One Year Anniversary
We give thanks to God for His mercy and grace as we reflect on our first year as a church plant. In February of 2024, Christ Reformed Church (CRC) began holding evening service in Florence, KY. Our story, however, did not begin there. In 2021, I was installed as a co-pastor at Ascension Reformed Church (ARC), and one of my tasks was to assess and grow interest in a Reformed mission work on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. Known as part of the “Greater Cincinnati” area, northern Kentucky consists primarily of three counties: Kenton, Boone, and Campbell, yet can also include the three outlying counties of Pendleton, Gallatin, and Grant, yielding a total population of around 448,194—and fast growing.
In 2021, we began holding monthly Fellowship Groups in Kentucky, wherein the Kentucky-native ARC members could gather for Bible study, prayer, and fellowship, and also invite friends and neighbors. In fact, this is how several of our current core group members first got involved. As time approached to launch CRC, our monthly Fellowship Groups, which met in homes, morphed into a monthly Reformed Bible Study, which met at the church property that we planned to rent for CRC evening services. The Reformed Bible Study was a great opportunity to present and explain key Reformed doctrines, such as unconditional election, covenant theology, and infant baptism.
Since launching evening services in February of 2024 with thirteen souls from ARC (including my family), the Lord has been very kind to us. Almost immediately we held a New Members’ Class, which brought five additional souls into our membership. We also celebrated a profession of faith from a baptized young adult. By the end of 2024, we offered a second New Member’s Class, which is poised to add six to eight additional souls in the coming weeks, bringing our membership to between twenty-four and twenty-six souls. Our average weekly attendance for the year, however, was thirty-six souls.
Over the past year, we have began training up a deacon, we started a monthly Fellowship Group, and held our first Nine Lessons and Carols Christmas Service. I can report with thankfulness to God that our core group is growing, both numerically and spiritually. We will enter “Year One” of the church planting phases in July of 2025, and we are amazed of all that God has done for us already!
We enter 2025 with the same vision as our beginning, namely, to be a confessional church that stands on Scripture, engages unbelief with truth and love, relies on the ordinary means of grace, and seeks God’s comforting Word and Spirit in every circumstance of life. We also covet your prayers as we approach the next phase in church planting. Pray that we would be faithful to Christ in doctrine and life, and in worship and evangelism; pray that our membership would increase and that additional officers will be raised up; pray that we would be able to have the appropriate membership numbers to start Sunday morning services; and pray that we would find another church building to rent wherein Sunday morning services would be possible.
