Monday, September 10, 2018

Forty-Five Years and Counting


To the GCF Family:

Sunday, September 16, 2018 marks the 45th anniversary of the formation of the new church body which would eventually become Grace Christian Fellowship, a member congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America.  Some of you have been involved since the beginning.  Most of you have joined the church family in the years since.

The vision driving the founding of this church was a desire to remain true to the orthodox teachings of the Christian faith in the face of theological liberalism infiltrating the mainline Presbyterian Church.  Today, the inroads of compromise and lack of theological integrity continue to plague organized Christianity across our land.  Pressures from secular society are taking a toll on numerous denominations.  Rather than standing for biblical orthodoxy, many choose the path of capitulation and compromise, leading to churches that gradually are losing their Christian distinctives.

Semper Reformanda, Reformed and always reforming, has been the battle cry of churches in the heritage of the Protestant Reformation.  This phrase doesn’t mean that we are always to be adapting to the latest trends and demands of secular society.  Rather, the focus of these two Latin words is that churches must be continually striving to re-orient our beliefs to the absolute authority of Scripture.  

The human tendency is to compromise.  The burden of such Reformed churches is that our beliefs and practices must continually be brought back into line with the Word of God.  And that is our goal at Grace Christian Fellowship.  Our loyalty is not ultimately to the traditions of the past but to the abiding relevance of God’s eternal truth in the Bible.

As we look to the future, let us pray and work and serve together so that in the years to come we will remain true to our founding vision.  There is much work to be done to honor the name of Jesus Christ and to address the evident needs of the tri-state area in which we live.  Thousands of people in our neighborhoods lack a fundamental understanding of the gospel of salvation by grace alone, through Christ alone.  Let us pray for increased zeal that we may more effectively be “blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom [we] shine as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15).

God has gifted each of you to contribute to the ministry of this congregation.  Let us encourage each other as we serve the Lord together.  May God’s hand of blessing rest upon our labors so that much fruit is produced for His glory.