Planting Churches in Australia

I was invited to attend a conference of Church Planters from around Australia by Crossover Australia. About 30 of us attended with a variety of backgrounds and methods of Church Planting.
Inglewood Community Church is planting a campus congregation. The model being we have one church, one board, one Senior Pastor….with a campus pastor taking caring of the pastoral needs of the seperate service.

Some of the folk at the Conference were house church planters, simple church planters and complex church planters.

Inspiring Leaders
One of the young planters I was impressed with was Mark Broadbent from Queensland. He leads City Life Christian Church. His vision is to see 3 new churches planted over 6 years. The idea being each church plant then plants another plant. They have planted three churches so far. Mark preaches at each congregation. Or rather, the person rostered on for that day preaches at each church. One aspect of church philosophy that really resonated with me was Marks comment that a Christian should be growing as a Christian, moving towards becoming a ‘mission/evangelistic’ focused person. That is his churches agenda. If you have left that agenda as a Christian, while you are welcome to come, you wont be interfering with the Churches agenda. Its a focused approach born out of a desperate desire to see people won to Christ.

No sheep stealers
One common denominator for these church planters was their sincere desire to plant churches for the purpose of seeing people become Christians, not merely shifting the passengers on the boat. It amazes me how some new churches advertise, obviously targeting Christians. Whats the point in that, spending money on reaching people already on their journey? Only if you are interested in building your own kingdom!

Personal
For myself, this is an area we are rapidly moving towards at Inglewood Community Church. The Hub, our new church campus to be launched in August, wont be our last. Already we are planning for the next campus of Inglewood Church. There are enough people who have not yet discovered Jesus for us to be fully convinced this is necessary and prudent. This conference was challenging, diverse and interesting. While I would not follow some of the models being propagated, there was enough common thought to inspire me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *