How we started...
Harbour Light Ministries USA is a unique ministry birthed from a desire to understand more of the LORD - YHWH and have a deeper relationship with Him.
We started meeting during the week to study the Word, worship, and pray. In one of our meetings a young lady in our group interrupted Pastor Janet's worship and handed her three quarters. Pastor Janet looked down at them, confused and asked the young lady, Liz, why she was giving her 75 cents? Liz said, "Because that is my tithe and you are our pastor!" At that point someone turned off the music and everyone gathered around and the group told Pastor Janet that clearly she was the pastor.
On Sunday, April 25, 2005 Pastor Janet was ordained. YHWH had told her it should be the weekend of the 24th, which (we didn't know) was Passover that year! Pastor David Stobbe of Harbour Light Ministries, Nova Scotia, Canada came down to conduct the ordination and we became Harbour Light Ministries, USA.
Healing is the heart of Harbour Light Ministries. Isaiah 61 has always been our theme--healing for the broken and freedom for captives.
In June 2003, Pastor Janet was alone worshiping and YHWH spoke to her and gave what we have come to call a "download." He spoke about the Bride of Messiah not being the Catholics and Protestants uniting, but the Bride being all about Israel--the Jew and Gentile united. YHWH said that we need to understand the Hebrew roots of His Word and learn the truth so that we can be free.
We began to study. What we found was that for the first time in our lives, we had finally found Spiritual food--truth and not only did the proverbial "light bulb" begin to come on, but "stadium lights" began to turn on as we began to understand the Bible based on the Hebrew language and mindset.
As we learned, we slowly began to make changes in our lives. We learned about eating according to the Word and about the Feasts and as a group stepped out of Christian holidays and began to celebrate YHWH's holidays per His direction. In January 2011 we moved from Sunday service to Shabbat service on Saturday!
Today we are still learning and we will always be. We now consider ourselves Messianic and through studying, recognize that we are part of Israel. We have either become part of Israel through grafting in (see Ezekiel 37 and Romans 11) or because our families come from the Southern or Northern Kingdom of Israel. Some of us are part of Israel because our heritage goes back to the Southern Kingdom of Israel because some of our families were Jewish, or because we are from the Northern Kingdom of Israel--the ones who were captured and never returned--and are now the Christian church. The good news is we don't have to know exactly how we are part of Israel, only that we are because we, like the foreigners who came out of Egypt with Moshe (Moses), choose to live as YHWH instructed.
Our mission is no longer just about healing and freedom because of wounds and hurts and deception in our lives, but also about the healing and freedom that we find as we understand the Hebrew roots of our faith and walk in the whole Bible - the Torah! We didn't know how captive we were. We didn't even understand grace and truth. Praise YHWH we are learning! It is a crazy thing at first, but all we had to do was study the Word, based on the Hebrew mindset and language, and to desire truth so badly that we are willing to die to what we thought was truth.
