A Church is Born
Sovereign Grace Church Nairobi had their first worship service at 10:00 am on January 5, 2025, meeting in a garage. We had 22 adults and 13 young children in attendance, many of them part of our launch team, family members, and several guests were there at our invitation.
When we started, a few minutes late, as we waited for a few more people to get settled, I (Jonathan) was a bit anxious. What if I mess up and let Brian and the rest of the team down? What if no one sings and our rag tag team has to continue to lead a bit awkwardly while trying to maintain hearts of worship? What if no one sticks around after the service? What if they do and we don’t know how to answer their questions?
Fortunately, as we started the service, God gave each of us a wonderful measure of faith, and we trusted him to work in and through us no matter what happened. And what happened was glorious! People seemed to be engaged in every aspect of the service, singing with their voices and with their bodies, worshipping with their praying, giving, and attentiveness to the sermon. After the service everyone stayed for lunch, to enjoy fellowship with one another, and then to ask questions about the church.
By the time the team met for dinner that evening to go over the service and to celebrate together, our bodies were tired but our hearts were full of gratitude to God! We’re not naive. We know hard days are coming. We know every service won’t feel this special. But we know God is at work in the birth of this church, and are just so privileged and humbled to be a part of it. Thanks to you for praying for us, encouraging us, giving us practical support, and checking in with us by text and email. All glory be to Christ!
What Happens Now?
We considered this a “soft-launch,” meaning we didn’t do any wide-scale advertising to invite the general public. Even now, our social media accounts and website are being developed. We’ll let you know when they go live. But we imagine it will be a couple more months before we do the official public launch. We want to continue to build our growing team into the Lord, into a greater understanding of the gospel, and into each other as we worship together on Sunday and do life together throughout the rest of the week.
We will continue to invite guests to join us on Sundays and to pray and seek out those who have no hope and are without God in the world of Nairobi. But for now this will be by word of mouth through the growing team God has given us. Who knows, we could outgrow our garage in a matter of weeks! So please be praying for us as we seek out a venue that can serve as our meeting place for years to come.
And just to be clear. We’re not concerned about growing numbers for the sake of growing a big church. Our first priority is to be faithful to the Lord and faithful to his Word. But we also want to reach the lost. We want to reach those who think they know the gospel, but don’t yet know that Jesus is even better than they imagine. We want to disciple and train up pastors, evangelists, and missionaries. Our heart is for Nairobi, but we’re praying that the Lord would use us to reach Kenya, Africa, and the nations!
Prayer
As always, check out our prayer page for the latest praises and prayer requests.
Praying for you!
Thank you so much! Oh how we need prayer!
God bless you guys! Thanks for sharing the updates, we will be praying!
Thanks Nick. Give our love to the fam!