Some years ago a pastor, Ray Ewers, instructed me in the finer art of how to walk into church. To most people, this might appear to be a rather basic accomplishment requiring little or no tutelage. Perhaps a family with five toddlers would appreciate some advice, but most of us would never give it a thought. Ray’s instruction was very brief: “Pray about where you sit”. (more…)
When we first married, my husband kept telling his young single friends that a man was only half a man until he married. Shortly after tying the knot, we left for our duties as the only missionaries on an isolated Aboriginal mission settlement in the Northern Territory. The starry-eyed approach to marriage faded and we became the persons we really were in our relationships. Falling in love was not a sufficient resource to meet the demands of our new life together. Now we were to show that we were ‘one flesh’.
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.
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.