Ilagan Christian Church began with seven leaders and a simple wish: to worship God together with their children.
Nobody started out planning a big building or a large crowd. The first members met as families to read the Bible, pray and worship, and they did it through a great deal of sweat, tears and prayer. Everything the church has now grew out of that small start. We don’t take credit for it. One plants, another waters, but God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6–7).
The beginning
Seven leaders and their families started meeting together. They wanted to worship God with their children, and that was the whole plan. There was no talk of a large building or big numbers, only a plain desire to seek God as families. They gave it a great deal of sweat, tears and prayer, and God honoured that small, simple obedience.
Growing
Seven became ten, ten became thirty, thirty became fifty, and the church kept growing after that. The young people of those first years are parents now, leading their own homes. The toddlers who ran around the hall during the service, and the babies rocked to sleep through the sermon, have grown up and serve in the church today.
Today
The first leaders have become the church’s older generation, and a new one is taking up the work. Everyone in the pews today is part of the calling that began with those few families. None of it came from clever planning. Through every change, one thing has stayed the same: Christ is Lord of His church, and He is the one who keeps it.
Through every season
Our years together have not all been easy. God has given us times of joy and times of sorrow, years of plenty and years of want, things that went well and things that failed. He led us through hard seasons to make us pure and steady, not to break us (1 Peter 1:6–7), and in them we saw His help more clearly than anywhere else.
In some of those seasons all we could do was wait on Him, and in them He gave answers to prayer we can only call miracles. The good years taught us to give thanks. The setbacks taught us that we cannot carry the church ourselves. Both pointed us the same way: to hope in Him and to give ourselves to Him alone.
However many years the Lord gives us, we want to keep following Him, because He has stayed faithful to the people He chose. We don’t intend to grow tired of moving forward in His name, and we pray that our children and theirs will tell the next generation what He has done (Psalm 78:4).
Our prayer for the years ahead
Our prayer is the one Moses prayed. He knew that numbers, land and money were worth nothing without God Himself:
“If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?”
Exodus 33:15–16
And God answered him, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name” (Exodus 33:17). The church has been kept by God’s grace from the beginning, and it will be kept the same way in the years to come. That isn’t because we are strong. It’s because the One who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light is faithful (1 Peter 2:9; 1 Thessalonians 5:24). To God be the glory.