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| Sunday, June 22, 2008 |
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Global Communion Service Connects the Church
Church of God Ministries, Church of God - General
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By Kevin Stiffler
 Nearly twenty-four hundred worshipers filled the Ward Fieldhouse at Anderson University on Sunday night for the first-ever Global Communion Service of the Church of God. The evening was hosted by Pastors Jim Lyon and Robbie Davis, Jr., with music and worship led by the choir and worship team from Arlington Church of God, Akron, Ohio. Pastor Marty Grubbs and the choir and congregation of Crossings Community Church joined in worship from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Don Smith, principal of KIST, and Daniel Mdobe, CBH Swahili speaker, participated live via Skype from Kima, Kenya. International church leaders from Côte d’Ivoire, India, and Germany sent prerecorded messages. Church leaders from around the world who are in Anderson for this year’s conventions also shared greetings, including Charles Nsengiyumva, of Rwanda; Andrei Kolegov, of Russia; and Isai Hort, of Brazil. Carma Wood, Tommy Moseley, Sandi Patty and daughter Aly, and others shared in powerful testimony and song.
The Sunday evening service was broadcast on local cable television as it has been in past years, but this year an estimated three hundred congregations of the Church of God from across North America and around the world met in their own towns simultaneously, watching the streaming broadcast via the Internet and taking Communion together as the body of Christ. In North America, some congregations that had split many years ago reunited for this act of unity, while other groups gathered with local churches of other faith communions to share in worship. In some countries, the difference in time zones meant that believers met in the middle of the night for worship; some met on Sunday evening and worshiped and prayed together for several hours prior to taking Communion.
Through the miracle of technology and the commitment of Christians to live out their unity in Christ, the service was undoubtedly the largest and most diverse gathering of the Church of God in the history of the movement.
A version of this article appears in the Monday, June 23, 2008, edition of the NAC roundup/08 newsletter. To view the newsletter in its entirety, click here (2.85 MB). The document is in PDF format and requires Adobe Acrobat in order to read and/or print it. If you do not have Acrobat installed on your computer, you can download a free copy of Acrobat Reader here.
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