Weekly Pastoral Message prepared by Rev. Murray Adamthwaite
for Sunday 3rd August 1997

From the Pastor: Twenty Years On

Today we celebrate our twentieth anniversary as a congregation which continued from the old Methodist Church of Australasia when it joined a section of the Presbyterian Church and the Congregational Union. This determination to maintain an evangelical witness and Biblical preaching had to be sustained amid great adversity in those early days. But at this point we need to ask some pertinent questions in the light of the past twenty years. While the need for our original stand is more acute than ever, what with the doctrinal and spiritual decline of many of the major denominations (not all), have we too become stagnant? If our stand is for the Gospel according to the Scriptures, does that not entail a certain zeal, even desperation, for the lost souls of men and women? I think here of the church at Philadelphia, (Revelation 3:7-13), which had only "a little strength", but had "kept the command to persevere", but which had before it "an open door" of opportunity for the Gospel. Perhaps evangelical churches are not "flavour of the month", but that under God is precisely our "open door". History shows us that God does His greatest work when human opposition is at its strongest and most fierce. What is needed is courage, and not to be afraid either of our message or of the opposition, whether from "political correctness", religious pluralism, New Age notions or whatever. One thing is certain: numbers have never been a factor in God's estimate. What is important is that we have the Book of God's Word, and the need to be strong and very courageous (Joshua 1:7-10).