Philip Ogunniyi

I readily accepted the message. I didn’t however understand the full essence of the message until about 7 years later when for the first time a missionary who was staying in the guest apartment in our house explained to me how Jesus Christ reconciled the world to God through his death. It was the first time that I understood Christ as Saviour.

I remember asking him to give me the tract he used to preach to me and I then went on to use the same tract to preach to my best friend almost as soon as I got back to boarding school.

I started attending IIC in November 2018. Before coming to Ipswich my wife and I had looked up churches in Ipswich and we decided to check IIC out. We have not stopped coming since then.

My role is primarily to work with other relational cell leaders to ensure that together our relational cells are achieving the purpose for which they were conceived by the leadership of the church , which is to serve as vehicles through which DISCIPLES and DISCIPLE MAKERS can be raised.

When you read of the account of the early church, you see this massive throng of people gathering in the temple in Jerusalem defying the conventional Jewish beliefs of their day, refusing to be cowed by their religious leaders, praying to God in the name of Jesus and experiencing miracles and wonders in their meetings, so much so that fellow Jews began to join them in their thousands. Initially, the impression it casts on your mind is that it is a large church gathering in large places.

But when you take a closer look you notice that beneath the massive gatherings is another kind of gathering, a more intimate one, which took place in the homes of members of the church. We are told in Acts 2:46 that they worshipped together at the Temple each day, met in homes for the Lord’s Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity. We see a community, though large in number, yet deeply connected and committed to one another, meeting in their homes, allowing genuine fellowship to blossom amongst them. It is in these small spaces that they are able to worship and pray to God together as a family, show love to another by sharing what they had, speaking truth to one another in love and thereby encouraging one another to mature as disciples of Christ. I see our relational cells as a representation of this smaller and more intimate manifestation of the church.

Our relational cell meetings provide an atmosphere where brothers and sisters in Christ can deepen their relationship with one another in ways that the larger Sunday Services meetings can not. They allow us to worship and pray to our Father together and to inspire us to have a common vision of reaching those who have not yet come to place their faith in Christ as we have. My desire is to see every member of church becoming a part of a relational cell.