Its all about Trust

Here I deal with my friendship with Pastor Colin Craggs, and the need for trust and good partnerships.

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.

Have some great new folk coming along to Church. One of them put this together for us.

When God called Gideon, he was HIDING.
When God spoke to him, he RAISED PROBLEMS instead of TRUSTING PROMISES.
When Gideon did start to obey God, he WORKED AT NIGHT and had to have REPEATED ASSURANCE that the Lord was with him.

yet…he is one of the heroes on the Bible…..

and just freaky busy at the moment.

Watch this space

And their kids names as well.

No longer the case at Inglewood Church, and it can be a little disconcerting at times.

What do people expect of me as their Pastor, and what do I expect of myself. As we transition and grow, and the crowd gathers momentum, I can no longer act as I once did, and I knew that 12 months ago. But perhaps the past month or two has highlighted it.

I like to stand at the door after the service, and say goodbye to people, listen to what they are saying, and respond if a request for prayer or something else is needed.

Just working through what I need to do, if there is anything I need to change, or if its just a realisation. Either way, I know I come home from Sunday Church exhausted.

The other day I needed to rip a DVD onto my hard drive, with just the video/audio file so I could play it seamlessly at a presentation.

I used this program,

Rip DVD

However the manufacturer has given me some free codes so you can download and use the full professional version. I have codes for both Mac and PC.

Full Pro Version

Let me know if you want a code once you have downloaded it. Download the trial version, get the code off me, and it should work

What it does:

“MacX DVD Ripper Pro – ultimate DVD backup and ripping software brings you the best DVD ripper for mac that rip DVD to MP4, iPhone, iPad and Mac.
The MacX DVD ripper for Mac software allows you to rip DVD to MP4, H.264, MOV, FLV, MPEG, M4V, AVI, QT(QuickTime) with high quality video/audio. The New-DVD-Backup feature let you copy DVD to single video file with original video quality and 5.1-channles AC3/DTS Dolby audio.
Rip encrypted DVD to iPhone iPad iPod and iMovie, MacX DVD Ripper give you the easy way to rip all type of encrypted DVD and copy-protected DVD (remove DVD CSS, region code, RCE, Sony ArccOS, UOPs, Disney, etc). Thus you could make a perfect backup for favorite DVD movies.”

I also have some codes for the Windows version.