Yesterday was a great day in our Heritage Reformed Congregation of Grand Rapids with the ordination and inaugural sermon of Rev. Darryl Dedert (center of photo) as our full-time pastor. Rev. Dedert will be preaching for us a few times per month while focusing primarily on pastoring our many young people and leading our various evangelistic outreach endeavors.
Pastor Dedert is a recent PRTS graduate who has been a member of our church for nearly twenty years and his wife Kara (second from left in photo) was raised in our church and has been with us all her life, except when she and Darryl served a few years in Cambodia some years ago. They returned to Michigan in order to care for the urgent medical needs of their son, Calvin. They are blessed with four additional children, and are dearly loved among us (photo taken after the inaugural sermon—one daughter was missing at the moment).
In the morning, Dr. Michael Barrett preached Darryl’s ordination sermon well from Ezekiel 2 on “A Paradigm of Ministry,” focusing on the motive, mandate, message, method, and mission of ministry. I did Darryl’s ordination, gave him a personal charge, and led the impressive laying on of hands ceremony, with ten men involved in quoting biblical text while laying hands on our new pastor. In the evening, Darryl preached his inaugural sermon on Paul’s prayer for the Colossians under the theme “Our Prayer for Our Church,” focusing on being filled with the knowledge of God and walking worthy of Him.
The Lord willing, one month from now (Nov. 20), we hope to ordain another full-time pastor in our church, John Byl from Ontario, who is also a recent PRTS graduate. He will preach once nearly every week and focus on pastoring the congregation as a whole. Please pray that God will bless the ministries of these two dear brothers, such that God’s name will be glorified, true believers matured, and the unsaved saved.
