From the April-July 2009 Issue
Tenth anniversary of the opening of the church building
Jose and Virtudes Moreno
La ManchaThe 29th November 1998 was a milestone for the Evangelical Church in Alcázar de San Juan. On that day we had the official opening of our new church building, located in one of the main and busiest avenues of the city. Therefore it was right to remember such an event ten years afterwards! This is not to say that we have not remembered it before in other anniversaries, but we thought it was good to use this round number to reflect again on the Lord’s goodness to us in granting us such a plot of land and such a fine building.
So, on the last weekend of last November we had a number of special meetings to mark this anniversary. Not only did we have special meetings, we also produced three new evangelistic leaflets specially geared for our own situation here. In addition we produced a DVD in which we went over the history of our church, not just from 1998 but from the times from which we have records of Alcázar and its surrounding villages having been evangelized. Finally, we also launched our web page — www.iglesiadealcazar.es. This is at present in the process of being built, but so far it presents the Gospel to those who may contact us through the web.
Twofold purpose
As you can well imagine, all these special meetings and the materials presented for the occasion had two sorts of people in mind. First of all, the believers themselves. The Bible clearly teaches us that we are not to forget the Lord’s past mercies, lest we, as God’s own people, become ungrateful or complacent. The building was for us a great token of the Lord’s abounding love for his church in this part of the world. It has provided us with a very comfortable place to worship the Lord in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). The building can comfortably seat 80 people in the main meeting hall, although we can go as far as 120. It has also two extra rooms for other activities, mainly used for the children’s work. It has been a place where we have met with the Lord and where we have grown spiritually through the teaching of his Word.
However, all these special meetings and the materials prepared for the occasion also had another purpose. It was a good opportunity to invite friends from outside the church to consider again the message of the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. This purpose served well as, quite apart from other friends, we had a number of new people coming along for the first time. They all took away our new leaflets and some of them even the DVD. Indeed, the building itself has also been a public witness for the church for all these ten years, in that many have come to us as a result of seeing it. Indeed for someone a process that happily ended in his conversion, began with his pondering the verse that is written on one of our notices at our front gate. But this occurrence was an exception!
The greatest encouragement of all is that throughout these past ten years the Lord has been pleased to meet with unbelievers as they listened to His Word being preached. Our happiest memories have to do with such occasions. That is why we are eager for unbelievers to attend our services regularly and not just for the anniversary. Sadly, we have to confess at the same time that our place has not generally become ‘A soul trap’ as they used to call George Whitefield’s Tabernacle in Moorfields in London.
What of the future?
For us the anniversary is also an indication that, in the same way as the Lord has been with us all these past years, he will continue to uphold us in the future as we walk in his paths. Our church building, our ‘stone of help’, our Ebenezer – ‘Thus far has the Lord helped us’ (1 Samuel 7:12) – is an encouragement to persevere in the Lord’s ways. He has been good to us through all these years, he will surely be merciful and gracious in the future as we honour him in our midst.
At the same time, the anniversary has filled us with expectations. If he has been so good to us in Christ, in spite of our many failures and sins, will he not grant us even more good things from his hands in the future? We are sure he will. We long for the Lord’s people here to keep on growing spiritually. We pray that the Lord may grant them graces and gifts to enable them to serve one another more. But we also long for new conversions. We are already encouraged with the growing congregations that we are having on a regular basis on the Lord’s Day. We always have unbelievers present at our different gatherings. We would like to see more coming but, above all, that the Lord may be pleased to save them.
A good problem that we are beginning to have is really an encouragement. This is the fact that the rooms for the children are sometimes crowded to overflowing. We welcome such difficulties! Therefore we hope and pray that this growth will be sustained in the coming days. This would be our request to you to join with us in praying. May the Lord answer our prayers, so much so that we will need to have another reopening, at least for bigger rooms for the children!