Christ Covenant Church of Grande Prairie
A little bit about my local church
In July of 2022, my wife and I and our 3 yr old daughter and 3 week old baby drove through Bezanson Alberta, cresting one of the final hills to look over the grand prairie into Grande Prairie Alberta at 10:30 PM, with the evening sun was shining fiercely into our eyes for the last 30 minutes into town.
Exhausted after a 17 hr drive from our last stop in Niverville Manitoba, we arrived at our 3 month rental, a long term airbnb rental and we all crashed into bed and fell asleep as it finally started to get dark around midnight. We rolled out of bed in the morning, and the ministry began.
Thankfully, we didn’t have to take the U-Haul ourselves, since two gentlemen from the church had picked it up from Ottawa 2 months before we arrived in Grande Prairie. Yes. It is possible to drive across the nation in 40 hrs, spend an hour in Ottawa, and then drive 40 hrs back to Grande Prairie. All in one shot. It has been done. Kudos to them. When it is an Albertan, presumably they don’t want to stick around to see the parliament buildings.
“Let’s get out of this city as fast as possible!”
A student fresh out of the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in 2019, I was ordained as a minister of the Word and Sacrament in the United Reformed Churches of North America and worked in Prince Edward Island until I received a call to serve as a pastor here in Alberta from Christ Covenant Church of Grande Praire in March of 2022. We took May and June to spend time with family in Toronto ON (I did a month of landscaping) and have our second baby at the York Regional Hospital. I was installed to pastor CCC on July 16, 2022.
I realized recently that I have written on my denomination of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) but not specifically on my local Church. After my direct duty to Christ, to my family, my local church is both my primary love and responsibility.
My local church is a church where the officers adhere to the Three Forms of Unity, within the CREC. This is uncommon, given that many/most CRECs subscribe to the Westminster Standards. We are a member church of Knox Presbytery, based out of the Pacific Northwest of the US, but also a Presbytery that spans four nations - the US, Tasmania, Brazil and Canada. Of course, our denomination maintains the ecumenical creeds as well - the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon.
This congregation has been gathering since 2006, with some highs and lows, but seeing the faithfulness of God all the way through.
We have upwards to 120 persons gathering for worship on a Sunday. We have four elders, including myself (who am called to serve as a full-time pastor), and four deacons.
We are an active church community. We have monthly Psalm Sings to sing from the Cantus Christi (we were just discussing how we should call them Psalm roars), monthly men’s meetings (7-9) to study the Reformed confessions, weekly men’s prayer meetings, and a biweekly ladies Bible study. Some of the home schoolers in the community pool resources to help one another in education. We are active in showing the love of Christ to those who visit our congregation and those we cross paths with in our communities. We also have had some great lectures on the church fathers and summaries of the Bible on select week days.
The Sunday gathering for worship is central to our life together. This is the rallying point, the preaching is the trumpet blast, as we gather together to sing hearty songs of praise and bring our prayers to God in this meeting between heaven and earth. As a Church in the Reformed tradition, we practice weekly communion, we baptize the babies of believers, and we open the Table of the Lord to those who are baptized in the Triune Name. We sing the Apostle’s Creed or Nicene Creed weekly, before the celebration of the Supper. We call men and women to repentance and faith. We do this as we preach as well as the pastoral ministry of the church.
We are a community that emphasizes hospitality. Usually our Psalm sings and men’s meetings are held in people’s homes and shops (given that we still do not own a church building). We encourage the fellowship of Christians through the week and we encourage Christians to invite newcomers and those still lost in sin into that fellowship so that they can taste the hospitality of God.
We believe that covenant is central to living as a church. Thus, we make vows to the Lord and to one another to live in the bond of unity, seeking both the peace and the purity of the church. As David says in Psalm 22:25: “From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will perform before those who fear him.” That covenant bond is demonstrated throughout the histories of the Old Testamant and finally in the covenant bond of the Book of Hebrews, starting with the bond with the Lord presented in Triune baptism, and then moving to that bond with one another as we dedicate ourselves to the good of the House of the Lord, the people of God, the assembly, the Household of faith.
Over these years, my wife and I and my children have been blessed by the kindness of and warmth of fellowship within this congregation, even as we seek to fulfill the calling of our Lord to serve within it, preaching, teaching, shepherding.
One of the places where this congregation really was blessed and has been a blessing, was before I came out here. In early 2020, about 6 weeks after the lockdowns struck, the elders decided that it would be wrong to close the doors of the church and bind the consciences of members in relation to the mandates of 2020-2022. This led to rich fellowship, growth and increased unity in faithfulness to Christ. We are still reaping the benefits of the faithful decisions of the session of elders then as we are now. I honor the faithfulness of the men here who risked fines, imprisonment and other penalties for the sake of faithfully gathering the church during an evil time.
Our church community is composed of a diverse range of church backgrounds, from Mennonite, to Pentecostal, to Lutheran, to Baptist, to Dutch Reformed (I may be missing one or two). Christian culture begins in the waters of Triune baptism and we build it from there in service to one Lord, with one faith, by the power of one Holy Spirit. We love Christian doctrine, the beauty of growth in Christian holiness and the pursuit of maturity in our Head, Jesus Christ.
We love the church wherever it is found, as it seeks to exalt Jesus as Lord, worship the Triune God, and walk in obedience to the Holy Bible, which is the Word of God. We pursue unity with such churches, recognizing our common bond of unity to Christ and in Christ. We strive to stand within 2000+ years of church history. We want to study church history and understand how the Spirit has moved in the Church to respond in faith to the truths of the Holy Bible throughout the ages. In our worship and liturgy, we strive to draw on various Reformational traditions including Lutheran and Anglican traditions.
The Triune love of God abounds among Christians who love one another in and through the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ.
God is doing a work here out on the frontier of the Canadian frontier. The Spirit is moving and we pray and expect that He would continue to go before us.
I have been reading Anthony Esolen’s book, Out of the Ashes. This is a compelling case for the need to build solid church communities in the ashes of what has burned down over the revolutions of the last 50-75 years. What we have here is a community that is hard at work to rebuild in the ruins of western civilization. We love expository, Christ-centered preaching, the sacraments, the holiness and purity of the church, robust Psalm-singing, prayer, service, hospitality, Christian laughter and celebration in the goodness of God.
We are praying for the will to work and the winds of abiding & lasting reformation.
Our Lord commanded His disciples to bring the gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth (Matt. 28, Acts 1), to go, to baptize, to disciple, to teach. He is ascended and He is King. He is with us to the end of the age, empowering and strengthening His church for this task. That is what we are doing in obedience to the King.
The picture is from my installation to the work of pastor on July 16, 2022.
Hey! I saw your post on my homepage and wanted to drop by and send you some good vibes. Whenever you have a moment, I’d be grateful if you could do the same. I’m always happy to support and lift each other up!