I remember the first conversations I had about the possibility of growing to two Sunday morning gatherings. It was back in June last year. Even as time progressed and the Littlehampton Primary School gymnasium got more and more full on Sunday mornings, April 29 2012 seemed such a long way off!
And yet this Sunday will be our last Sunday as one congregation at 10 AM! The following week we launch our 9 AM and 11 AM gatherings as we seek to create space for more people to join us. I’m confident that in the coming weeks and months God will continue to grow our church as he draws in more and more people.
If you were to peer through the windows of the Trinity Mount Barker office on a Friday night, what you find might not fit with what you expect to see in a church office! GiG (Growing in God) our youth group for school years 7 – 11 meets in the office every Friday during school term for Bible study surrounded with food, games, sport and plenty of time for relationship-building. When we started our church we ran a combined youth and young adults group, then last year we started this separate youth group. From around 6 members just over a year ago, the group has grown to over 30 kids and leaders on a Friday evening. It’s a bit hard to imagine that many people in the meeting room of the office!
We thrilled to have so many young people both within our church family and also connecting with us from outside. The topic for this term has been the Apostle Paul’s letter to Romans, so our young people aren’t just sitting back and taking it easy! Studying Romans has been a real stretch for many and has challenged these young ones to think carefully about their faith the Scriptures.
God has brought many people into our church in the nearly two years that we have been together. This growing community of young and old and in between has been one of the great blessings we’ve received from God’s hand. I’m constantly hearing of people’s excitement at being part of a growing family where God is at work making himself known and drawing people to himself. A growing family also presents challenges! This year our children’s and youth ministry has grown to six separate groups at three different addresses and on Sunday mornings, the kids in our Children’s Ministry have taken over yet another room in the Molly Miels building. And as was especially evident over the holidays when the children stayed in the service, we’re heading steadily towards capacity in the gymnasium.
Since July 2011 the Leadership Team have been considering ways for us to continue to accommodate the growing number of people that God is drawing into our community, and as you will be aware, our plan is to grow to two Sunday morning gatherings, at 9 AM and 11 AM from the 29th of April.
This week I spent some time in Melbourne taking part in a church planting conference. The Geneva Push is an Australia-wide network seeking to see, under God, hundreds of churches evangelised into existence across the country and the National In The Chute conference brings together church leaders and members from all different parts of the country to hear the Bible taught and to learn from each others’ ideas and experiences.
My role in the conference was to speak about our experiences in church planting, what we’ve learned and what we’ve seen God do amongst us in the 21 months since Trinity Mount Barker began. I got to answer lots of great questions about our church and explain the ways we do different things. It was great to see so many churches and Christian people trying to work out how to take the gospel of Jesus forward in their regions.
Thursday night a small group gathered in the church office to pray for Christian brothers and sisters who are persecuted for their faith in Jesus. It seemed highly appropriate, praying for these members with us of the body of Christ in the middle of our teaching series on prayer! Here was a chance to put some of what we’ve been learning from the Scriptures into practice. It wasn’t only us praying. Christians around the world joined together in prayer this past week as part of the International Day of Prayer for the persecuted church.
Every day around the world, countless thousands of our Christian brothers and sisters suffer violence, intimidation, loss of employment, imprisonment and death simply because they confess Jesus Christ as Lord. As I mentioned last Sunday, it’s a sad fact that more Christians have died for their faith in Jesus in the last century than in all the previous centuries of the church combined.
Last Sunday was a great day! Sharing in Will & Shirley’s wedding was a special treat. Thank you to everyone who helped out with our slightly different Sunday and please keep praying for Will and Shirley as they adjust to married life together.
Last Sunday we also learnt something. We learnt how many people we can comfortably fit in the building – exactly as many as were here! Sure, there was a seat here and a seat there, but we reached the effective capacity of the gym. If one more family had walked in, they wouldn’t have been able to sit together. In fact, as the last few people joined us, the helpers who sit up the back gave up their seats and stood up for the service.
On behalf of the Fopp Family let me say a huge thank you to all our family at Trinity Mount Barker for the concern, care and love you’ve shown us since the arrival of Abigail last week. In what we hope is a sign of a child who will never run late for anything, Abby arrived three weeks early on September 14. Despite catching her parents a little by surprise with her sense of timing, Abby is doing really well, as is Kathy, and the rest of the family are enjoying having a baby in the house! We’re so thankful to God for the safe arrival of this little member of our family.
In the last week and a bit, we have been touched by numerous expressions of concern, cards, flowers, meals and more. It has been a real blessing to be members of this community of God’s people. People have been kind and gracious in allowing me the flexibility to cancel and reschedule appointments and meetings which has been a great help to our family.
Our friends over at the Anglican Church of Noosa are running a series of blog posts with guest blogger Simon Manchester on the theme of How to Enjoy Church.
The series encourages us to think about how we can make the most of our church services, not just for ourselves, but for others also - especially newcomers.
Since we're at a stage of church life at Trinity Mount Barker when there are lots of people around and a number of visitors every week, there is lots of good advice in these posts for us.
I realise that if you're under about 40 years of age, the idea of wearing a name badge to church on Sunday seems like a pretty silly idea! And being in that age bracket myself, I understand the feeling. "I know my name," we think, "why do I need to advertise it to the world?"!
But as our church has grown and there's more and more people around the place on Sundays, it's getting harder to get to know people and even more tricky to remember people's names. So we've decided to get name badges!
If you're a Trinity regular, I want to encourage you to buy a name badge - and not just buy one and leave it on your desk or in the car, but buy one and actually wear it to church on Sundays! Sure, you might feel a bit like a ... what's the word? ... a goober ... but the whole point is, it's not about you, it's about trying to look after each other in our church. When we wear a name badge it's especially helpful for new people who join us who are trying to learn the names of 150 other people!
In July this year Trinity will be presenting the inaugural Revelation Music and Ministry Conference. The goal of the conference is not primarily to improve the skills of musicians in church, although there will be workshops aimed at developing particular skills. Rather our goal in running the event is to help Christians; musicians, pastors and members of churches grow in their understanding of the role of music within the Christian community and particularly the important part that music plays in our Sunday gatherings.
We are very pleased to have Rev Dr David Peterson giving the keynote talks at the conference. David is an internationally respected theologian, teacher and author, having written and taught extensively on Christian worship and liturgy. David is the author of the seminal work on Christian Worship, Engaging with God.
When I write to people who have visited our church, I often tell them how encouraged we are when we have newcomers amongst us.
Newcomers help teach us some really important things about what it is to be the church.We’re reminded that our church gathering isn’t all about us.Sunday mornings aren’t just an opportunity for us to do a range of things the way we like them.When new people come amongst us, we’re reminded that other Christians express their faith in different ways.They have traditions and expectations that are different to our traditions and expectations.We’re also reminded that lots of people in our community have no background in the Christian faith.Some newcomers don’t know where to find a given passage in the Bible.They don’t know at what points in the service we generally stand and at what points we tend to sit.Many newcomers don’t know why we say declarations of faith together or why we pray.
This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, on which Christians remember Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in anticipation of his crucifixion. The gospel authors all explain for us how Jesus fulfilled these words from the prophet Zechariah, in riding into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey.
From the time of the exile around 586 BC, God’s people had had no king. The emperors of Babylonia, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome had been particularly keen for this to remain the case - think of the crowd’s threat to Pilate at Jesus’ trial, “anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar” (John 19:12). Nevertheless, despite having no king for the centuries after the exile and return, Judah (as the nation came to be called) were still God’s people and their king would come.
Revelation Music & Ministry Conference is approaching! Click the banner above to find out the latest. Keynote talks from Rev Dr David Peterson, input & music from Geoff Bullock, Nicky Chiswell and Mark Peterson, plus lots more!
This past week we launched our Trinity Mount Barker Prayer Network. Even as the structure and names were being put together, we had our first request for prayer – and our first answer to prayer! No sooner had I been told that the Prayer Network was up and running that I heard that the first prayer need passed onto the network had been graciously answered by God. We shouldn’t be surprised, though! The Scriptures tell us that “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” (James 5:16).
As we saw in our Foundations teaching series earlier in the year, what matters about prayer, more than anything else, is the God to whom we pray. In Matthew 7 Jesus tells his disciples, that just as they love to give good gifts to their children, despite their own sinfulness, their heavenly Father will give good gifts to those who ask him (Matthew 7:11). All around that particular section, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes it clear what some of those “good things” are; Being salt and light is good. Storing up treasures in heaven is good. Taking hold of eternal life is good. Seeking God’s kingdom above all else is good.
I remember the first conversations I had about the possibility of growing to two Sunday morning gatherings. It was back in June last year. Even as time progressed and the Littlehampton Primary School gymnasium got more and more full on Sunday mornings, April 29 2012 seemed such a long way off!
This growing community of young and old and in between has been one of the great blessings we’ve received from God’s hand. I’m constantly hearing of people’s excitement at being part of a growing family where God is at work making himself known and drawing people to himself. A growing family also presents challenges! This year our children’s and youth ministry has grown to six separate groups at three different addresses and on Sunday mornings, the kids in our Children’s Ministry have taken over yet another room in the Molly Miels building. And as was especially evident over the holidays when the children stayed in the service, we’re heading steadily towards capacity in the gymnasium.
This week I spent some time in Melbourne taking part in a church planting conference. The Geneva Push is an Australia-wide network seeking to see, under God, hundreds of churches evangelised into existence across the country and the National In The Chute conference brings together church leaders and members from all different parts of the country to hear the Bible taught and to learn from each others’ ideas and experiences.
Thursday night a small group gathered in the church office to pray for Christian brothers and sisters who are persecuted for their faith in Jesus. It seemed highly appropriate, praying for these members with us of the body of Christ in the middle of our teaching series on prayer! Here was a chance to put some of what we’ve been learning from the Scriptures into practice. It wasn’t only us praying. Christians around the world joined together in prayer this past week as part of the International Day of Prayer for the persecuted church.
But as our church has grown and there's more and more people around the place on Sundays, it's getting harder to get to know people and even more tricky to remember people's names. So we've decided to get name badges!
Rather our goal in running the event is to help Christians; musicians, pastors and members of churches grow in their understanding of the role of music within the Christian community and particularly the important part that music plays in our Sunday gatherings.
