We started in a living room. We have never stopped moving.

Twenty years, five addresses, no building of our own

In 2005 a handful of families in Ma'ale Adumim were driving into Jerusalem every week for congregation. They asked their leaders whether they could start something at home. The answer was: wait a year, and pray. They waited, and they prayed, and they were sent out with a blessing.

The first year met in Avraham and Shoshi Ben-Hod's living room. The furniture went out to the yard on Shabbat morning; the bedrooms became the children's classes. When the living room ran out of room we moved to a field with a few thin trees in it. After the field we spent about a year in a cave in the Good Samaritan National Park, on the road down to Jericho.

Around 2012 we rented a former nightclub underneath a bowling alley. Every wall was painted black and the place was filthy. The whole congregation turned up to change that — paint, tools, kids underfoot. From the first month we were in it, the giving of the congregation doubled and covered the rent. Nobody organised that.

Today we gather in a building on the edge of the desert, and there are about 120 of us. We have never owned a room we met in. Twenty years in, that has stopped feeling like a problem and started feeling like the point.

What a week here looks like

From October we are also starting home groups across the city — back to the living rooms we came from.

A Place at the Table

We have been funded for twenty years by the people who sit in the room — tithes, cash in a basket, standing orders from households who have kept this going for twenty years. That is how we would like it to stay. But there are a few things we cannot reach on our own, and this is where we are asking for help from outside.

A monthly gift, at any size, is worth more to us than the same money once — it is the only kind we can plan a year around. Partners get a letter from us every month with what actually happened, and an open invitation to come and sit at the table in person.

Who we are, plainly

We are a Messianic congregation: Jewish and non-Jewish believers in Yeshua, meeting in Hebrew, in Israel. We are a registered Israeli public-benefit company — תקוות השני בע"מ (חל"צ), number 513729178 — filed with the Registrar of Endowments.

We do not publish our street address. We would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. Write to us and we will tell you where we are.

The monthly letter

One email a month from Avraham and the team. What we prayed for, who came, what it cost, and what we are asking God for next. No campaigns.