Church

Our morning venture out was curtailed by my sudden onslaught of nausea. We would have had to walk, and I was breaking out in cold sweat, shaking, and feeling like puking. This passed after about an hour and then I was totally fine - very WEIRD!!!! Anyway, after lunch we went out to King’s Wood, a nearby nature reserve. I stopped in the reserve with the kids to eat our snacks while Bill went up the road to see if the church was where we thought it was on the map. When we met back up, he was on the phone with the pastor, who decided he was going to come pick us up for their evening service.

At the evening service, Pastor Pavitt gave a message from Acts - nine basics that Peter taught. It was as if he were giving a statement of faith in that message. The entire time, I couldn’t help but feel that the Lord had led us pretty much right to that place. This church uses and defends the KJV, and he preached out very strongly against things going on in English churches - like TULIP (Calvinism), other religions, etc. I can’t believe we have found a place like this on our first try. He said that Pastor Tooley of Kettering Baptist is another church of like faith. This is the church we had researched on the web that we knew was of like faith. Not only that, but Tooley comes over to Lifegate’s Wed night service to be an encouragement, and those who can from Lifegate go over to Tooley’s service in Kettering on Thursday nights. Both of these churches are very small struggling works (we were half the congregation). Our visiting was a tremendous encouragement to this pastor, as he repeatedly mentioned.

The pastor mentioned a few statistics in his message - there are only 5 English national pastors of like faith in all of England, and additionally there are about 40 missionary pastors, mostly Americans. England, which used to be a center of world missions, is now in need of missionaries itself. 58,000,000 people and so few gospel-preaching churches! These facts confirmed what we had found on the web. It seemed to us that most of the good churches in England were actually run by American church planters, and this is indeed the case.

Another interesting thing that occurred: Bill asked the pastor where he had received training, and during that conversation, the pastor mentioned that recently he had been studying at a seminary in Ireland. Bill immediately said “Emmanuel?” The Pastor said “Yes!” and said he knew Dr. Strauss, and so they chatted about that mutual acquaintance for a while.

Although I think we will at least visit over at Kettering Baptist, this church could well be the church we settle at. Before coming here during those couple months, I just always had a feeling about church over here - that we would somehow be helping out a small, struggling church. I’ve had a very particular burden and the events of these past months and days just seem to be intensifying how I think the Lord is leading us. We will see......