not something to tear up in joy about, I don't know what is! They asked us to reflect as we worshiped on the name of God that is "Jehovah Shammah", meaning "The Lord is there." It comes from the end of the book of Ezekiel. The Israelites had been in exile and Ezekiel encourages them that "The Lord is there." - Where? In the promised land that had been set before them and promised to them. He had gone before them and was already making preparations for them to walk into the promised land. What a great word for me today!! The Lord, in His faithfulness, had guided us to this church through the things we saw and liked on their webpage, and He has evidently been active (and exalted) in Lancaster before we arrived. At least that's what I was reflecting on about Jehovah Shammah. And Heaven...oh how I will never get tired of envisioning that glorious day when Jesus comes for His people who had longed for His appearing!

Join us in thanking God for leading us so quickly to a new church home. We miss Grace Bible Church tremendously (the friends, the teaching, the worship, the Truth proclaimed there), but we see now that the Lord is not just exalted there-- He is here, too! AND they have a guest speaker next Sunday coming to talk about Israel and things currently happening in the Middle East. I have a passion for these things, so I am ecstatic that we will get to hear what this journalist and Christian speaker has to say. There is even a question and answer session that night, so I'll be spending some time this week coming up with things I'd like to ask an expert. What great timing! :-)

Here is the church's website if you want to check it out: www.newsongfellowship.net