A Church Landing in a New Location

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J.L. Allen

Puritan Board Sophomore
My family and I have attended Westminster OPC in Indian Head Park, Illinois, for a few years now. My children were baptized there, and my family has been so very blessed the people we worship with. I went from desiring to explore the ministry to working on my status as a licentiate. Lord willing, I will finish that part of the process later this year.

Long before we arrived, the church was well established in a humble chapel provided to rent by Lyonsville Congregation UCC. Westminster has been there for over 20 years. Right before things got crazy in 2020, we switched places with Lyonsville to utilize their larger worship space. They, unsurprisingly, have been dying off as people are losing interest in liberal "Christianity." Westminster, by the grace of God, has been blessed with growth. Please pray it continues. This coming Lord's Day will be Westminster's last day at Lyonsville before moving up the street to rent space from more like-minded, Gospel-loving LCMS Lutherans. Reverends Bruce Hollister and @Alan D. Strange will be preaching in the morning and evening respectively. Hope Lutheran is an older congregation with regards the average age of congregants. I think our presence there will be a blessing to them.

I post this with no particular intent other than sharing my appreciation to my church and her leadership. God is good to us, and we are thankful for this. If you have visited, or are planning on visiting, be advised that 1/23/22 will be the final worship at Lyonsville. The following Lord's Day (the 30th?) will be our first worship service at Hope Lutheran. There's a picture of the front of the building (mind the 2cv) on their website above. We will be using their gymnasium and some other space for Sunday school and mid-week activities. I believe that entrance will be the doors on the left side of the building (picture more in the center).
 
Sounds like a wonderful development. May you congregation continue to grow and prosper. We started out renting from a struggling Baptist church and ended up buying them out so they could move to a more suitably sized facility.
 
Sounds like a wonderful development. May you congregation continue to grow and prosper. We started out renting from a struggling Baptist church and ended up buying them out so they could move to a more suitably sized facility.
That would be quite the answer to prayers if we were able to eventually purchase their building. Perhaps that will come about at some point in the future.
 
You might appreciate this in relation to your story... the last church I was a member of, and I know there are some folks from there here, is Reformation Presbyterian Church of [Greater] Atlanta (FCC). It moved around to several different places before ending up where it is now. Our pastor had been formerly an associate pastor at a PC(USA) congregation, and in part because of memories of his serving there was able to get use of an auxilary building on campus (a fellowship hall, which we were the sole users of on the Lord's Day). It was also affordable. It was a very convenient location by the interstate, convinient as the congregation was somewhat scattered around the area. The PC(USA) church in the 70s had been a large, well-attended congregation and as I understand it, evangelical in orientation. However, it was by the end of our time renting there barely able to keep the doors open, with a female pastor that was not too fond of our position on male leadership. I believe even our small congregation had more gathering in the auxiliary building than in the main worship space. The PC(USA) congregation ended up folding and selling the land to a developer. I believe a hotel is there now.

We ended up moving to a building that had formerly been the main meeting place of a Primitive Baptist church, and was still owned by a local PB association. We found we had much more in common with the PB elders and they were delighted that the building was going to be used, so they gave us a very favorable deal. While dated, the space was also very easy to accommodate for our needs. It had not been regularly used for worship services since the 70s, but it occupies a visible place at a busy intersection in Gwinett County, so it gets many passers by. When we were moving in, some people just wanted to stop in to see the building they had passed so many times, and some even visited. You can see pictures here: https://reformationpresbyterianchurch.org/reformation-presbyterian-church-atlanta-about-us/
 
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