Category Archives: Church planting

We need more churches: church planting in the Adelaide Hills

Pastoral Ministry

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The church planting experience of Holy Trinity North Terrace.

What’s at the heart of your church? It’s either an easy question or a trick question. Answering ‘God’ or ‘Jesus’ used to get me through the Sunday School quizzes, but will these answers work for me now? Trick question or not, it has left many a Parish Council debating long into the wee small hours. And it has certainly produced some long and cumbersome mission statements. I work at Holy Trinity North Terrace in Adelaide. We, too, have been through the process of developing a mission statement, on the way to developing a model for ministry. After looking over the shoulders of churches both here and overseas, our rector noticed that many of the statements told God what that particular church would do for him. Yet the Bible constantly tells us the opposite. It makes it abundantly clear what God has done for us.

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Another church on Mayfair

Pastoral Ministry

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Name: Richard Coekin

Family: Married to Siân; four children, Charlotte (9), Rupert (7), Rhian (5), Johnny (3).

Ministry background: Trained at Moore College, Sydney, and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford; four years at St Mary’s, Manchester; appointed pastor of Dundonald Church, Wimbledon, in 1995, and has served as that church’s first full-time minister since it was planted in 1990.

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Doing ‘nothing remarkable’ on the coast

Pastoral Ministry

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Twelve years ago I had a ‘vision’ which in hindsight appears prophetic, but in reality can be put down to youthful enthusiasm. While holidaying on the New South Wales Central Coast, my wife and I read of its staggering growth rate (around 5% p.a.) and became aware of the needs the place would have in the years to come for a growth in gospel ministry.

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I will build my church

Pastoral Ministry

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The challenge of church planting

Perhaps it is because whenever we read the verse, we think of claims to papal power and the need to prove that Peter was not the first pope. Whatever the reason, we often forget the other more positive side of Matthew 16:18: “I will build my church.”

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Factotum #5: Church Improvement

Everyday Ministry

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It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It’s a bit of an ugly word, unpopular and out of fashion, much like the person it describes. A factotum is a servant—someone who goes about a master’s work, a ‘doer of everything’, no matter how menial. ‘Factotum’ is servant training.

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Should we pump it up?

Everyday Ministry

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What is the optimum size for a congregation? From one point of view, the answer seems obvious: you want more and more people in your church because that means more and more people in the kingdom. But it just might be that those two things don’t necessarily go together.

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An evangelistic dream

Pastoral Ministry

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To reach people in every culture in the world, a church must be established in every culture to communicate the gospel and nurture those who become Christians. All methods of evangelism have their place, but God’s primary method of evangelizing a community is by planting a biblically functioning church to reach that area with the gospel.

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The Busby experience

Pastoral Ministry

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St Clement’s Busby was a very small branch church congregation on the edge of a huge new housing development in a predominantly working class area in south-western Sydney. As the freshly appointed curate, I was given the task of pastoring the congregation and equipping it to reach out into the new area.

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