Location: Broomall, Pa.

Presbytery: Atlantic

Organization: 1798

Membership: 67 communicant; 22 baptized

Pastors: Alex Tabaka

Website: broomallrpc.org

If you come to Broomall on the Lord’s Day, you’ll find a lot going on. We start at 9:45 a.m. with Sabbath school, followed by morning worship at 11:00. Then we head downstairs for lunch together. Each family brings its own food, but there’s always enough to share with visitors. After lunch we have a second, more informal service at 1:15 p.m. If you stay for everything, when you finally leave church around 2:30 p.m., you’ll have spent most of the day with us.

We didn’t always do things that way. In the early 1970s, a time only the oldest of us can remember, we had worship services both morning and evening. Then, the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo and the ensuing fuel crisis hit. Gas prices soared and gas became hard to get; so we moved our evening service to the afternoon, and we stuck around between services and ate lunch together. The main idea was to save on fuel by saving on travel.

It turned out that the Lord had additional blessings for us. Our new schedule greatly increased the opportunity for congregational fellowship and made it easier for people to come from a distance. It also opened up Lord’s Day evenings for families to invite each other or visitors to their homes.

In 1981, there were two children in our Sabbath school—the pastor’s children. We went through a period of significant growth with an influx of newer, younger families. By the year 2000, we had a good mix of ages, and families came from all over the Philadelphia area, even from Lancaster County, which is over 50 miles away. Next, God called a number of our young men into pastoral ministry. They and their families went off to seminary and into service throughout the denomination. At the same time, our children were growing up and going away to college or work in other parts of the country. Before we realized it, we were becoming an older congregation again. Then a wonderful thing happened. Many of our children not only came back but started families of their own and began to assume positions of leadership in the church. Most mornings there are 70–80 at church, including the small children who mostly stay with their parents during the service.

Today we still draw people from the greater Philadelphia area, but we also have numerous families that live within walking distance of each other and within five miles of the church in Broomall. Many of them see each other during the week and help with each other’s children.

A Wednesday night prayer meeting, a monthly women’s fellowship meeting, and periodic Saturday social events comprise our other organized activities. We give to things like Reformation Translation Fellowship and RP Global Missions, but we also support local groups. For example, we support a crisis pregnancy center in Philadelphia. Over the years, a number of us have volunteered there, serving on its hotline, helping in the office, and sitting on its board. The way things often go with local ministries is that individual members get involved first and then bring the rest of the congregation along with them.

Concerning Philadelphia: it is the sixth-largest city in the country and home to many colleges, universities, and medical schools, with its metropolitan population topping six million. Our church has been a waypoint for pilgrims, as students and others come through for a few years and then move on.

We are one of the three congregations that formed the Reformed Presbytery in 1798, over the years welcoming immigrants from Ireland and other countries, being a station on the Underground Railroad, and working with a mission to Eastern European Jewish immigrants after 1900.

We would love to have you show up some Lord’s Day morning to hear solid preaching from our pastor, Alex Tabaka, and to get to know us over lunch.

We encourage you to pray for us as we continue to work at reaching our neighbors with the gospel, as we seek to minister to students and other pilgrims coming through, as we pray for places to start new congregations in our area, and as newly elected church officers take their places of leadership.

—Joe Comanda, Bill Edgar, Julia Mann, and Mandy Werts