Tomorrow is the last day Sunday of the Living Room Church Plant. My friend Gerard has been faithful and a great servant to keep it going, yet the Living Room’s journey will finish tomorrow as you get together for the last time. The Living Room will always be part of our lives, we met so many wonderful people and made so many good friends. 

I want to thank you all of you who came and support it the Living Room over the years. 

There are so many lessons that I learnt and I am still learning during my time serving the people for almost 7 years in North Belfast. The task of planting a church is huge, and the way we did it was even harder. We began meeting in the Living Room of the manse, then we moved to the local primary school, and to the local community centre. Finally, we moved to the Hopelink Centre, which was by far the best location we ever had.

Here are three lessons out of many that the Living Room taught me:

1. Depend on the Holy Spirit. If it wasn’t for the Living Room I would have not experienced the power, presence of the Person of the Holy Spirit. He became so real to me and became my best friend. He took away my fear of men and the expectation of being successful and replace it with being faithful. Church planting is by Faith in the Holy Spirit, not in my best ministry training and planning. He uses that as He wishes.
2. Church Planting is a team effort, sadly in many ways, this was not our experience and therefore it became a lonely place. I had to build a team around me and they were mostly not church people, which was refreshing and challenging. Teamwork is important.
3. People are precious, we valued relationship over religion and over traditions. People were free and we did not try to make them religious. You don’t have to have the gift of prophecy to see what is wrong with people, but you need to use it in order to find in them their true identity, their value and their worth.

There were many other things but now I want to thank you for shaping the lives of those whom we were able to touch.

So this is my prayer for all of you, you who came and were with us from the beginning and for you who will come tomorrow and support Gerard, thank you for persevering.

So many stories still to share!

“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:14–19 NIV11-GKE)