How lovely is Thy dwelling place!Within Thy courts I long to be;
The presence, Lord, my spirit craves, For this my heart cries out to Thee.
As
depicted in David's Psalms, the church is the dwelling place of the Lord, a
place where both God and men may find rest.
Correspondingly, Ephesians 2:19 also says: "So then you
are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the
saints and members of the household of God" .
In
the early eighties, a group of Christians, under the Lord's sovereignty, moved
to central Jersey- some for study and some for work. Being attracted and encouraged deeply in their hearts by the love
of God, they desired to pursue further knowledge of Him.They were also aggressively seeking for the Fellowship of Life with other local believers.According to the pure revelation and the
examples of practices of the early churches in the New Testament, they Continued steadfastly in the teaching and the fellowship of the
apostles, in the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2:42)The
first home meeting of Christians was then started in1981 in the neighborhood of
Rutgers University.With the blessings
of the Lord and through the laboring of the saints in one accord in spreading
the gospel, new believers were constantly added to them.Before long, they had more people than any
single house could hold and had to rent conference rooms in nearby hotels,
Sheraton first, then Marriott, for the Lord's Day meetings. Three or four rooms
had to be booked each time to meet the needs of saints speaking different
languages or for children/young people services. Until 1986, by the Lord's
leading, we acquired a property in Franklin Park as our meeting hall, which was
a nursing home, "Emanuel Home", previously owned by "The Brethren" After we
settled in this new place, the assembly increased rapidly from a few scores to
several hundreds.In the early
nineties, prompted by the burning desire to further the Lord's work, saints
started to extend their reach to the northern and the eastern parts of New
Jersey.As a result, two more churches
were established in 1994, The Church in Nutley and The Church in Manalapan,
each with her own meeting hall. The number of believers had multiplied by leaps
and bounds and exceeded one thousand since then. The majority scatters around
central Jersey in the following counties: Middlesex, Sommerset, Mercer,
Monmouth, Union, Morris, etc.More than
50 home meeting places can be found in these areas, as detailed in Our Meeting.
We
are sincerely looking for fellowship with all believers in Christ. Everyone
that has been received by God is automatically received. We desire to serve God
and express Him as the Body of Christ, simply according to His pleasure and the
teachings in the Bible. With a warm welcome, we like to invite all those
pure-hearted pursuers of the Lord to join us in testifying that the Church is
the new man, where there can be no differences by race, culture, or social
status, but Christ is all and in all (Col. 3:11). For the fundamental truth and
our faith, please refer to Our Belief.