New Life began on Sunday, August 10, 1997. Last year, we celebrated our 20th year anniversary. We built and moved into our current building on Sunday, August 12, 2007, which was our tenth year anniversary. God has been good and faithful to us all these years. He has done some amazing things in and through us. I hope and pray that God will do even more great God-sized things in the years to come through New Life.
When we decided to build and have a place of our own, someone needed to come up with architectural concepts and design. Unfortunately and strangely, Leadership Team was restricted from working very closely with the architect we hired to reflect our thoughts, needs and desires for the building we were going to use. So, the building didn’t come out the way Leadership Team at that time wanted. However, we were able to at least put in the requests to have a very spacious fellowship hall that will look like a big café and a baptismal pool that could also be used as a water fountain.
Once the building was completed and we moved in, we needed to fill and decorate it with various different kinds of furniture, pictures and paintings. We put the map of the world and the framed pictures from our mission trips with appropriate Bible verses on the wall. They look nice.
There are still many spots in the building and spaces on the wall that are empty and could be decorated. One space that caught my attention was the long hallway between the sanctuary and the admin office wing. I thought it would be great if we can decorate that wall with pictures from the past to display the history of New Life that will remind us of God’s goodness. Even though New Life got started in 1997, we did take a couple of years to prepare ourselves to plant New Life. Therefore, displaying pictures on the wall chronologically beginning from 1995 would show where we had been at first and where we are right now. And I wanted to call this hallway “The Hall of Faith.”
This chronological display of pictures will create a deep sense of gratitude to God in the hearts of New Life members because it will show our past and present and the growth that has taken place in between. It will also provide much encouragement to those pastors and lay leaders who come to New Life for House Church Seminar for Pastors and Lay Leaders. They often come from smaller churches. And when they come here, they only see our present but don’t see our humble beginning. They hear from me that New Life got started in 1997 with about 20 founding members. But seeing the history of New Life through the pictures on this wall will give them so much more encouragement, and they could walk away from this place believing that together with God they too can grow and be like New Life and become even greater.
One member of New Life worked extremely hard to come up with what we have on the wall now. She spent countless number of hours for this project. Unfortunately, due to my lack of communication with her, it ended up being a collage of many precious pictures but not a display of New Life history. I deeply feel bad for how this happened and take full responsibility for this mistake.
In order to rectify this mistake, this is what we will do. First, we will enjoy the mural on the wall for the next 4 to 5 years. Please go to The Hall of Faith and have fun finding your own pictures as well as enjoying the pictures of other fellow New Life members.
Second, we will create a small committee made up of New Life members who have been here the longest with very keen eyes so that they could collect as many pictures as possible from you and various different social media and put them in a chronological order. Your help with submitting pictures to the committee will be absolutely essential for the success of this project.
Third, we will find someone either internally or externally who can do the project for us with very clear instructions so that the mistake will not be repeated. The goal is to complete this project by our 25th year anniversary.
I thank you for your understanding and cooperation on this.
Your pastor,
Eric
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