God Central Church - Update 9th September

We are incredibly grateful to God as our first Sunday went well and it was great to worship Jesus in the centre of our town with both friends and new faces alike. It was also fabulous to be able to involve the children in the service and for them to have their own room.

This week we’ve been advertising in the local paper and our prayer is that God joins many more people to us for His glory.
We have specific needs both in terms of children’s workers and parts of our worship team which we’re trusting Him for as we seek to build a significant church here in Harlow, Essex.

Please do keep praying for wisdom and protection for us all as we are at both an exciting but also vulnerable stage in our adventure at present.

Thanks for reading and hope you have a good weekend
Keep smiling
Ben, Clare and everyone at Newfrontiers God Central Church – Harlow
www.Godcentralchurch.org

Newfrontiers God Central Church - Harlow. Update 1st April

Update 1St April

Firstly this isn’t an April fools message so please read on as we’d like to keep you informed of what’s been happening in the Life of God Central Church and would really value your prayers.

The last couple of weeks have been fairly tough as we seem to have encountered lots of illness within the church and a few people have also had tough personnel circumstances to cope with.

We’d really appreciate your prayers in light of this for healing and the power of God to breakthrough several circumstances.

We’d also appreciate prayer for staying on course on the mission we’re on of glorifying Jesus in Harlow and building big people for him. We’re very much in a transition at present looking towards weekly gatherings from Easter onwards building towards weekly Sundays before too much longer.
That means finding a new rhythm of doing things and we want this to be God’s rhythm for us not one we make up!

In particular we feel God has been speaking to us about 3 M’s to aide us on our mission.
Men & families
Musicians
Mature Christians
If you could join us in praying for these we’d be very grateful.

Thanks as always for reading and please see our website www.Godcentralchurch.org for more information including details of our Easter Celebration which will include the dedication of Truth & Amelia!

Keep smiling
Ben, Clare, Amelia and everyone @ God Central Church

Update 1st October 2010

Greetings from a wet Harlow!
Thanks for your continued support. The past couple of weeks have been both hectic and significant for us as a group.

Both of our ‘Life Groups’ have been going well and it’s great to see people stepping up and helping us move the church forward. We’ve also had some new people along again which is really exciting as it’s great to see God building His church.

Another answer to prayer is that we’ve also found a venue for our ‘Us Together’’ meetings so with effect from the 7th October we’ll be meeting every other week at the ‘Harlow Study Centre’ where the folks have been extremely accommodating and generous towards us. If you or anyone you know is around in Harlow and wants to pop in please drop us an e-mail from the ‘contact’ part of our website, www.harlowchurchplant.org, and we’ll send directions etc.

Focus for prayer at this time would be an increase of God’s presence amongst us as well as His favour in gathering more people.

In addition if you live in or around Harlow can we ask you to ‘save the date’ for the evening of the 14th November and we’ll give you more details in due course.

Thanks for taking time to read this
Keep smiling
Ben & Clare

Hope when life hurts - follow up

For those of you in Hrlow Group you'll know during our crazy summer we've spent the last two weeks listening to Louie Giglio talk from John 16 about how to cope when life hurts.

Yesterday whilst reading several Blogs I read PJ's Blog and was interested and inspired that he also quotes John 16. Please see a copy from his blog below which i'd recommend reading

When it comes to dark days, it is vital to put on the Kevlar before the first shot is fired…

All this I have told you so that you will not go astray…I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world (The first and final verses of John 16)

Therefore, put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist… (Eph 6:13-14)

After 25 years of giving regular sermons and Bible studies, I have a huge folder on my laptop containing 50 sub-folders of different themes, containing every presentation that I have ever done. One of these sub-folders is simply entitled, “Tough Times”, and before my diagnosis with cancer it contained 40 messages or articles on this theme by me. And, because I have preached some of them in different contexts, we can safely say that I have averaged preaching on the theme of suffering twice a year for 25 years.

I am so glad that God graciously allowed me to get anchored in truth before the storm, rather than having to flounder around for anchors after it hit. Although initially shocked, I was not for a moment surprised (1 Pet 4:12) that a storm had hit because Jesus promised us that we would have trouble in this world (Jn 16:33), and I have been able to stand firm in certain knowledge of what the bible teaches about dark times.

D.A. Carson writes:

One of the major causes of devastating grief and confusion among Christians is that our expectations are false. We do not give the subject of evil and suffering the thought it deserves until we ourselves are confronted with tragedy. If by that point our beliefs - not well thought out but deeply ingrained - are largely out of step with God, then the pain from the personal tragedy may be multiplied many times over as we begin to question the very foundations of our faith. (DA Carson; How Long, O Lord?)

How Long Oh Lord

The foundation of our faith is the integrity of God. Interestingly, when suffering hits biblical characters, they often seem more concerned about the integrity of God than the issue itself. For example, Martha’s first words to Jesus after the death of Lazarus were “Where were you…?” (Jn 11:21) not “I thought everyone was supposed to get healed!”. When caught in a storm on the lake, the disciples woke Jesus and instead of crying “Save us!” they asked “don’t you care if we drown?” (Mk 4:38).

“Where were you, God? Don’t you care?” These are cries of anguish from those surprised by storms, who are yet to develop their own trust of the character of God in seasons of suffering. Without a clear theology of storms, you may find yourself subjected to a double burden – the burden that makes you suffer, as well as the burden of disillusionment with the integrity of God. A double load like that can be brutal.

I want to recommend to you the benefits of putting on your Kevlar body armour before the bullets start to fly, and I hope my blogs in the coming weeks will help you to do just that…

Update July 16th

Thanks for taking time to read this and your continued support.

No baby news to convey yet but lots of other good news this week. Last Sunday we greatly enjoyed being part of the Church in Harlow at the town park where we got to meet with old friends, make new friends and above all see Jesus worshipped in our town.

Since then we’ve been able to follow up enquiries to the website and had the pleasure of meeting new people both from Harlow and also Tibet who it has been great to share time, friendship and life with.

Thank you therefore for your prayers as God has definitely answered them by bringing us into contact with several new people, we’d ask you to continue to pray that this continues to happen and we’re able to gather more people over the next few days and weeks.

We’d also ask you to pray for wisdom for us as we face a few decisions in the next few weeks about how we go forward looking at the next chapter in the life of Harlow Church Plant.

One resource we’d like to recommend to you that was shared by Lex in a Seminar at Brighton is the website www.fixed-point.org
If you’ve not come across it before can we encourage you to have a look and maybe set aside some time to watch some of the debates including the well known ‘God Delusion’ and it’s both great and reassuring to see how these set of arguments are dismissed and the Gospel Message emerges.

Lastly for those of you in the Midlands please take a look at the Facebook group for ‘Real Life Church’ which is another Newfrontiers church plant starting in North Birmingham this summer. Hopefully this link might work! http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/findreallife?ref=ts

Have a good week and we’ll keep you informed when baby arrives

Ben & Clare

Update 10th July

Many of you will know that Clare & I have just returned from the Newfrontiers Leaders Conference in Brighton where we had a great time meeting friends, getting lots of advice and really encountering God.

In Harlow we’ve had a lack of new people for a couple of weeks although we have had some e-mail enquiries to return home to. Please pray that these go well and we’re able to meet and build with key people in the town.
Please also pray that people moving into the town find us via our various forms of advertising and that God would bless us and allow us to regain growth momentum.

We’re looking forward to Sunday afternoon when lots of the churches in Harlow who are part of ‘heart for Harlow’ have gained use of the town bandstand and are putting on a Praise in the Park which we’ll be going to. This should be a great time as God is honoured and His people come together. If your local and free between 2 and 5.30pm please pop along.

Thanks for your continued support as we seek to build a fresh expression of Christianity in our town

Keep smiling
Ben & Clare

Harlow Group Thursday Night Commentary

Hi everyone my name is James and I’m part of the church plant here in Harlow.

Every Friday I’m going to be giving you a brief overview of what happened at Harlow Group the evening before so if your new and thinking of coming along you know what to expect and if your part of the group and miss an evening you won’t be in the dark.

Last night we had a great turnout with 13 people present, it started off in the normal fashion of yummy food made by myself, Ben and Clare which went down well with a side of catching up and laughter, we also had some great news one couple had some amazing news regarding a potentially troubled pregnancy which is no longer troubled and I now have a job so praise God and thank you for all your prayers.

During worship God spoke through me and Ben to the group which was both challenging and uplifting so THANK YOU GOD.

This week Lee brought some very impressive and factual teaching about the Wesley’s and the early Methodist movement after which we broke into groups and reflected and prayed.

By the grace of God the group is getting stronger and more people coming and showing interest.

We value the prayer support of all of you and pray that God will bless you abundantly!
In the words of Ben… God bless and keep smiling!

Facebook Update 15

Another week has flown past and been a really amazing one for us as a group as we’ve seen some massive answers to prayer. We’ve seen God provide a job for one person and a simply amazing healing for another. God is good.

Please be encouraged by this and know that you, and all the other people around the globe supporting us, contributed to these amazing events.

If you haven’t been to our website, www.harlowchurchplant.org, recently then have a look as we’ve altered some of the pages. In addition James from our group is now posting a weekly summary of our Thursday Harlow Group meetings so if you want to know what we really get up to why not have a read on the BLOG section.

Could we kindly ask you to continue praying for good health and employment for us as a group as although we’ve seen breakthrough there are still many more issues affecting different people in the group which remain.

Also please pray for more contact from people who are either new to Harlow, not connected to an existing church here or simply exploring the Christian faith, as it’s been great to continually have new people coming along the last few week and long may in continue.

In particular please pray that we can connect with men in Harlow as we are acutely aware that we are getting a gender bias in the group and also for people with key gifting who can really join the front lines within our ranks for the sole purpose of advancing Jesus’ kingdom in our town.

Ben is speaking at Open Door Church in Dunmow on Sunday so please pray that he’d be able to serve them well and we’d see Jesus’ kingdom extended all across Essex and beyond.

Have a good week and we’ll be in touch soon

Ben & Clare

Harlow Group Update 9th April 2010

We hope you had a great Easter. We spent time reflecting on one of the phrases common in the early church ‘Christ has died, Christ has Risen, Christ will come again!’

Since our last update we’ve been busy continuing with publicity and God has been good to us and brought us into contact with more new people one of whom has joined our group! It may not sound like much to you, but it feels like revival for us and we’re so grateful to God as it’s all His doing. We have a great God who answers prayers – our faith has risen and we ask for more contact with more people who can join with us on our adventure of making Jesus better known in Harlow.

Within our group we are still having battles for employment and health so would appreciate your partnering with us in prayer on those issues as well as connecting with new key people who can join our Harlow Church Plant.

We are hoping to do a brief summary of our group Thursday meetings on the BLOG section of our website (www.harlowchurchplant.org) so if you do know of people in and around Harlow please mention that to them so they can get a fuller flavour of what’s happening and hopefully pop along.

Ben is speaking at Kings Community Church over in Braintree on Sunday so we’d appreciate prayers for that so that Jesus is honoured, lives altered and His kingdom extended. We’re also looking forward to being amongst friends and catching up on goings on in the past months.

Thanks you so much for taking time to read this and for continuing to remember us in prayer – you are all superstars and we thank God for you (even if we don’t know you personally!)

Have a great week and lets hope the spring sunshine continues

Keep smiling

Ben & Clare

Weekly Update on Harlow Church Plant 19th March

Hello and another week has passed and we hope it has been a good one for you all. We’ve had a good week too as we seek to see a significant church established in Harlow as plans have been coming together for this Sunday’s Regional Celebration and we also had Colin & Eunice Potter join us last night to share their wisdom, thoughts and strategies with us from the two extremely successful church plants they have done in Plumstead and Enfield.

We are very grateful as Colin & Eunice shared many things which have provoked me and other members of the group and I’m sure will be fruitful in giving us direction in the next phase or our journey. Speaking of which next Thursday will be the first of 4 Harlow Group sessions looking at what we want to value. We are expecting The Holy Spirit to be with us and for some great revelation – see the website ‘News’ section for more details.

We’d really appreciate your prayers for the 3 minute slot we have at Sundays Regional celebration as although not long we have lots to communicate and help to request, as getting people to log onto our website thus making it better rated by the search engines such as Google is one of our current aims – with that in mind could you maybe go there after reading the remainder of this update? www.harlowchurchplant.org

Otherwise we’d appreciate prayers for health of key members of our group and also employment as we are still struggling on that front.

Also for new people to join the plant, we sense that we are ready for some new warriors to join us, people who are prepared to join us in our Churchillian blood, sweat, toil and tears battle and so are seeking God with expectation to have more of Harlow’s mighty men & women added to us.

Have a great week and we’ll be back next week with an update from the regional celebration plus an overview of how our first evening of putting in the foundations has gone.

Keep smiling
Ben & Clare
p.s. now don’t forget to go to www.harlowchurchplant.org

Weekly Update 12th March

Once again good afternoon on a Friday and we hope you have a good weekend planned. Thank you one and all for your continued support it is very much valued!

This week has seen our website, www.harlowchurchplant.org, go fully live on the various search engines and we have already had one family in Harlow contact us via it which is really exciting! We are praying that this is just the start of things to come!

We have also taken delivery today of our first set of postcard flyers and I even had time to drop a few off whilst up the town centre earlier between coffee appointments. Your continued prayers for fruit from our publicity would be excellent at the moment as we are seeking to meet fresh people in our town, Harlow.

Last night we met as a group and it was nice to have 2 new faces with us whom we hope were blessed and will consider joining us on our mission to make Jesus better known in Harlow. We looked at what God has called us to be and were really challenged by the following passage from Isaiah 61

'The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour'

We believe that this is what God has called us to be and also discussed the reality that this isn’t going to be an easy achievement and is one we are going to have to make sacrifices for and persevere in the fight to see come to be. We really do feel God’s favour with us at the moment and yet are still in the midst of several individual battles so your continued prayers for protection and employment are vital to the life of our church plant.

Lastly your prayers for us as we prepare to share very briefly about Harlow at next Sunday’s regional celebration would be welcome.
Thanks for reading and please do keep passing our web address to anyone you know in Harlow as people can make contact by filling in the form on it.

Have a great week and we’ll give you another update next week
Keep smiling
Ben & Clare

Update week ending 26th February

Afternoon at the end of a wet week here in Essex. We hope you are all well and thanks for your continued support in our church planting adventure!

This week has seen some of the Harlow Group men enjoy a men’s day entitled ‘Men of Stortford’ at Community Church where we are based which was a great day. In addition Adrian Holloway (from ChristChurch London ) came to speak at Community Church last Sunday and inspired us in the area of making Jesus known which was very timely for us as Harlow Group, as we’ve felt God nudging and reminding us that Harlow is a town consisting of 90,000 people the majority of whom need to know that there is a God who loves them, died for their sin and who wants a personal relationship with them.

In response we’re considering how to get to know more people around our town and will keep you posted once things materialise more but we’d appreciate your prayers for us as we seek to go purposefully into Harlow to grow our group.
In addition if you could continue to pray for God’s protection over us particularly regarding health and employment we’d massively value that. Plus one final specific request this week would be a job for James in our group as he urgently needs employment in order to move and join us here in Harlow all the time.

Please do keep checking our website – www.harlowchurchplant.org as we are adding new bits all the time plus it has our BLOG, News, Dates and even some videos about Newfrontiers

Have a great week and don’t forget to keep mentioning us to your friends, family and anyone else you meet!

Keep smiling
Ben & Clare

Harlow Group Meeting 18th February

Last night we met once more to worship Jesus plus share Shepherds Pie, cake and life with one another.

God has been speaking to us as a group lately about being in a battle, it has certainly felt that way! In line with this we drew comparisons and encouragement from scripture plus the following speech given by Winston Churchill as he address parliament for the first time as Prime Minister after taking lead of the country shortly after the outbreak of the 2nd World War.

'I say to the House as I said to the ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.


You ask what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea and air. War with all our might and with the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.


You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs - victory in spite of all terrors - victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival'

God spoke to us last week from Psalm 23 with a special focus on verse 5 'You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.' and again last night as we prayed into this we felt God re-affirm that He is with us and that the battles and struggles we face He is with us in and that He and He alone will bring us through.

We had pictures of God being our support in the way a stick supports a plant and were also reminded of the footsteps poem where God carries us through the tough parts of life.

God also reminded us of the value of standing together and not retreating into our own worlds but standing together as a 'new' community united by Jesus. A picture was brought about Roman soldiers shields locking together and so being more together than apart and able to withstand together better as a community than apart.

Overall it was a good night where God was with us and lifting our spirits and blessing us because of His goodness.

We wait in excitement to see Him build us into the people He would have us be for Jesus' glory and honour - what a challenge and wonderful adventure we're on!

5th February Update from Facebook Group

Greetings everyone and welcome to those of you for whom this is your first contact.

Thanks for taking time to read this, for remembering us in prayer and as always we sincerely pray that you will be blessed in return. God has been impressing on us the importance and need for prayer and more and more we are realising that we are totally dependent upon Him, trusting in His grace and mercy and brought up short with our total inability to make things happen.

Since the last update lots seems to have happened although it’s only been 2 weeks. We have got a website up and running so can be found at www.harlowchurchplant.org and whilst parts of this are still changing we are hoping to use this more and more in the future so keep an eye on it.

We have also finished having our initial coffee and chat times and so are excited at the prospect of running ‘Harlow group’ every Thursday evening in various homes. We’d really value your prayers for these as they are crucial for us to build together and truly become ‘friends together on a mission’

For anyone still considering popping along we’d encourage you to get in touch! The plan is still to meet from 7 till 9 including simple food and a great time together focusing on Jesus knowing it’s all about Him!

This week we’ll be looking at what God has spoken to us prophetically so it promises to be a significant and good evening!

Please do pray that God would not only direct our Thursday evening meetings but that He would also add to our number particularly in areas where we are currently weak. Harlow contains around 90,000 people and Jesus has an inheritance here of many people who yet don’t know Him, the challenge for us is massive but we are trusting in God to direct and connect us with the right people.

In addition please could you pray for protection over us as a group as we’ve had medical scares, ill health and just lots of things not going as we planned in the past couple of weeks too!

Thanks for your continued support and please don’t forget to have a look at www.harlowchurchplant.org

Keep smiling

Ben & Clare

Facebook Group Update from 23rd January

Hello again or for the first time to those of you who have joined us in the past couple of weeks since our last update. Sorry for the slight delay with this update but lots has been happening, we’ve tried to incorporate the key points below. Also apologies to those of you who have joined the group who we don’t know and haven’t sent a personal message to. With the groups size now it is hard to determine who is new and who isn’t so if we’ve missed you please drop us a reply to this update.

Thanks for taking time to read this, for remembering us in prayer and as always we sincerely pray that you will be blessed in return.

What’s happened in the past 2 weeks then? Well primarily we’ve had the privilege of meeting lots of new people, from outstanding leaders in our town, people at Community Church Bishop’s Stortford and fresh faces at our Harlow Group drop in sessions.

Last Sunday we had the opportunity to introduce ourselves at Community Church Bishop’s Stortford where we are now based. We have been really encouraged by people from CCBS bringing words, pictures and encouragement from God for us which were extremely similar to previous words given in other settings. God is good!

Harlow Group is now up and running and we have our 4^th getting to know one another session planned for Sunday 31^st January from 3 till 4pm and then from February are aiming to meet weekly on Thursdays from 7 till 9.

If you or anyone you know of might be interested in joining or meeting us please can you forward this message onto them or ask them to get in contact via our Facebook Group page as we’d love to meet them.

We really feel we have the favour of God with us at present and would ask for specific prayer that this continues and that we honour Jesus in all we do. We would also ask you to pray that God would continue to add people to us and cause people who are living in Harlow but not part of an existing church to hear of our existence and get in touch.

Have a great week and we’ll have another update shortly plus our website should also be up and running in the next couple of weeks too.

Keep smiling
Ben and Clare