This coming Sunday 29th November 09 Howard Kellett will be speaking to the church.

Howard, along with his wife Naomi and their children, are planting a newfrontiers church in Cheltenham called Godfirst Church. Howard and his family moved to Cheltenham in September, having led Hope Church in Manchester. He has been in Christian ministry for 14 years during which time he has been involved in planting in Teeside, Manchester and now Cheltenham.

The few times I have met with Howard I have come to realise that he is a man with a God given pioneering gift and an infectious passion for God’s church. Here is an excerpt from a resent Howard Kellett blog September 18th.

When people think about church they associate us with being at least two decades if not two centuries behind times, and dedicated to the spiritual equivalent of finger exercises. At worst the church is seen as laggards, traditional, past focused, dull and routine, about conformity, lacking risk, desiring safety, controlling passions, hypocritical, empty of compelling dreams and meaningless.

We have been misrepresented or we have misrepresented to others what it means to be a radical (literally proceeding from the root) follower of Jesus. The ancient roots of God's church are its strength. The very fact that we have a message captured beautifully in scripture stretching back at least two or three millennia is absolutely the source of the church's power to not simply resist secular culture but change it one life, one salvation at a time. The very fact that 2000 years of history is full of Christians who changed the world is because they were rooted and established in Jesus (Ephesians 3:17) and practised the ancient pathways of the spiritual disciplines of prayer and study, fasting and solitude, celebration and confession.

Let me encourage you to come to this Sunday’s meeting with the expectation of meeting with God.

Grace and peace to you all.