Our History
In Nov 2004, a team was commissioned and sent out from South Africa to plant a new church in Wellington, New Zealand. By April 2005 we had moved our weekly gatherings into a public venue. While planted out as a locally autonomous church, we’ve always believed that we are best able to promote the cause of Christ by building relationships with other churches, networks and denominations. With this in mind, we are associated with Acts 29 internationally as well as to the Fellowship of Reformed Baptists locally in New Zealand. While we are indeed a new church plant, due to our formal historical connection with the Reformed Tradition, it might well be said that our history extends all the way back to the historic reformation 500 years ago.
Our Pastor
Michael Beck is originally from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. In 2004, he and his wife, Candice, were sent over with a team specifically for the purposes of planting Gracenet Community Church in Wellington.
He has been married to his beautiful wife, Candice, for 15 years. They have had 3 genuine Kiwi children, Charis, Jesse and Evah, while living in NZ.
Mike has a deep passion for Biblical, Reformed, and Christ-centered theology. He desperately desires that the church move away from thinking about theology as something that is dry, dusty and irrelevant to daily life – to instead seeing it as nothing less than a wellspring and fountain of life for all believers.
For more in this regard, check out Mike’s blog and podcast at www.twoagesojourner.com
Our Vision & Mission
Our vision is to behold and reflect the glory of Christ.
The church has three main purposes; 1) Ministry to God (worship); 2) Ministry to believers (discipleship); 3) Mission to the world (evangelization)
To say that our purpose is “to behold and reflect the glory of Christ” is essentially to talk about all the primary purposes of the church summed up in one Christ-centered statement. The wording is deliberately broad enough to include the many things that we should be doing as a church.
Our mission is to hear and do the Word of God.
Our mission statement describes how the vision will be realized. It is through the ‘hearing of the word’ that we ‘behold the glory of Christ’ – and through ‘the doing of the Word’ that we ‘reflect the glory of Christ’. Here again – it is intended to be an all encompassing statement that becomes further unpacked as we look at our specific strategy for achieving the mission. If you would like to know more about this, please talk to us about joining one of our regular New Member’s Class.
Our Values
Our core values can be summarised as follows:
Real – authentic relationships characterised by honesty and accountability.
Radical – passionately living out our faith, with uncompromising obedience to the Scriptures.
Relevant – allowing the Gospel to be wrapped in the garment of the generation to be reached.
Relational – organic community life with strong emphasis on prayer and fellowship.
Reproducing – committed to saturation planting of more local churches.
Releasing – seeking to release all believers into the fullness of their ministry.
Reformed – embracing the great doctrines that were emphasized during the Reformation.
Our Beliefs
1. We are Christian & Evangelical
We believe in the essential doctrines of the faith as laid out in the Apostles' Creed, Nicene Creed & Athanasian Creed. We seek to partner with all Christians from various churches, denominations and networks that are in agreement with these fundamentals.
2. We are Reformed & Baptist
We are in broad agreement with the great confessions of faith such as the Belgic Confession, Canons of Dort, Heidelberg Catechism, Westminster Confession of Faith, Savoy Declaration & 1689 Baptist Confession.
While reformed, we also have a deep conviction on certain matters of ecclesiological articulation. For this reason, the most defined summary of what we believe can be found in the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. This was the confession that was used by the famous baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It is the confessional statemetent of historic reformed baptists churches, and continues to be the confession favoured by many modern reformed Baptist churches.