Truly at Home at Last

I was raised in a non-Christian family. I am the eldest of four. When I was six my family moved to a new farm and in this district some Salvation Army Christians picked us up and took us to Sunday school (and when I was twelve I gave my heart to the Lord.) I always loved anything to do with God I became a Sunday school teacher. At fourteen I wanted to go into uniform but my parents opposed and sent me to the Presbyterians where they had been married. Here also I taught Sunday school. At high school I also attended many meetings and camps arranged by the Brethren assemblies. I loved to be with Christians and went to as many meetings as I could, often biking three miles to get a ride to a meeting in town. My hymn and chorus book and Bible often became my prayer books-hymns such as "Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee", "Trust and obey, for there's no other way", and "Ask the Saviour to help you, comfort, strengthen, and keep you". Jesus was my best friend. My Bible was well underlined and prayed over. God was very real to me and I needed the strength and faith I received from the Bible, as my environment was hard. When I was eighteen I wanted to be baptised but my parents would not allow it. I was baptised the day I turned twenty-one.

When I married we lived in the city and went to the closest meeting place, the Methodists. While we met there I also I went to Pentecostal meetings on Sunday evenings. We then came in contact with an evangelical group and changed our place of meeting. After four years in this group, through a fellow member, we came in touch with the church in Feilding by attending a love feast. We knew no one in this church nor anything about them, but what a witness we had within that this group of Christians really loved the Lord in a very experiential way. They were so much for the Lord, for each other, and for other believers. They lived the Lord and they knew the Lord in both a personal and a corporate way. We felt so one with them-the old, the young, just everyone enjoying Christ.

I had given my very best to the six denominations I had attended, but not one of those gave me this feeling of being truly at home, as this group of Christians did. I wanted to bring others to come and see and enjoy. Six months after going to our first love feast, we left the denominations, having seen that God's call was to come outside the camp of religion, to worship Him in spirit and reality, and to meet not according to our choice but His, in the place where God had put His name, just like the Israelites had to come to Jerusalem and not meet in the high places erected by man. My experience of the church life is one of abundant reality, enlightenment, growth, and mutuality in the Body of Christ.

The church really is the pillar and base of the truth, where one grows unto a full-grown man with all the brothers and sisters, to satisfy and enjoy in a most intimate way our dear Father God. L.P.