It’s so good to see many of our vacationers dropping back in one person and one family at a time. Without controversy, no year did our congregation ever witness such a high rate of vacation travel by members like this summer. This is quite commendable and in line with the standing biblical injunctions on the need to take out time on occasion to rest. I hope you all brought with you, experiences and testimonies of God’s faithfulness and preservation from the
many dangers that people face across the world presently. Praise God that He remains our “refuge and strength” (Psalm 46:1), and everyone has remained safe and sound.
And Now Comes a New Season
The work of the kingdom stares us in the face as we enter the final and decisive season of the year 2019. What happens from now until the end of the year determines whether or not we shall finish this year on a strong footing. A look at our activity plan for the year indicates that much ground remains to be covered. Consequently, there is a need to move with a great sense of urgency going into the final months. Jesus highlighted this need when in John 9:4 he declares, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night comes, when no man can work.”
We have quite a couple of exciting things coming up requiring our urgent attention. Work among our children and youth remains top on our agenda with more children and youth workers needed in both departments. Our children’s demography continues to grow in leaps and bounds and we must step up to the challenges. By the grace of God we added a new dimension to the ministry among our youth in August when fifteen of them embarked on a fun/mentoring boat cruise to Finland. That trip was such a rewarding and unforgettable experience to all the participants. Such an exercise must be made a recurring experience among our youth.
Secondly, establishing a formidable business men and women’s fellowship within our increasing number of business members is a passion that I want to see accomplished within this ministry year. Thirdly, the Women’s fellowship is in need of revival and I urge all our women to be on alert as plans are on to revive that very important aspect of our ministry. The media department needs some level of modernizing in order to show our services and programs more to the media-savvy world.
International Cultural Week
Plans are on for our annual International Cultural Week (ICW), a program which always intermarries with the anniversary of the establishment of our congregation. A vibrant planning committee is presently working to give us what is hoped to be the best version of the program ever. As usual, the various nationalities in our church are expected to put up sterling and God-glorifying performances during the three day-long program. Talks are ongoing to ensure that get hold of the appropriate speaker for the event. I urge everyone to be in prayer as the events approach.
Finally, keep in mind always, the words of our theme for this year, Daniel 11:32, “The people that know their God shall be strong and do exploits”. Let us therefore remain in the knowledge of the Lord, ceasing every opportunity to bear witness to the gospel. And always remember, PRAYER IS THE KEY!
Much blessings on you all!
Pastor Sam
September 2019
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Friends here we are again, and it’s yet another season of transition from darkness to light. The Spring season is a good reminder to us that darkness and gloom do not last forever. Little wonder why the wise man King Solomon tells us that “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” I believe we can all relish watching those frowning faces of that convey discontent and disappointments begin to brighten up because joy has come. It clearly has come to substitute every trace of fear, of sorrow, of pain from losses and the ravages of death and sickness in our lives and in the lives of our beloved one. I hope our sighs and feelings of resignation to the unknown tomorrow will begin to respond to the shining light of Christ’s presence which has brought us tremendous hope and unbreakable promise.
The Lenten Season will soon give way to the joy and hope of the Resurrection of life – the life of Jesus our Savior by which we are also raised from the dead and from the onslaught of iniquity and wicked principalities. The Resurrection is the ultimate hope of every believer. This is the reason the glorious event of that glorious morning has been taken very seriously and celebrated with great pomp throughout every generation of the Christian faith. This Easter season, we too must be joyful because our Lord overcame death. By his glorious grace we too have become overcomers. Romans 8:37 calls us “more than conquerors”, and that is what we are!
Before I conclude, I want to use this opportunity to congratulate all the new Ministry servants in our congregation chosen on March 16, 2019 at our church’s annual meeting. The Lord has chosen you for a purpose irrespective of whatever position you have found yourself. It is he that gives grace and unction to function for him and I believe he has equipped you with the grace you need for this work. I therefore call on you all to man your duty posts faithfully and with gratitude to God who has given you the opportunity to serve him at this time. Always remember that diligent and faithful service is a prelude to heavenly reward. Welcome on board! To every other person, I call upon you to locate your places in the ministry, especially as it is my heart’s desire to provide opportunities for people to grow into their full ministry potentials. Simply let me know the area God has gifted you and you will receive all the encouragement you need to develop yourself.
Lastly, I enjoin everyone to be part of all our Services and meetings so that we can continue to grow together in the Lord. I will end with the text of the message preached to us on February 24 namely, Galatians 6:2, Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ”
My family and I wish you all a very happy Easter in the name of our risen Lord!
Pastor Sam
April 2019
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For every well meaning Christian, the Advent season is the season when the adoration and worship of Christ our savior is at its highest point. Through each day up until the Christmas day, the world comes to a near standstill. With spoken and unspoken languages there is a general acknowledgement that someone special was born into the world to meet the human race where they are. The sweet melodies of Christmas carols, Christmas bells chiming through the air, not least, through the maze of human activity witnessed through unequaled travels and movements of people through every available means coupled with the greatest season of commercial activity as people frantically make purchases in readiness for exchange of gift all bear witness to the fact that a special season is unfolding.
As God’s people who are privileged to be associated with this special child who have become the King of all kings, you and I have a huge responsibility. We must all step up our efforts to ensure that the message of Christ’s birth is not drowned by the loud and alluring drums of profanity and fanfare. The unbelieving world is fast losing touch with that message. Christians are therefore called upon to speak up. Go, tell it on the mountains, over the hills and everywhere that Jesus Christ is born. One person at a time-and the reason for the season will be made known to all people everywhere.
THE YEAR 2018
The season of Christmas also immediately leads us to an important transition point in the life of each of us as well as in our church. The end of the year and the start of a new one both follow in quick succession. It is needful therefore to use this space to appreciate every member of Equmeniakyrkan International Hallunda for such a wonderful ministry outing this year. I believe we all had a most wonderful time in the presence of God and very blessed through each and every meeting opportunity that we had.
Special mention must be mentioned however, of the exciting 10th anniversary celebrations that ran through two consecutive weeks ending early in October. What an eventful moment in our church! I thank each and every participant who contributed ideas and resources to make it what it was. My appreciation goes particularly to the few people who worked assiduously to ensure that the event was successful. God bless you real good! Also to every member of the Advisory Committee, as well as all the ministry groups I say a big God bless you! The Scripture tells us in Daniel 11:32b, “The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits”. From this Scripture springs up our theme for the coming year, 2019. It will be a year of “GREAT EXPLOITS.” I urge you all therefore, to begin to get excited because a great year is ahead of us.
I conclude with an important program information. Effective January 2019, our “Miracle Tuesday” will move to mid week fellowship under the title “MIDWEEK COVENANT ENCOUNTER. With this change, our first midweek fellowship will take place on Wednesday January 2, 2019. Be sure to adjust your schedules accordingly to enable you embrace these covenant meetings. Lastly, mark your calendar for our New Year retreat on January 13.
My family and I wish you all a very happy Christmas and a joyous and prosperous New year!
Pastor Sam
December 2018.
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From Pastor Sam’s Desk
Wednesday February 14 was Ash Wednesday in the church calendar. It marked the beginning of the Lenten season. It was also the beginning of the six weeks that will take the church to Easter Sunday. What does that means for you? First, it makes you a part of the Christian
heritage. Our Christian faith was not born the day you were born. It began 2000 years ago when Jesus came to die for you. Second, it gives you the opportunity to identify with the sufferings of Christ during his ministry on earth. These are the expectations from you throughout the season of lent. Spend each and every day repenting and reflecting on the sacrifice of Calvary. Calvary was the place where your sins were paid for in full. Lent demands therefore, some level of sacrifice on your part. What can you sacrifice as a response for what Jesus did for you? In case you are wondering, there will at least, be one corporate opportunity for you to respond in kind. Throughout the Holy Week namely, March 26 - 31, we shall observe our annual “Week of Sacrifice” as a week of sober reflection and abstinence from much indulgences. In practical terms, you will be expected to save from food and drinks abstinence and be ready to offer your savings as a special offering to Jesus during our Easter Sunday celebration. Get excited about this opportunity!
Church Matters
As you are already aware, March 10 is our Church’s Annual Meeting. As has been the practice in the past, issues relating to church economy will be lifted and positions filled at various levels of our church life including our own Executive Committee. You must all pray for this process so that both the returning and new leaders will be chosen into the work with great enthusiasm and dedication. But in addition to your prayers, you are expected attend this important meeting so that our congregation will be well represented.
Our new preaching schedule just kicked off with the theme “Experiencing the Power of God”. Under this theme, we shall examine the demonstration of the power of God in the lives of a number of people in the Scriptures. This theme will lead us through Easter when this power raised Jesus from the dead. I urge you not to miss any of these topics.
Program Alerts
Two important programs are coming up during the season. March 24 will be an Easter musical outreach in Hallunda Centrum at the usual
time of 12-2.30 pm. We thank the Lord for the continuing opportunity to take the gospel out to the shopping mall. Also, our usual Good Friday “To Golgotha with Jesus” will be replaced with a Good Friday evening Gospel music experience tagged “Sound of Majesty”. We may have one or two guest artists join us on this day. Get excited about these and other events coming up in the coming weeks and months.
The final program alert worth noting is that we shall be marking our 10th anniversary this year in grand style during the period 1st-7th October. Some of you will be called upon to take up some responsibilities towards this. We hope you will gladly answer that call.
Soon this darkness of winter will begin to give way to brightness of Spring and Summer. Until that happens, may the Lord remain your light and the Rock of your salvation, always keeping in mind our theme for the year, “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2).
With lots of love from my wife and I.
February 2018
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Yet again, another year is fast racing past us. If like me, you are yet to come to terms with the fact that effectively, by the time you read this, there will be less than a month for 2017 to be consigned to the annals of history just like those before it.
Each day you slept and woke up, you helped the numbers to reduce while the number of your days on earth increased. One day after another we all advanced towards something; something not quite well known to us, leaving behind many yesterdays’ totally impossible to return to. This reminds me of something King David said in Psalm 90:12, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” We have had over eleven months since January to learn this great lesson of doing like David enjoined us to do. My question for you then is, “What have you learnt?” Have you numbered your days? Have you “gained a heart of wisdom”, as the NIV would put it? As we watch the year come to and, perhaps this is my challenge to you to keep pondering over, especially as everything indicates that the end of the age is near. In other words, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, is knocking on the door. He will come again just like he said he would, (John 14:1-3).
The Advent season reminds us that Christmas smells in the air. Nearly everything all around us bears witness to that-the roadways, the shopping malls, the garage sales and the grocery stores. The frenzy has indeed begun effectively. But, just like I have always challenged you in the past during seasons such as this, do not allow the message, the real reason for the season to be drowned out by the sights and sounds of commerce. We must not be silent this time! Satan wants the message behind Christmas to fade away. We must never allow it! Therefore, tell everyone around you that Jesus Christ was given to the world as the Saviour. He is the reason we celebrate. Again refuse to be drawn into an attitude of political correctness. You offend no one when you wish them “Happy Christmas” rather than “Happy holiday”. Christmas is about Jesus Christ, pure and simple! It is not just a holiday. Its purpose is to remind the world, your friends and associates that his presence will never go away. He is the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords. Be a bearer of that Good News this Christmas! When you do, you would have fulfilled the real purpose for this wonderful season.
The Year 2017
Join me to acknowledge the overwhelming faithfulness of God to me and to each one of you who made Equmeniakyrkan Hallunda (Int’l) your spiritual home during the period. We entered the year together and we are getting to the end of it together. To me, that’s nothing short of God’s faithfulness. Rather than death, the Lord added many lives to our church. Rather than funerals, we celebrated thanksgivings, dedications and birthdays possibly more than every single church within our community. God has been our healer, our deliverer in times of trials, our supplier in times of need, and our strength in times of weakness. Indeed, the Lord was our everything during the year 2017! We can all therefore bow in adoration and repeat the words of this one song that nearly became our anthem throughout the year, “Everything written about you is great!”
My final word is to appreciate each one who served the Lord faithfully through our Ministry this year. From all the Babafemi-led Executive Committee members to the leaders and members of every ministry group I say a big God bless you! You will not lose your reward in Jesus’ name!
Reflecting back, aside from our scheduled weekly programs, the Lord provided us with opportunities to let the Gospel out to members of our community. As you would recall, we played host to a couple of guest speakers including one from outside the shores of Sweden. In addition, we undertook evangelistic outreaches at both Hallunda Centrum and outside our church. Our summer picnic and the just-concluded International Cultural Week were also highlights of a year that helped us fulfil part of our cardinal objectives as the International congregation of our parish. I pray that the Lord will bless and cause all the seeds sown in peoples’ lives to germinate into mature faith in Christ in the name of Jesus Christ.
As we look to 2018, let’s all be determined to enthrone Him in our lives, family and church more than ever before. Brace up, for it is not yet time for rest. Fights remain to be fought, and victories remain to be won. But the Lord is on our side!
My wife and I wish you all a most blessed and happiest Christmas you’ve ever known!
December 2017
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My Beloved sisters and brothers in Christ, I most warmly welcome you back from whatever part of the world you’ve been to for your summer vacation. Isn’t it wonderful that God in his infinite wisdom gave us the idea of rest? He didn’t simply advice us to rest. He demonstrated it. God is the teacher who teaches through lived examples. We read that much in Genesis 2 verse 2, “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.” With no iota of doubt, rest is good, and good rest is most desirable. And so welcome back to work, to family but also to the huge work of the kingdom in our hands. Rest has to be a blessing by re-invigorating and reenergizing you for greater exploits. That the reason for it. I will also acknowledge those of you who held the saddle while the rest were away on vacation. God bless you real good, and I sincerely hope that you too will take the time to get yourselves some rest before the intense end of year activities set in.
Autumn Calls…
As you may have observed, the summer lights are gradually giving way to autumn darkness. That will soon come with it the chills of Swedish winter that signal that 2017 is gradually winding down. But the darkness of winter, or the northern colds of Scandinavia are not enough to quench the fervency of spirit with which we must all approach all the many outreach and personal and congregational enrichment programs that lie before us. We will continue to bear witness to the gospel in all kinds of ways. To do this, we must all embrace the many exciting activities detailed in our worship program schedule recently released. There are troves of blessings for you in there. But also, there are outreach opportunities waiting for you to be part of so that we will be able to sustain our three cardinal objects namely, Preaching the Gospel, Building Community, and Touching Lives with the Love of Jesus. To these and other objectives we must remain faithful.
Please, note that we have a major program coming up in October namely, our annual International Cultural Week (ICW). The details are in the worship bulletin. I implore all our member nations to prepare adequately for this important event. God willing, some eminent personalities including some African Ambassador in Sweden will be in attendance. Also, we are working hard to be covered by the news media including channel 10 Christian TV. The Lord will help us in Jesus name!
Lastly, I want to thank the Lord for the various upgrading currently going on in our church building which I am sure many of you may have noticed. I implore you to support these efforts through increasing your giving but also, through answering the call for helping hands each time the need arises. I thank the church board and everyone in leadership for your faithfulness to the calling you have. God bless you, and God bless Equmeniakyrkan Hallunda in Jesus glorious name!
August 2017
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Friends in Christ, I bring you greetings once again in the name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. I thank the Lord for the great outpouring of his love and for the sustained growth that we are experiencing. You are a significant part of that growth and I do hope that you will see it as God’s immeasurable grace poured out to you.
As you all well know, we are going through a period of transition within the rank and file of our leadership. Time has gone so very fast since March of last year when The Executive Committee under the leadership of brother Babafemi Martins began its one year leadership tenure of our congregation. During the months between then and now, our congregation experienced lots of progress which are well known and appreciated by each one us. I personally thank every member of his team for the good work and for being very supportive of me in this work. We welcome with open arms those of them that may be returned to their offices, while wishing the rest all of God’s blessings as they move to other aspects of the work. Let us trust the Lord with much prayers to move the work of our congregation to the next level as we prepare to enter into another year of ministry in the mighty name of Jesus.
From Grass to Grace
Our just-concluded winter outreach revival conference was a huge success to the glory of God. I hope we were all able to understand and appreciate the power of testimony which was what that program was about. Rev. Nyangu’s story was doubtless, an example of that. We heard how the Lord can pick a person out of the place of obscurity and announce the person with the megaphone of heaven. You heard that your humblest beginnings are no barriers to God’s promotion, and you heard that nothing is impossible to anyone who dares to seek God with desperation and faith. This reminds me about God’s word in Jeremiah 28:13 where God says thus; “And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” If you can seek him with the kind of desperation of a young Muslim cattle rearer from a remote Nothern Nigeria village, then you are candidate of divine translation; translation from nothingness to something, from ordinary to extraordinary and from irrelevance to indispensability.
Over the next five weeks or so, we will be exploring mostly what our responsibilities as agents of transformation through our own testimonies are in our Sunday sermons. Salvation comes with some responsibilities on our part. If you are a child of God then you have a story to tell. Your testimony is powerful enough to challenge your hearers to also put their trust in God. As one of my teachers once said, when you witness to someone, you are like a beggar who is telling another beggar where you got bread. That’s powerful isn’t it? That’s all you are required to do. Tell your godless neighbour, your unbelieving friend, your depressed work colleague etc, about the man who gave you salvation, joy, peace and wholeness. People can doubt your preaching but they cannot doubt your lived experiences. Your story is the most potent evangelism tool you have. Use it! When mixed with prayer, you will see great rewards by way of the souls you will gain to the kingdom.
Finally, as I have always urged you, continue to bear one another up in prayer, especially as we see the enemy bring on all forms of attacks on God’s people. Let us bear one another’s burdens as the Scripture urges us to, (Galatians 6:2). Look out for new people finding our church and find out what their needs are. That is the only way we can win people for the Lord.
Blessings and peace!
Spring 2017
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