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Last Saturday we began sharing our facilities with Fraser Valley SDA Church. This is an ethnically diverse group of followers of Jesus who have been meeting in Surrey for many years. For the past thirteen years they have been one of the churches that has shared space at Gateway Baptist Church in North Surrey. Currently they are without a pastor because their previous pastor retired, but they hope that the regional offices will send them a new pastor (that is how their polity works) now that they are gathering again. There were about 125 people here this last Saturday, but they say many of them were visitors from other local churches celebrating the relaunch of the church. Normally they are about 50 people each week.
If you are wondering just what a Seventh Day Adventist Church is and how the denomination fits within the range of churches here is an interesting article written from an Evangelical perspective: 9 Things You Should Know About Seventh Day Adventism
It will be good to have another group in here using our beautiful sanctuary to worship God, strengthen God’s people and work for the Kingdom of God. This building has been empty for too long with the COVID lockdown! We are always looking for ways to use the church building and this seemed like a way to see the building used for God’s glory and neighbours’ good.
Financially this will be a help for us as well and will allow us to make up for some of financial contributions we have missed out on this year. We hope that this will help position us to make some moves on staffing for our youth and children ministries!!
Here is a little update on our other building partners:
Bright Angels Child Care: The Daycare continues to push on. They have been operating only ‘before and after school care’ for the past few months because the daycare was not able to recruit enough people to return. However, starting this month they are doing full day care again and are working hard to see the place flourish again. One way they are attempting to do this is to apply to be a part of the $10 a day daycare program recently approved for BC! Financially they have been paying 1/2 of their normal rent this year. We had budged for that, but had expected them to return to full payments by April. They started full payments again in July, so we are only around $3000 behind our expected budget with them. They have however given $5000 toward property projects at the church – preferably the resurfacing of the back patio.
Kwangya Presbyterian Church: The Korean church is back in the building after the long COVID hiatus. They are a small group that worships together from 1-4 pm on Sundays and meet for prayer early on Saturday mornings as well. Because they haven’t been able to meet over the past sixteen months and have not had any income, we have agreed to continue to accept payment at 1/2 their normal rate for the first three months that they use the church again. When we made the budget, we used their 1/2 total for the entire year, so the three month extension of 1/2 rate does not affect our expected revenue numbers at all.
Surrey Food Bank: The Food Bank stopped using our building when COVID hit and then chose to shut down our site completely. Once they opened their new building and distribution centre in Newton they felt that our GTCC Depot served the same community. The staff misses being here, and we certainly miss them and the clients. This was seen as part of our ministry and mission at GTCC, so we did not charge them for use of the space.
