Leadership

 

 

Profile of Church Leadership

My name is Harry Roberts, and, together with my wife Joy, we constitute the present pastoral leadership of Cornerstone Church.

The Church has (again, at present), one formally recognised Elder who shares the pastoral leadership with us, Collin Coupe.

All three of us have been with Cornerstone (apart from two years that Joy and I and our family spent with Gorton Evangelical Church, in the '90's) since it's inception as a distinctly recognised local community of believers; from the early days in St. John's Anglican Church; through it's incarnation as 'Living Stones Christian Fellowship'; and on to it's present status of Cornerstone Church.

I felt God's call to leadership ministry in 1992, at a John Wimber Conference in Manchester, where both Joy and I—along with a good many folks from St. John's—had a powerful encounter with the Living God through His Holy Spirit.

Around about the same time a core group of believers at St. John's were being convicted by God that the moving of the Holy Spirit amongst us was actually moving us on into forming an independent fellowship (independent of the Anglican denomination, not of God Himself!), I was directed by the Spirit to attend a small, seemingly insignificant, yet Spirit-directed Bible College in Ancoats, Manchester. All of the time that Living Stones was finding it's feet as a community, I was finding my feet in the Word and the Spirit!

In 1995, I left the college (as a student) with some paper qualifications, but a whole lot more spiritual qualifications, and was, in the summer of that year, ordained as a formal 'Reverend'. I returned to the college after graduation to continue as a teacher there, covering subjects such as Old and New Testament Surveys, Christian Ethics, Holy Spirit Enablements, and others.

A few years later, in the noughties, Joy felt motivated by the Spirit to attend a two-year course of study called The Workshop, which served to really challenge and develop her in her relationship with God and His Word, and to ground her and capacitate her for pastoral ministry.

We have two grown-up sons, Sam and Ben, who were with us as infants in the fledgling fellowship that began back in 1993, and who grew up in the environment of the church. Both are Born-Again believers, and both have, in the past, played in the church worship group. They now no longer attend, but their walk with God continues, and both would readily attest to the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, especially at crucial times, and in and through difficult and trying situations.

We have seen the church go through some considerable ups and downs over the last twenty-odd years, in terms of numbers (we don't have a formal membership), and in terms of pastoral problems, and sometimes relationship-testing experiences like the 'Toronto Blessing'! Through it all though, we have been firmly convicted that God's purpose for our small local body is to significantly affect the surrounding community through the presentation of the Gospel in both our words and our deeds. We have met with varying degrees of success, but at present, with The Lighthouse outreach, we perceive opportunities that we haven't hitherto enjoyed for taking the truth of Jesus into the very heart of Mossley.