Happy Birthday Protea Valley Church!

Today, eleven years ago 17 people met in an old farm house a few hundred meters from our new building. An old honky-tonk piano led us in worship, the gospel of Jesus was preached and a church was born. Eleven years later some 400 adults and over 150 children call Protea Valley home and for that we're grateful to Jesus for His work in the valley.

Our prayer is that we'd always remain committed to Jesus as our Lord and Saviour and that we'd always be growing the church and extending His kingdom.

Thank you Lord for your sustaining power over these years,

may you sustain us for many more for your names sake.

May your name be exalted, your gospel preached and your 

kingdom extended here through us and in us.

May your grace be our joy, the Bible our story, 

the Spirit our power and the resurrection our hope

Both now and forever more,

Amen

Malawi 2014

It's been some time since I have blogged. This has mostly been because I have needed to sort some priorities out in terms of my leadership of the church, and so for these last while the blog has taken a back seat.

I leave on Friday for Malawi and I thought it would be good to write a bit about our plans for this trip. For some years Gibson Banda from Malawi worshipped with us and as I got to know him I discerned a deep love for Jesus and a desire to serve him. Gibson returned to Malawi and as we have continued to keep contact God has been pushing an idea into my mind about planting a church through Gibson.

On Friday I head up to Malawi to go and spend time with Gibson as well as hooking up with a number of other missionaries in the area to see what God may be doing with us in Malawi.There is always a call on the local church to take the gospel to the nations as we're reminded by Jesus in Acts:

'But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth'

So we're heading to the ends of the earth and we're trusting that Jesus is going to open some doors in this time and I'd ask for your prayers for safe travels and that the Holy Spirit would reveal to us what God's heart is for this. I am convinced that God puts people on our path for a reason and so we're simply following  what God puts before us in the hope that the church would grow and that God's kingdom would be extended.