What a wonderful country France is! What a lovely city Rouen is! And what a beautiful church ‘Le Gospel’ is….
During the course of any year, I visit many, many churches. I love them all, but the church here, and ‘Le Source’ in Lisieux, have to be two fo the loveliest I have the enormous privilege – and pleasure – of visiting. Neither are ‘big’ churches: and as someone whose heart and passion is for small churches (you’ll only have to recall past blogs from the places I go to to know that), it’s a special joy to come to stay with wonderful people, Gerard & Elisa, whose home was genuinely ‘home from home’ for me from the moment I first came here earlier this year – and Mark feels exactly the same way about them and their home), but to be involved in churches whose main passion is ‘outside’ of the conceptual church many of us have.
Le Gospel is reaches out to the community in a huge way, reaches into other nations in a huge way for a small church, and does’t really have ‘designs’ on being a church as we’d know it (Jim… oh, that dates me!!), but is genuinely a family who want to love, serve, and bless their city, and in turn love and care for each other. It’s a church full of spiritual mums and dads, which is so, so lovely.
Yesterday was a wonderful day, from 3 pm to midnight, really, just sharing on what the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is, and this a church wanting and desiring to change the cultural mindset of church, not establishing church, but being the Kingdom on earth… ‘your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth..’ How many thousands of times have prayed that? And ow many TRULY believe it is POSSIBLE to BE the Kingdom and to bring heaven to earth…?
Yesterday there were no ‘blockbuster’ miracles, but there were people healed: more importantly, there were lives touched with the Kingdom principles, and those already with those principles accelerated further into seeing God’s Kingdom Come…
It is a real privilege to be here, and the ‘bond’ with this church has grown exponentially this weekend. It seems that possibly 10 or more from this small church want to go to Cali, Colombia, with me, next year – so that’s two trips with 5 each over and above the 2-3 trips already planned! Mark and I have had so much fun here, too: fun, and Kingdom, is a great mixture… and when God shows up and changes lives too, that’s an even greater blessing….
The meeting today is at 2pm, which takes it instantly out of ‘normal church’ mentality, so we’re looking forward to seeing what God’s going to do in the next 6 or 7 hours!
