A word from our pastor

Draft — not yet the pastor's own words.

Thank you for coming this far into our website. A church is hard to judge from the outside — a hall beside the highway, a notice board, an hour on a Sunday morning. What I would like you to know is what goes on underneath all that.

We are a Malayalam-speaking congregation of ordinary families, and between us we carry the sort of weight that rarely gets said aloud on a Sunday: work that is uncertain, a marriage under strain, children grown up and living far from home, a parent who needs more care than one person can give. We do not gather here because those things have been settled. We gather because God has not left us alone inside them.

There is a line in Psalm 92 I keep returning to — that those planted in the house of the Lord still bear fruit in old age. Planted, it says, not visiting. Almost everything God has done in this fellowship he has done slowly: through years of unremarkable Sundays, through prayers that went a long time without an answer, through people who simply kept turning up for one another. If you are waiting on God just now and nothing seems to be moving, that is what I would say to you. Stay planted. His mercies are new every morning, and he has never been in a hurry to prove himself to anyone.

So the invitation is a plain one. Come and sit with us. You will not be asked to stand and introduce yourself, to sign anything, or to give anything. If a prayer meeting in someone's home would suit you better than a Sunday service, come to that instead. And if you are carrying something you cannot yet say out loud, write to us or telephone — I will pray for you, and it will go no further than me.