ASHLAND - The congregation of The New Beginning Church marked the anniversary of its first worship service on Sunday and celebrated one year of being a ministry of and for the community.
The church opened its doors on May 19, 2013, for its first Sunday service, and since that time, the ministry has shown growth both within and without the church's walls. At that first service, the Rev. Larry Coutlee, pastor, said the intention was to take the message of Jesus Christ beyond the physical structure of the church and into the community. It would be a "church without walls" in many ways.
The storefront church is located at 919 Centre St. The location is the site of the former Herwick's Hardware Store, which had a downtown presence for decades. Worship services are held at 11 a.m. every Sunday. The church is affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America.
After some announcements and introductions by the pastor's wife, Rebecca Coutlee, the Rev. Coutlee opened the service.
"May 19th last year we held our first service in this building a year and a day ago," he said. "We had had four services before that at the youth center at 12th and Market streets. I want to thank everybody right now for everything they have done in helping us to get this location ready. There has been a lot of work put into this first floor. When we came in here on a Sunday evening, the thrift store had moved out and left everything in here That's what it seemed like."
He explained once the building was cleaned out, the process of repairing, painting and other work began in earnest, and over the year, church members have come in on Tuesdays or Saturdays to make improvements. In the near future, a crew from an EFCA church in Frederick, Maryland, will visit to do work, including building an office and adding another restroom.
One thing that the congregation has learned that what is planned is not necessarily what comes about.
"What we want and what God wants usually turns out to be different things," Coutlee said. "We had all kinds of plans of what we were going to do. Have you heard the phrase that if you ever want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans? Well, he laughed a lot at some of some plans that we had. We had to change plans on the fly, but that's easy when you're a small church. It means you can change direction pretty rapidly."
He explained that the church took over youth ministries in Ashland and Gordon, eventually closed the Gordon site and added Girardville. Coutlee describe the ministry at the church itself as a "family ministry."
"We're looking forward to the next year coming up, and we're just hoping that a lot of the faces we see here today will still be here a year from now," he said.
The pastor introduced a slide show that provided a memory lane of photographs showing what the church looked like when it was being prepared for worship, events in the church and at the youth centers and personal moments of the members.
Coutlee said the Rev. Peter Johnson, associate superintendent of the EFCA's Eastern District Association, was instrumental in the "planting" of the church in Ashland, helping with the steps necessary to form the new congregation.
"New Beginning Church. Why do you think that you have that name? You could have been Christ Church, you could have been Grace Church, you could have been Calvary Church, any number of church names," Johnson said. "Why did you choose New Beginning? I think the answer is this, because most of us have troubles in our lives. Most of us have some sort of history that we wish nobody else really knew about. We have not always walked with God. Sometimes we've done things that we're really ashamed of and we need a new, fresh start, a clean start, a new beginning. Sometimes because of our own doing, sometimes just because the world is broken."
He continued, "This is your one-year anniversary. Like Pastor Larry said, I was here at the beginning watching God bring a new church up from the ashes. A new, fresh start out of brokenness. Has God been faithful? Well, He sure has."
The church has recently partnered with God's Chuckwagon to supply free meals from 4 to 6 p.m. every Friday afternoon in Ashland. The ministry from Shamokin has converted a donated school bus into a mobile soup kitchen and parks it in front of the church at 919 Centre St.
"The first week there were 28 served, the second week was 25, 40 were served the third week, and this past Friday was 44," Coutlee said. "It's starting to grow."
The pastor can be reached by email at lcoutle@yahoo.com, or visit the church's Facebook page (The New Beginning Church) for more information.