Thanks to the generosity of My Father's House, we were able to share with each of them: 25kgs of oats, 20kgs of maize meal, 2 boxes of peanut pastes and 4 boxes of Easter eggs for the kids.
-
The Finnie family in Blighty, December 2021
-
Dean and Paula pastor The Gathering together -
The Gathering -
Baptisms at The Gathering -
Preparing to serve at The Gathering's Soup Kitchen -
Soup Kitchen Welcome To 2022 lunch
-
Serving hands - the heart of The Gatheirng -
Thankful Thursdays -
.JPG)
HOPE Home Based Care Team -
Gathering Ground -
Staying fit as a family -
The Helderberg - The prettiest of the mountains we face
Showing posts with label firgrove. Show all posts
Showing posts with label firgrove. Show all posts
Following our prayerletter which we sent out yesterday and which can be read here, we want to explain a little more, give a bit more info to the background and answer a few questions...
At The Gathering we have never wanted a building for the sake of having a building, rather, we have always wanted a venue from which we can serve the local community from Monday to Saturday with Sunday Gatherings being merely the cherry on the cake.
Initially there was broad support for the lockdown despite the fact that before it started there had been no local Covid related deaths and infection rates were minimal.
For the first time since South Africa entered its 21 day lockdown two years ago, The Gathering has had to close its weekly Soup Kitchen because a few of us are ill with Covid.
We've done our best to ensure that word is out, especially amongst the Macassar folk to save them the walk for food later.
There's little worse than seeing our church venue locked up with no sign of life, especially when we make such an effort to be open as much as possible so community members know where they can find The Gathering when they need us.
As a church we are fully committed to the working out of the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:5), so this morning we gave over our Gathering to a Seven Minute Challenge in which we allow members the opportunity to share God's word for up to seven minutes.
This morning Gloria, Linda and Leilani rose to the challenge. Each of them were diligent and faithful in their preparation and spoke with immense authority.
I will never tire of the joy of delivering blessings to others, especially the joy of delivering food to the two Soup Kitchens in Macassar which The Gathering supports.
This month we were able to give them a few boxes of peanut pastes, rice, soya mince, jam and washing up liquid each, plus an ice cream tub full of sweets for the kids which were left over from The Gathering's Soup Kitchen lunch back in January.
It was good to finally install some industrial quality fans in The Gathering's premises this morning.
Previously we had two domestic quality fans in the front and one at the back, and to be honest they were a bit rubbish.
So it was a blessing to be able to use some of the money left over from the Soup Kitchen Christmas Lunch to buy five new good quality fans that will do a great job at cooling us all down. It's just a shame I only got to install them at the end of summer.
Pastoring a church is never easy and it comes with a lot of challenges, but it also comes with a lot of joy and blessings.
One of those blessings is the joy of getting to deliver boxes of food to four of our local primary schools, knowing that the most vulnerable children at each one will be taken care of with a meal before lessons each day.
Life really doesn't get much better than that!
We are so thankful for life at The Gathering at present.
As a church we've been praying for the spiritual growth of our members for a long time and we've seen these prayers answered spectacularly. Just this morning Errol shared a word rich in scripture, passion and practical application which greatly encouraged the membership. Seeing someone raised up in to leadership and ministry and then flying in these areas is a joy to watch.
So, here's the question: Why do you persist with church?
It was gutting to get a phone call late in the afternoon yesterday informing us that the home of some of our Soup Kitchen regulars had been on fire, with the household losing everything they had.
But it was also a blessing as the community knows that in such circumstances they can turn to the church for some genuine relief and assistance.
Our much anticipated, prayed for and planned ''Welcome to 2022" Soup Kitchen lunch was a roaring success on Sunday, and we give God all the glory for this!
As we watched the advance weather reports in disbelief, stating that Sunday was going to be the hottest day on record, we gathered people to ask God to bring the temperature down, and to specifically cover the sun with cloud from 12-3 pm, or the event would simply be unbearable for us all.
Printing is done, stickers are ready, goody bags have been lovingly decorated by hand and are ready to be stuffed to the top with some delicious sweets . The food is prepped and ready, so now there are just a few last minute jobs to be done as we pull it all together in the morning ready for service at 1pm.
Happy New Year to you all.
We've been thoroughly blessed with an amazing family Christmas (our first in 11 years) and New Year and this morning, after worshiping with the community of St George's in Weald we interred Paula's Dad's ashes in the graveyard.
This was a special time with family and was great to share with Paula's remaining Uncles & Aunts on her Dad's side. We were also thrilled to learn that his ashes were to be interred in the same place as her Mum's ashes. This truly blessed the family.
So, Christmas is done and we're entering an interesting year...
Eli enters his Matric year and is very keen to enlist in the British Army as soon as he can once his exams are over. Joel has applied for an internship and is hoping and praying he's successful. Please stand with him & us in praying for this.
This scripture is the guiding principle of The Gathering's Thankful Thursdays, and sometimes it's easy to forget about it, so it was good to be reminded of it so starkly yesterday, a day of phenomenal blessings and heartbreak.
The blessings had begun on Wednesday when I drove over to My Father's House in Simon's Town to collect a very generous food donation from them.
Since we've taken the Soup Kitchen up to a minimum of 100 litres each week our consumption of the basics has rocketed meaning that keeping on top of it all and ensuring we have enough to prepare and serve the soup each Thursday has become a bit of a mission in itself.
Given how wet and cold it was, it was even more of a blessing knowing the The Gathering's Soup Kitchen had more than enough to make sure that no one went hungry, and everyone could have as much as they needed.
The 140 litres certainly went a long way and it was one of the few Soup Kitchen's in recent times in which we've not had to turn anyone away because the soup was finished.
Our Soup Kitchen is always a chilled and laid back affair, but everyone seemed to know there was more soup than usual and so our regulars were more than happy to take their time over being served, even if it meant standing out in the wet and cold for a bit longer than usual.
Last night at The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen I think we might just have found a way to communicate the levels of hunger...
For some time now it has been a dream of mine to increase The Gathering's weekly Soup Kitchen to 100 litres so that we can be even more generous with our soup than we currently are. Most weeks we have been serving 70lts and sometimes just 50lts depending on how close we are to the social grants having been paid.
Over the last few weeks we've just been using our 70lt pot and a couple of times we've had to turn folk away because we had run out, and that never feels good.
So it was great to be able to be our usual generous selves and then some, as we had plenty to go around tonight and by the time the queue had fizzled out we had just a single one litre pot and a cup left.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
