Shoutlouder

big Sundays at Hope City continued

// August 18th, 2008 // Sunday

It was another great Sunday in Leeds this week with more new faces and a great atmosphere of faith and expectation as we move into an exciting season within the church. There’s growth and increase taking place, lives being changed and of course in a couple of months we’ll be moving into our new building. Here’s some highlights from day:

• Congratulations to Josh and Beth who are now expecting their 1st child
• Awesome to have Joyce & Henri join us who have been our missionaries in Gabon for a couple of years and now spending time in Leeds ahead of the birth of their 2nd child and for Henri to do some studies.
• Our worship team have been doing so well over the Summer as it’s effectively a bit of a skeleton crew with people away. Yet the power and presence of God in worship has never been more evident! Keep it up guys!
• Great to see loads of new people joining us and enjoying themselves. A big hi to the new Taiwanise couple George and Joan (I know – I thought it really funny that they had such English names until they told me their Taiwanise name and I was so glad they had English versions…). Hope you enjoy yourselves whilst here for the next year!
• Dale preached a great message on how to do the journey between weakness and strength in God using the story of Gideon in Judges 6 as his text. The key thought for me was that in every breakthrough and moment of transition you need to have an ENCOUNTER with God – it takes REVELATION not will power to move you forward on this journey. Watch out for the podcast to listen to it in full!
• 1 person made a decision to be a Christ-follower which is the most amazing part of the day. We had a really long season in the first half of this year when we saw no-one making decisions on Sundays. But for the last few weeks we seen people EVERY Sunday which is a real breakthrough!
• Summer Picnic – it was our annual trip to Roundhay Park for the bif family picnic. It almost looked like we might be rained off, but the sun came out and we had a great time. Everyone was really social and sat around in the park for nearly 4 hours chatting, eating, playing footie and then we also kicked off the 1st ever Big Family Walk round the lake which is a good way of dealing with all the junk food you just ate!

Such a great day! Can’t wait for next week!