Kevin & Judy Borrett’s Letter from Gibraltar Standing on THE ROCK – Part One
This is the first of several articles about New Life Church Gibraltar (NLC), it’s people and its mission. The fellowship is a local registered charity and has been in existence for about 25 years. It was formed when individuals left more established denominations in the town to bring together a clearer evangelical witness. It started by meeting in a home before numbers meant moving to a local community centre where it grew significantly quite significantly.
The inability to continue to rent that premises in 2018 as it was repurposed, meant NLC holds its Sun-day service and other meetings in the Church of Scotland, St. Andrews church building. The Church of Scotland (CoS) meet at 10:30 am on a Sunday morning for a punctual one hour service and that small fellowship (10-15 believers) have coffee afterwards in the adjacent room or outside on a patio area. NLC helpers arrive at 11.45 which gives us about 20mins to set up our audio equipment etc and commence our service “at Noon”. Yes starting a few mins late is very punctual for Gibraltar, so I tell visitors not to arrive before five to twelve! Typically our morning congregation numbers about 30 individuals and this grows to about 50 in the summer. Our Sunday service lasts until about 1.30pm and is followed by a “bring & share” comprising sandwiches, sa-voury items and cakes with drinks, finishing around 2.30pm. After that it’s home for a siesta! In the summer we sometimes gather in a local park or at the beach for a time of early even-ing fellowship.
The Sunday service order is slightly different to Rehoboth as we start with a period of about 45 minutes of singing songs, scripture readings and praying before communion and then the message is brought before a final hymn. We have no piano player, so its two guitars and some bongo’s as you can see in the photo.
There is a combined prayer meeting on the first Tuesday evening each month. On other week’s the Men meet on a Tuesday evening (including 1-2 men from CoS and the La-dies meet on a Wednesday evening. All these meetings are held in St Andrews. We also try to hold one or two social event each month, such as a walk on a Saturday afternoon either in Gibraltar or Spain, a beach visit or a cafe breakfast on Sunday at 9.30am, before turning up at St Andrews at 11.30am. Judy and I help Michael and Berenice, the church leaders with that programme and I preach once every 6-8 weeks at NLC as well as covering for Ewan who is the CoS minister and evangelical in his outlook, a couple of times a year.
The heading for these articles……. Yes we worship here on a rock. It’s a big limestone rock which stands 426m high (1,400 ft) and is 2 ½ miles long and one mile wide. However the focus of our worship is “THE ROCK” to whom we all owe our salvation. Never is the connection between NLC and Rehoboth more evident than when we sing “my hope is built on nothing less, than Jesus blood and righteousness” or as we sometime sing here in spanish “Mi esperanza es en Jesús, y su justicia por la cruz”.
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