A Journey of faith- Part 1

 A journey of Faith -  Time Line ( Part 1)

 A Journey of Faith

:A Brief History of Word of Grace Church 

This June we celebrated 10 years of God's faithfulness to us at Word of Grace. We are in awe at what the Lord has done and how HE has sustained us thus far. 

Here is the first part of the script of what was shared at our celebratory evening. ( I have added a little more detail here to make it more understandable). As you read it, my prayer is that you will have faith for your situation, to know that in this journey of faith, you NEVER walk alone. 

Time Line

 Hello everyone. We have more than 10,000 reasons to be thankful. During this evening I would like to walk you through a brief history of Word of Grace – a journey of the past 10 years. We want to Remember God’s faithfulness through the Past decade. We want to rejoice in all the exciting things God is doing in the Present and we want to Rededicate ourselves to become committed followers of Jesus for the future.

 We’ll do that with Video clips, photos, sound bytes, personal stories,  prayer and the Word of God.  I hope you will be able to catch a flavor of the past and the present.

Pre-History

Just married Dec1991

 Location,Careers, Church...

(Once upon a time …Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait) In 1990 I had just returned from Kuwait after Saddam Hussein’s invasion. I worked as a software engineer – travelling the world training people. Navaz was a lecturer in college in Mumbai. When I came back to India, I joined Living Word Church where one of my sisters used to worship. It was here that after so many years of being a christian , I was challenged about water baptism. I got baptized that year. During this time I also met Navaz who was a part of Living Word.  We got married in 1991. We were happy with our jobs and our church and life was good.

Year of Training – Goa

1993 Batch at the Year of Training with Mike Springer and team.

In 1993 our leaders  (Duncan & Arun) invited us to enroll in a  full time discipleship cum theological training with New Frontiers India. It meant leaving our jobs and moving to Goa for 9 months.  We felt God leading us to  do this training and God gave us the grace to do it.These 9 months of training were truly life transforming but that would be a story in itself!

At the end of the training God

Our first born Andrew John - Christmas 1995

In 1994, we were invited by David Fernandes who pastors Living Word church to come full time on the pastoral staff. God had been preparing our hearts for this through various prophetic words  during our training. So,1994 we resigned our jobs and came full time at Living Word Church, Bandra in Mumbai where we served for 8 years. We got involved in everything to do with church life - be it the serving teams, worship, administration, hospitality, hospitality toward outstation guests,  helping in organizing bigger events, discipleship of people, leading house groups, preaching, teaching etc etc. In 1995 our first child , Andrew, was born.

New Frontiers,  the family of churches we are a part of is a church planting movement, therefore church planting was always high on the agenda and often spoken about. It was a part of our DNA - one of our core values.However these values  were not meant to be inked on paper alone but on etched on our hearts as well. It affected and challenged our hearts, our lifestyle, our destiny.

The Challenge, the call ( to be continued)

Colin.

For  PART 2 , click here. and PART 3 and for PART 4 click here