Enjoying Gospel Partnership In Frankford
An update from Stephen Bowne, Senior Pastor of Grace City Church, Frankford, Philadelphia, USA...
Grace City Church of Frankford is a Sovereign Grace Church in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Frankford. Frankford is a very poor and needy neighborhood. Our congregation matches the make-up of the community around us. We are a church of people in recovery from addiction, people that have criminal records, people that come from broken families and low education, people that struggle to get and keep jobs, and people that don’t have their own homes or don’t know where their next meal will come from.
We are a small church of about 40 people (including children) on a Sunday. It’s a beautiful mix of people from all walks of life, different ethnicities, and various levels of cognition. We gather on Sundays to celebrate the gospel together through singing, preaching, and taking communion together. We meet on Wednesdays to study the Bible and pray together. We evangelize and do good works in the neighborhood together. We fellowship together and disciple new believers. We are being a local church in our context, and that is simultaneously very ordinary and also, because of God’s work, very extraordinary.
Because of our demographics, our church survives only through other churches partnering with us to support us. We have received some support from other churches as well, but the vast majority of our support comes from Sovereign Grace churches and especially from our region. We were planted in 2018 in Frankford through this partnership and continue to survive as a church through partnership. In September of 2021 God used our partnership with other churches to make a way for us to purchase a building in Frankford and to begin the process of renovating it into a church.
Like all building projects, it took longer and was much more expensive than we first anticipated, but God continued to supply everything we needed all along the way. Financial support and work teams came from Sovereign Grace churches to supply all that we needed. And, thanks be to God, we had our first Sunday worship service at the new building on April 2nd! We are looking forward to what God has instore for us in this new building. Please pray for us as we seek His direction for the future.
Our story is an extraordinary story of God using ordinary local churches to help our ordinary local church to plant and build in Frankford. Praise God for His work in many different contexts throughout the world! What a privilege to partner together with you all.
