Turnaround God by Charlotte Gambill

Author:Charlotte Gambill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

A PERMANENT

INVESTMENT

AS WELL AS LEADING A CONGREGATION IN BRADFORD, England, my husband and I also have the privilege of pastoring a congregation in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This city is famously known for its longstanding troubles and tensions. I remember when I went to Northern Ireland for the first time and drove around the neighborhoods, seeing the walls of graffiti portraying religious allegiances and artwork of gunmen and the fights they were a part of. I recall seeing the barricaded police stations with barbed wire around the exterior walls and being told by our Northern Irish friends about the no-go zones in the city at night.

That trip had a deep impact on me; I felt fearful at times and deeply saddened at what was occurring in the name of religion. I left Belfast on that first trip convinced of two things. First, they needed a God intervention; and second, it wasn’t something I was called to be a part of. When you already live in a struggling community, as I did in Bradford, the next choice for church planting certainly wouldn’t be an even greater troubled city like Belfast. Yet God had something else in mind, and a few months later Steve and I sensed God calling us to be a part of a team that would start a church in Belfast and believe in the God who could turn all things around.

For the first few years in that city, our church family met in a rented hotel room, but over time we knew we needed to find a permanent space to be our church home. After some time God led us to an old warehouse tucked away in the city center. It was on a prime piece of land that was not even up for sale. As soon as we walked in this space, we knew it was perfectly situated to become our new church home. The more we committed to the process of acquiring this building, the more we saw God move obstacles out of our way until we eventually signed on the line.

On the day that we were to receive the keys for this building, we planned an evening with the church family to celebrate this next step and to pray over the warehouse where God had placed us. As my husband and I arrived in the city of Belfast for our opening weekend, after months if not years of relative calm in Northern Ireland, trouble broke out. Violence and fighting had erupted across the street from our new building, right in the city center, over a new political decision that divided the people of Northern Ireland. Our planned celebration was in jeopardy, as some feared that Belfast would regress into the problems of its past. We learned that the night before our arrival, petrol bombs were thrown and cars were torched in the city. As a result, police in riot gear were deployed, armed guards and police vehicles were posted strategically throughout the city, and the police had zoned off all the area around the city, where our new plot of land was, in order to protect it.

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