Yesterday afternoon I had the very great privilege of participating in the service to charter a New Church Development congregation.
Translated from the PresbySpeak, this means that this congregation has met a number of standards (including financial stability and viability) and is now an official congregation of the PC(USA) in good standing.
This congregation, the Biyaya Community Church, has been forming since 1999 and began with a Filipino pastor who started an outreach to the Filipino community in the Sugar Land-Missouri City-Stafford suburban area southwest of Houston. The congregation has been "nested" in an established Presbyterian church in the area and meets in that facility on Sunday afternoons.
Today when we celebrated the chartering there were slightly over 100 people attending the service, which included the official installation of the pastor and the ordination and installation of the first session. The congregation is still primarily Filipino-American, but also has attracted Africans and African-Americans.
I was particularly impressed with their praise band--a group of talented young people who could really rock that contemporary worship music. And I do mean ROCK! I'm not a fan of praise music, as my gentle readers know, but I give a big tip of the QG hat to this all volunteer group which displayed both good musical skills and sincere and inspiring delivery of the songs. If we had a presbytery Battle of the Praise Bands, they would be hard to beat!
Of course no service like this can conclude without a big reception, and this was no different. The members of the congregation outdid themselves with a big spread of traditional Filipino goodies, which I couldn't identify if my life depended on it but were all delicious.
And amazingly enough, I get to do this again next Sunday when the chartering service for the Vietnamese NCD congregation is scheduled. The pastor of that congregation told me today to plan for the service to last from 10 to 12:30 because there would be 12 adult baptisms of folks converting from Buddhism to Christianity as part of this service. Stay tuned for that report!
Thanks be to God.
1 comment:
It is an exciting experience, isn't it. I recently had the privilege of taking part in commissioning an EPC new church development at Lighthouse Presbyterian Church in Paola, Kansas. When I asked the "new members" to rise, there wqere 314 of them. It knocked my socks off. God is good!
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