The Powerful Gospel Goes Forth

An update from Jim Donohue, Pastor of Covenant Fellowship Church, PA, USA, and Director of Evangelism for Sovereign Grace Churches…

A big reason why we're so eagerly seeking to plant churches is to see lost men and women come to know the forgiveness of their sins that can only be found in Jesus Christ.

This last September, we planted a church in rural Indiana with 22 people. In their launch they took their community groups through the Proclaim Course (https://proclaimcourse.org/) to motivate and equip their people in evangelism. And they just finished running their third Bridge Course (https://bridgecourse.org/), a course we designed to tell people about the good news of Jesus Christ, and their church now has more than 70 people attending each Sunday!

We also launched our first Bridge Course in London last month and are working on translating the course into 3 more languages bringing the total number up to 10.  Another exciting development is that we’ve modified our web site so that it can be viewed entirely in Spanish and we are working on doing the same thing in Chinese and other languages.

We have seen the power of God transforming so many lives in recent months. Here’s a story that displays the incredible power of the gospel to redeem and restore. It’s from a woman named Julia. Her brother invited her atheist father to Bridge and he got saved a few years ago. And through their combined witness, God saved Julia in a dramatic way.  Here is some of her story…

“I’d spent the better part of the last decade willfully rejecting God. I mutilated God’s character and began a journey of self-discovery that I thought would lead to my deliverance but in fact promised to separate me from my Creator. In early May of 2016, I stepped boldly out of the closet, clothed in my new queer identity, and I leapt into the world’s embrace. I finally internalized the one lie that had haunted me from childhood: God does not love me. And I thought, if God could reject me, that means, I could reject Him too…right? Years went by as I convinced myself I didn’t need His love, that I didn’t even want it. And yet, I searched for it with a screaming soul as I looked to others for the satisfaction that only God could give. I expected fulfillment from my relationships, but they left me hollow and increasingly desperate, until I became an open wound of unhealed hurts, unable to make it through a single day without breaking down and lashing out. The pressure was building, and I was scared that it would culminate in an irreversible act of self-injurious behavior. I had lost hope, resigned to the belief that this was just how it was, how it would always be.

It was here, in the bottleneck of my distress, that my Father in Heaven offered me salvation through the patient persistence of my father and brother here on earth. It was early one morning when my brother Antonio again asked if he could read to me from the Psalms, and by God’s Grace alone, this time, I listened. Our Dad joined, and four hours went by in which they testified and tenderly answered my questions. That same night, I invited Jesus into my life as my Treasure, Friend, Savior, and God. I wept with shame for my sins against Him, horror-struck by every rejection I had denied Him with. I looked upon the cross with new eyes, recognizing my sins hanging from our Creator as ribbons of flesh, and I wanted to look away, unable to bear the enormity of His suffering, but I’d soon learn at Bridge that this was how it had to be…decided before the beginning, outside of time and space: the solemn agreement. A selfless plan to save our wretched souls baked inside the most magnificent love story ever told, written to us as an invitation, while we were dead in our sin.

On May 11th, 2024, almost 8 years to the day since I’d come out and traded God’s love for the fleeting promises of this world, Jesus, our Lord, called me by name, saying “you are mine.” On that day, He delivered me, and a peace settled into my bones, making a home for itself among the weeds.”

 You can find the rest of Julia’s story here. Praise God for how he is using our churches to reach the lost. God is doing a great work. And we have the privilege of joining him in the unstoppable spread of the gospel.