[0:00]
many of our churches have great theology when it comes to mission we know what we're called to do we know why we're called to do it and we have a great desire to see people around australia one for jesus christ but what would you do if you had the ability to actually hire someone to execute all of your desires to put your desires and your dreams into action and if you could give them a blank slate to do anything what would they do if you had the ability to do anything at an existing church missionary

[0:30]
what are the things that you would do well today uh i'm thrilled to be able to chat to elliot temple uh elliott works at christchurch sinai's a church in sydney's northern suburbs and it's great to have him with us today elliot how are you mate great dave it's nice that you had me in thanks for having me a pleasure brother mike uh you're working in evangelism and mission at the moment um but obviously more importantly than even that you're a christian you're a follower of jesus how did that happen in your life yeah i grew up in the north side of sydney and

[1:01]
uh we were on a farm we had horses we had yabbies in a creek that kind of thing and my dad stayed home and mowed the lawn but my mum she took us to church and that's probably a little bit of a sense of my life a little bit divided in some ways i've got god church i've got outdoors adventure yabbies and all that kind of stuff and they didn't always merge they didn't always come together and so you know later in life um i think when you're a teenager you're trying to figure out how they come together and we were doing things

[1:31]
in life that were a little bit uh you know out of step with god i remember going to concerts as in a live music we'd go and we'd um i remember going to the big day out and we all went and we all jumped the fence because we didn't want to pay for tickets and then uh i thought that was easy that was good i'll take my little brother to do the same and we went and did it at a walk tour and uh we we climbed the fence get away with it no stress but then he rang my mum about a month later and he said i want to i want to do

[2:01]
something mum i just wanted to know what you thought about it and my mum said no you can't do that it's illegal and i thought how good is it that he's asking mum to do something illegal that's good but then he uh then my mum turned to me because i was in the room and she said what do you think elliot i said he can't do that he's a christian and he said what's he talking about he showed me how to jump into concerts and all that kind of stuff so that was a time of reflection for me that was a time of trying to bring two

[2:33]
worlds together and that was a turning point where i i knew that i hadn't fully committed in all areas of life to bring it all together and so i always thought of jesus as my savior but that was the moment where i was like i've got to do this fully so i committed to him as my lord and i committed to if there's things that i know are wrong that i know god doesn't want me to do i'm not going to do them was there anyone in particular a church or even home who was particularly significant in

[3:03]
explaining those truths i suppose the the movement from jesus as savior to jesus the savior and lord um who are the most significant people in that yeah so i i actually think that a lot of the teaching that we get is always telling us these things we just need help taking it in because i heard that from everywhere all my upbringing in my home church i had an amazing bible study leader who invested in me for about 15 years wow he uh he basically taught me tutored me at high school to hang out

[3:34]
more and he picked up surfing because he didn't like surfing but he thought there was a great opportunity to hang out with some of the youth he was in his 20s he just got to know us he invested in us and he tried to apply this to our lives and i just think that everything that i'd heard i'd already knew it i already heard it i just hadn't committed to it to use an example my wife was sitting in a gutter beside swimming classes when she became a christian because she remembered what she'd learned when she was in primary school in scripture

[4:06]
so i think we learn a lot just don't take it in yeah do i keep teaching even if we even if we don't see fruit immediately because there are people who years later it'll it'll come home to roost and really be revealed elliot for many christians they come to know and love the lord jesus christ but they never make that next step to evangelism they remain kind of like undercover operatives if you like who really find sharing their faith difficult but you're an evangelist you're someone

[4:36]
who sees the need feels the need for the lost to know jesus and you've done something about it how did that happen that changed the move from hey i'm a christian jesus lord savior to hey i'm a christian i want to tell people about jesus yeah i'd say it was the same time so it wasn't a two-step thing wow and i think that the depth that you get when you just read your bible in year 12 when i was doing the hsc i remember

[5:07]
being very committed to reading the bible every day i was trying to do the bible in the year the same year as hsc and uh i just remember it making me think yeah and there's the general call of the gospel and then there's the specific gifts and i just think you we're crazy if anyone says you know evangelism is a specific gift i mean there is true truth to the saying that evangelism is a gift but i was talking to a gentleman this

[5:37]
week in his 80s and he said i don't believe evangelism's for everyone i think it's a gift for a few and by the way i did a speech at my um at my high school reunion the other day and i'm not an evangelist but i said to everyone now let me tell you about my faith so he was sharing his faith because you believe therefore you speak and i like the way richard borgon and put it who wrote the word one to one we're not all called to be bible teachers but we're all called to be bible sharers from the very beginning i knew that to

[6:08]
be true because think about in the gospel you've got jesus um first thing he does calls fish is a man last thing he does sends people out to go and fish for men when he says take up your cross and follow me right in the middle we've got all kinds of explanations as to what that means but why did jesus take up his cross and it has to do with the fact that he died to save people from sin and when we speak about the death and resurrection of jesus and we want to take up our cross and follow it's just natural to the christian disciple the

[6:40]
discipleship life yeah so i didn't i didn't think i had a moment i think it was just bible equals therefore i'll do it that's the general but the specific is um in late high school i joined a band and we were in pubs a lot so come weekends we would um every weekend we'd be in a different pub there was eight guys in the band most of them weren't christian churchgoers was this a scar band or something how did you have eight people yeah pretty much was it yeah yeah i know what era you're talking

[7:11]
about that's great yeah reggae rock we called it anyway we went around pubs and when people got together because of my conviction out of the bible i used to pray lord give me an opportunity when i go to the pub tonight to share my faith and i got a god regularly answered that pretty much every time i went to the pub i had chats we had some good times we went on a bus to melbourne and took people up to surf comps on the coast and we'd take all these people with us and just had lots of time so it's a combination of general

[7:42]
call of the scriptures for all christians to do mission followed by my specific circumstance where god had placed me where i was in that environment a lot which which made me i don't have i wouldn't say i have the natural talents for a lot of this stuff i'd say it's just thousands of hours of conviction and commitment and you get a bit better as you go yeah um what were your early attempts like your early attempts to engage with people non-christian people to share the faith the great news of jesus what was that like

[8:15]
i remember one guy at a party who told me that he'd gone into a church to steal all the bibles and i remember trying to have a chat with him about it um and uh we were at a party there was a bunch of people listening in and he just got fired up about religion because he had a passion against it yeah and then he started accusing me about leviticus and all the laws of leviticus and i just remember thinking what am i doing

[8:46]
um being in a band being in that environment i remember um so guitarist became a christian well and uh that was over a year of conversation so it's a long time and you're just going to pubs chatting regularly in and out and giving books he read books he was interested he became a journalist so he's the book kind of guy but when we go out and we chat about these things i still remember when he became a christian the division it kind of caused in the community

[9:18]
everyone turned and said you're not going to convert me because they felt like if one person had done it it was a threat to everyone now he um i remember when he went to the pub with us about a month later there was a lady probably five years older than him that was showing an interest in him and he said no khan i'm a christian well and she just started spitting at him and yelling at him like massive aggression uh hated the idea that she'd be rejected on the basis that he was a christian

[9:48]
and uh thought that christianity was the stupidest thing in the world so that was what it wasn't like early on it was like being in places where people thought it was stupid but i knew it wasn't stupid so i just kept talking about it yeah it's awesome mate mate going to be speaking uh and digging into what it looks like to go into a church with a strong history a strong history of gospel proclamation a good church um but a church that might have um in mission

[10:19]
become veering off and not been as effective as it had been in previous generations or previous years and what it looks like to go into a church like that and try and get mission back started again and that's the scenario many of our listeners and viewers are in at the moment they're in churches they want to see missions started they don't know how to do it what principles should they have we're going to talk about that and what you've been able to do and trying to do but before we get there tell us a little bit about um the church that you're at and can you

[10:49]
tell us the process of how you got there um what was your job interview like what was your job description like when you arrived so tell us about the church context who is it where is it and your involvement in the church yeah so christ church tonight it's on the north side of sydney it's about half an hour from the middle of the cbd and i've been there for six years uh prior to that i was an assistant minister in a general role but god had put on my heart for a long time that evangelism is where i wanted to specialise uh so i went looking for a job in evangelism and the job came up that it

[11:21]
was a mission portfolio role um i acknowledge and recognize a lot of churches don't have that privilege you know to employ a mission faster so this is a bigger church there's 750 adults on a normal weekend in attendance and a great history of youth and kids ministry so within that context um now i'd come out of 180 adults at my previous church four congregations on a sunday so you preach four times all of the congregations of small networks

[11:51]
um and we'd been doing mission there and there was some great opportunities but when i came to christchurch tonight we look back 1970s there's this dudley ford character that everyone mentions because he brought evangelism explosion into australia and uh he really went out multiple nights a week to everyone in tsarnaev's so he was the pastor he was the pastor he was the senior pastor and he took his congregation members and trained them to go out every night of the week and visit homes anyone who said anglican on the census

[12:22]
which was a large percentage in scenarios it's north shore it's um the kind of environment where there's a lot of uh you know white people that have been around for a long time just middle management right so there's a lot of that um and so he took people out doing this and the church grew to the size it is pretty much today wow um and then over the last you know 30 years or so it's been become a reputation as a church has been really maturity centric and focused on discipleship because

[12:54]
um john woodhouse came along he's he became the principal of moore college um and so he just had a bible teaching method that just really enriched people so we're coming off this heritage but the question is when i walked in where was mission at and someone stood up in an agm a couple of years before i arrived and said we should employ someone to focus us on mission and then the next year someone got up again and said i remember last year at the agm we really needed to focus on this let's put that forward again and because

[13:25]
there was a desire from the congregation probably built out of the long history of good teaching and ascent to the idea desire to have it and also an acknowledgement that it's not that easy also the team the staff wanted it to so i got invited in and it was a blank slate it was no one's done this mission role up until now you're the mission guy you're in a church with multiple congregations with a leader for each congregation but they're starting to specialise a little bit like that guy over there is in charge of growth groups but you're coming in as mission and you

[13:55]
don't have a congregation so that's your job was it a painful um reflection for the sanives uh leaders for the for the people in in the church eldership and the pastors and stuff to actually reflect on mission uh and say oh things aren't going as well as we would have hoped or um or when you arrived did you actually see this as an opportunity hey this church has been has been reflecting on this um and that's an incredibly healthy thing

[14:25]
yeah no i think people felt missional as in you couldn't really see many people becoming christian yeah but people were quite passionate still about mission supporting missionaries overseas and some were particularly passionate about sharing their faith it's just that uh we need to acknowledge that for all the bits of effort here and there it's hard to draw it all together as a coherent

[14:55]
hull so that we actually as churches celebrating new converts and i think that uh you know it we make it out to be really simple but i think we we we make it simplistic we know evangelism is about proclaiming christ so let's stand on a stage and proclaim christ to the congregation who's in the room and as people come and visit they'll hear and it'll be accessible to them there's so much more we can do for mission yeah yeah so what did you do you get there you got

[15:27]
the opportunity you got a few years under your belt as an assistant minister you're not a complete rookie you know you feel it and you've been looking for a role like this you get the blank slate what do you do yeah well uh the first thing that they said to me was we would love people to do a christianity explored course so there were some parameters that i was given had that been running already they'd run it maybe once a year reactively kind of thing um well there was

[15:58]
you know there was passion for mission there was a desire to run it but just the inability to find enough people to get to a course or to set separate people out if i'm running a youth ministry do i have time to run a christian explored if i'm running the growth groups do i have time to run a christian explored so it's a priority structure thing yeah and the execution is often the hardest part so desire yeah sort of motivation awesome but execution and you really need someone who's going to have time to do it well it's a it's a very nebulous role people don't appreciate this if you look at my

[16:29]
week it's hard to structure it you can't just do growth groups and sundays where there's structures and meetings and gatherings because most of your evangelism happens with people outside the building in this kind of fluid society where you've got to take the gospel to the world and if you want to try and do it all through events there's part of that but it takes a lot of work to do a lot of events all year round and so a lot of it's this kind of people work yeah i've got a few principles see i can talk about my own story

[17:00]
there's uh there's like a few things that i've done and i can share my story but the main thing i want to see is people watching or listening to this get to take on board some of these and apply it into their own settings i'd hate to finish this conversation with me sharing my story and i'll be able to say the principles so how about i get into to those principles about what i think when i started when you said what did you do what was your blank slate how did you go about it i'm going to do it as four principles so anyone could do it anywhere

[17:30]
yeah so one of the things excellent one one of the key things i think though we want to do is is understand that for everyone whether you've got a blank slate or not whether you've been given a bank slate or not i should say one of the replicable opportunities we have here is that actually all of us really do kind of have a bank site all of us can in a pastoral position can go hold on let me assess where we are what can i do here what can i do and as you say though the pragmatic so they're important but

[18:02]
it's the principles that guide them uh that's the most so i'd love to hear them brother what are the principles that you're holding on to um that you've developed over the time you've been there now uh that you think hold on this is really important and this is replicable for other churches so this is where i thought of four words yep okay so i hope that these can help people structure their thoughts so i got reaping steering coaching and shepherding when i say reaping let's let's start

[18:32]
with reaping run the reaping that's that's the phrase run the reefing and i'm stealing this a little bit from david robertson who some people have heard um with third space and he talks about plowing sowing and reaping when we think of reaping reaping is at that end of evangelism where we see people become christian it's the harvesting it's the bringing people through it's it's when people look at jesus in the bible deeply and they become christian and it's amazing how many

[19:02]
people you talk to that want their friends to become christian but don't have a plan for how to do the reefing yeah and we know that bit that's the teach look look at jesus in the bible deeply and become call people to become christian now in our church we've been using christianity explored and i love it because it's replicatable we've got videos i don't do the talks we use the videos and lots of different people run it in homes we've tried it in pubs and homes and in the church pubs get uh the best attendance but the

[19:36]
least retention yeah churches get the most in our building it's not as homely and hospitable by far the best we've had is that over a meal hospitality thing so we do courses but in a smaller church or even in big churches some people choose to prioritize one-on-one evangelism and they'll use resources for that and uh you know even some churches are really strong at considering how they do their reaping through their preaching on a sunday service and i just think

[20:08]
we need to think about how do we run the reefing and bring cool people across the line so that's the first principle do i just go for a mall well i'll just press into that one just for a little bit so how did you um you've been in the role now for six years how did you um come to the conclusion uh that the courses in this context are the best things would you recommend a sort of trial and error type thing i mean if your church is currently running christianity explored or or some version of that um

[20:38]
a particular way how how is the way that you've come to the conclusion that works in your context um and how will that be helpful for people listening do you think yeah so we have we're very positive about courses because we have enough people to get together to run a course on a regular basis so a few terms a year and in that setting you learn from each other and i've always felt that when you meet with someone to share the gospel

[21:09]
and to to to look at jesus deeply in the bible a lot of it is helping them take that journey for themselves rather than spoon feeding everything to them courses are great because it's a conversation and you listen and everyone listens to each other and they own the journey and they're also being transitioned into the life of the community and they get to see the hospitality of the community you are the light of the world plural they get to experience that one of the difficulties of the courses is that they're restrictive because not everyone's available at that time

[21:40]
yeah and if someone turns up in week one term one and you're not running it till term two you're going to make them wait for a term how does that work so in churches where you can regularly run the rhythm of courses and regularly have conversation i think you know they're excellent um but if you meet a gifted evangelist you'll find that they're able to do the planning saying reaping one to one and bring someone into the life of the church you know in a less structured way and i think that we need to celebrate that um and

[22:12]
you know the word one to one is an example i mentioned richard morgan and before uh sitting down and reading the gospel of john now we're persuaded jesus is the way the truth and the life that he's the gate he's the way so we have to bring people to look at jesus in the bible that's the simple gate that's where we do our reefing does it need to be a course no it doesn't we can do it in conversation but our experience is that it takes a long time for people to look deeply into jesus and to take it on and cast off their blockages yeah so

[22:43]
there's a bit of the logic now i've explained the different locations we've tried it but courses have some benefits that one-to-ones don't one-to-ones have some benefits that courses don't so going out and doing one-to-one in a cafe or anywhere i can me i've done a number of one-to-ones where i've caught a train into the city and they've lived on the other side of the city and we meet hufflepuff they're not going to come to my course yeah also people might have done a course and have an aversion to of course there's different responses and reactions to courses and so there's pros and cons um and i

[23:15]
had another thought what was it um it's gone let's keep going so just to summarize that it's really important for your church to think about how you hope to see people become christians the reaping where people will become christians and some of the language in the reach australian context is the conversion engine um but the reaping that's awesome uh what's the next one oh i know what i was gonna add okay sorry to hold us up but i remember a discussion or a debate around whether you could do both the christian explored and the one to one

[23:45]
and the thing that would restrain your abilities is comms or onboarding which is the second point yeah so the second point is steering yeah and what i'm saying here is steer the ship we think of the whole church as a bigger group and steering the ship takes deliberate effort and this is about you know when you're on a boat and you're looking out over the over the front you can see where you're going to steer a big ship you've got to see where you're

[24:16]
headed in the future and you've got to steer towards it and this is about cultural shaping this is about direction it's about the whole church the the way that we speak what we believe together corporately what our vision is and when it comes to mission i think that there's a diversity of approaches whether it's christianity explored or the word one-to-one or the way that you do it through your sermons and things like that but we need to work together for our best outcome and so if i as a church choose to do all three and try and talk about them in a way that's

[24:47]
explainable one of the risks is people get confused as to what my focus is so there's a balance it's the old skyscraper in the desert thing where if you've been to dubai you see this massive tower in the middle of a desert and it gets your attention but when you drive into sydney here which building do you look at and so if i'm doing the word one-to-one and christianity explored and we've got other strategies and events and techniques and we're putting it all together people just don't have the time to catch trust in the thing that we do yeah so there's a pro and con yeah how

[25:18]
have you been able to articulate and and steer i suppose from a leadership position while still you know having the team network so it's not just elliot at the top and you're telling everyone what to do although you are leading and guiding and steering um but how have you been able to pragmatically uh i get get your church on board with them what does that look like yes so steering the whole ship is for me an annual rhythm and that's because when i started

[25:51]
and i was asked to do christian explored the target that was given was can you get 35 guests a christian explored in your first year yeah great i need to get the church moving because i personally just moved to the church i don't have 35 guests to bring how do i get the church moving so this is the steering the ship thing the way we did it then was we said in term two we're going to set a challenge for every growth group that as a team you've got to work together to find one person to bring the christianity explored that we're running in term three it was

[26:22]
future uh when you think about growth group conversation about missions sometimes it can be a little bit guilt-inducing sure the evangelist in the room makes everyone feel guilty that's right and often it's because you're looking at the past but steering a ship is about looking at the future and if you look to the future as a growth group and you see something coming up that you can work towards and you've got a long runner you can pray about it you can plot for that you can chat and train each other for that and so we spent the front half of the year they

[26:53]
wanted to run christian sport in term two i said no put it out to term three and let's spend a lot of time working through the conversations in the life of the church first year i just gave one simple growth group challenge for them to chat about uh growth groups at our church aren't evangelistic settings they're not the place that you bring in on christians too but they are a place that are outward-minded and you want to train and equip people to think outwardly and so we do that what i call chat plot pray you chat about mission pray about mission but the way that it's not

[27:23]
guilt-inducing is you're plotting for the future so chat plot pray in your growth groups for the future um and that was the first real vision piece was christian explored and that shifted over the years that was the first one and that's because i knew that we needed to run the reaping so we put our energy into that we normalized it that term three we had five christian explored courses um and then someone ran their own in term four off their own back because they got excited and then we ran it every term for the following year and we just had people

[27:53]
coming and people experiencing it and the trust growing but uh i delayed adding anything majorly different for a couple of years and now our major ship steering item is called share life yeah tell us about share life um not that it's a one size fits all type thing but certainly you're in the burbs family sort of centric and some retirees or all types of people living at their share life what is it

[28:26]
just explain it for us and why do you why have you seen your gain traction in church and what do you hope to see from it well working backwards from running your reaping we find that the number of people you can bring to a course dries up unless the whole church are working together to feed it but if you just keep talking about christianity exploit every term people just get a little lethargic and don't see where they fit unless they're really involved in running it and on the team but the trouble with the course is that people feel that it's a high bar can i bring my family member to a course

[28:57]
it just feels like a big step so we're just trying to experiment working backwards from that how do we get the whole church doing stuff that leads to more people in these environments and we found that an annual rhythm worked better than a termini rhythm in terms of having if you work backwards from a congregation member to how long it takes to get your mind into game and to train your attitudes and repent of your bad attitudes and to prepare your diaries

[29:27]
we knew that what we wanted to do was we we say share life isn't a series of events it's a it is mission but it's bigger it's actually about transforming our church so that we reach more people and in term two we do what we call share life go which is all transforming our church we embed it into every structure to get people thinking we offer training and mission and we're looking to the future and we're plotting and our sundays comms the way we talk about stuff up the front we

[29:57]
push aside other distractions and we focus a lot on mission stories we get people talking mission that leads us into term three where off the back of winter we've historically had what we call big fridays for youth and big fridays have been great we get a couple hundred youth we've got people becoming christian teenage years and uh we've celebrated that and when i arrived at the church i said to the church where should i give my time what are the opportunities and so many people said parents of youth who aren't church people how do we

[30:27]
piggyback on that rather than doing the typical mission like week or you know um the january summer mission we felt that our friday night youth was regularly on a friday night rather than try and make it a camp focus we're going to do three friday nights in over three weeks and we're going to add a cafe to it we're going to talk to parents and bring parents along and run some activities with specialists to give talks and then share testimonies so it's that soft

[30:58]
pre-evangelistic evangelistic work yeah the contact and connect so contacting people connecting them in with the community that's there and then off the back of that rather than inviting everyone to a course which for some was a big step we have the privilege in our church of having multiple steps with multiple staff so we went from friday nights to sunday church we we got guest speakers in and um we focused on three weeks of bring people to church it is focused we we we had to explain

[31:29]
our theology to the congregation because you know running a seeker service for three weeks we have to be clear about why we're doing what we're doing and what it's for that led and we did have a lot of our typical church elements but it actually trains us to think evangelistically about how we run our sunday services because we're not always very reflective about it but when you're planning to have in the first year we ran we had 180 um guests across the four services and when people came to those services they weren't used to uh you know we got

[32:00]
a lot of guests we've got to think about the guests so we ran it with very much guests in mind and it reshaped the way we think about how to how to be guest friendly on a sunday yeah i i remember my first um carols event uh working in church and the effort and energy that went into that you know huge amounts of forget the music rehearsal just setting up the room all this type of stuff and the visitors and how we welcome people and i remember reflecting later as we saw very little fruit come from it that what if we had the same principles that apply every sunday that not that we had fairy lights out

[32:31]
every sunday and in carroll's every sunday but actually that there was someone in church people at church dedicated to caring for visitors experiences on sunday like that every week not to make every sunday seekers secret sunday but what does it mean for us to do that so you're doing this in term three i suppose the input that you're doing though is feeding into your church that's right you're you're equipping encouraging building them up um can ask why term three instinctively in sydney in australia uh

[33:04]
we often go term one term one term one we have christmas term two easter we run off the back of those type of things we've got summer holidays term three seems like a dead term this is the term you nap this is napping term so why are you guys doing term three and people feel a little bit of the winter nap don't they yeah big time which you know term three to rally for it takes a little extra work but to be fair a lot of churches that run mission in january are doing so much resource work in term four and if you're gonna ask me how to

[33:35]
immobilize resource term four is harder than term two now you have to make a choice are you going to build around the rhythms of your local community the guest you want to invite or are you going to build around your resource base and by resource base you mean the christians in your church and i know that each christian in my church has a bazillion people in their networks even if they don't think that they do that they can evangelize if they're energized

[34:05]
and it doesn't need to be in january it can be any time in the year but in terms of the culture of our community like all people you know people are a little bit more depressed in winter and so you do have to work a little extra to get that positivity of attending you know cold events that's why we put fire pits out and stuff like that but we actually have the sundays in september which is the start of spring and they run at the spring in their step and they're excited about the warmth coming out

[34:36]
but weather is so secondary to be fair it really is and when you think of the people in sydney they're not building off january as their free time um holidays people often in sydney uh decline in number people leave the city to go on their holidays so if you're in a coastal community jenna it makes a lot of sense because that's where everyone's going but for us everyone's around during term and everyone's here doing youth group on

[35:06]
a friday night so let's build off that yeah and rather than it being a week where a lot of people in our area don't commit to a week-long thing spread it out and have a path get your whole church on board over a long period of time working backwards from them knowing that there's going to be a whole lot of people need to hear it 50 times before they start to even engage their brain on it and they're going to have to have conversations to personalize it so they're going to need people talking to them just say where are you at in mission

[35:37]
you know what's your next step how are you going to be praying for real people we give out so to get very practical in term two we have been running growth groups online recently where there's embedded videos that they can watch and i've featured in those videos in term two to rally people for mission we've had one question the whole bit takes three minute video one question to get people thinking about mission and it's tied to the passage for the

[36:07]
week so for term two people are going from heart from scripture to heart to action future looking um we give everyone a journal which is basically um a bunch of weeks of just getting people to think about their hearts and where they're at and their friends and who they're praying for and we workshop with people how to list all of their networks and names of people and people go i've only got two friends

[36:38]
that i could think of to talk to one day about jesus and maybe this events aren't for them and we say well we're not about events and we're bigger than two people you've got people at work you've got people all kinds of places you've got school pickups or whatever you do with people all around you you're just not thinking of it as a missional opportunity so we train people's mindsets using journals and we've also added some extra training resource but that's the term two rhythm and the term three rhythm is when we're really

[37:08]
active and we're training and coaching on the job as we run those events and as we um learn from and celebrate the outcomes of those events and look to the future and then we try and shape the mindset of the congregation from coming out of that to say how does this shape your whole life because we're on about transforming our church so that we reach more people and that is running every year every day not reactive you're proactive you're looking at the calendar the mission or calendar yeah and this is in their inputting into

[37:39]
your church they're out the output is there in term three um i i love that thinking um not what's going to best serve uh the outsider that matters but what's going to best serve our christian people to engage with this that's going to transform them the most okay so you've got reap steer what's next the third one is coach coaching the king because when you think about steering the whole ship it's a lot of people

[38:09]
and there's all kinds of blockages that people have you've got people in your church that aren't even christian and they're coming along you're trying to steer them to do evangelism we've got to be realistic about what we can achieve and what i find is if you try and operate with large groups all the time you're going to get some people a little bit into it or you're going to get a lot of people a little bit into it but to really land it this is where that mindset of training and equipping comes in and uh if you think back at all of the

[38:41]
strong training movements i mean i myself did ministry apprenticeship at canberra's bible study at new south wales university and the first training course everyone did was two ways to live and two ways to live was a gospel outline that we memorized so that we could then go out and talk to strangers about our faith and then learn from that about how to talk in everyday life about the gospel without missing key elements

[39:12]
but training was at the heart of it and if you're training individual keen people that are keen to use that you'll start to see culture shaped from below not just from you know the stage there's what some people have called air war and ground war yeah we can talk about it on sundays but it's not landing we need to get people talking about it in life and then we need to get some culture shapers a bit of you your guiding coalition or your movers

[39:42]
and shakers the people that you really want to train up who are energetic and i just want to say on schedules i've been there six years now and i'm just starting with this so i just want to be clear on that the first two years i focused on getting the running the reaping going then after that i focused on this share life piece for a couple of years to get it going which is our whole church steering the ship i've tried to

[40:12]
train people on the job and i've done vision setting from the beginning but to do it all well i need more energy and time to improve it so at the moment we've been offering online training so people can do it if they're keen at any time off the back of that we've invited we had 50 or so people sign up for the online training to have a look those that finished were the most keen or the ones we invited to meet us in person so we did four weeks in person

[40:43]
debriefing the online content and then off the back of that i've been meeting with individuals who would like some coaching are to chat about the real people in their lives and how they're going and what their next steps are so that's the deeper coaching that i think some people might start with often often ministries start with the coaching training i feel starting with the running of the reaping gives you a context to practice what you're talking about it gives you

[41:15]
an on-the-job experience so it takes it just from classroom all the time to we're actually doing this i just wanted to be a doer before a talker so we're doing and now we're building our training the more and more we do so that's why the sequence from reaping running the reaping to steering the whole ship now to going deeper with a few and you know my prayer is that that'll be effective but we've got time to tell before i'll see how effective it is yeah that's right yeah

[41:47]
um it's funny training uh is often thought of uh within um our context certainly it's been a probably a a lack of confidence in training people in the church context say oh training works on campus you know you get the opportunity to go and do it so but you train people at church you know you train them in two ways to live or the bridge or this at the other well barely anyone uses it yeah they sort of data dump it you know down the track and it's not put into fruition and i think you're right though that is

[42:18]
it possible that this is because while we're not training the king beans we're training everyone when actually we need to be zeroing in on those king beans again no these are the guys we want to invest in here but also we've got the order back the front that actually we're training them before having the conversion engine or the reaping but actually you know we train them with that um so they have that on campus experience if you like totally i've been able to engage with it immediately you want to have a sense of team yeah and if you're just sending everyone out one to one all the time and we're not working together it's a bit

[42:49]
isolating yeah and other ministries have more sense of team because there's more structure yeah mission is a lonely place it is uh what's your final principle so the final one is about shepherding and it's when we think of shepherding the sheep we often associate that biblically with the christian community and pastoring people we remember that there's the one lost sheep story and we remember that there is about

[43:21]
going after the lost sheep one at a time but what i find in practice when it comes to shepherding and pastoring is that we're much better at meeting up with christian people and thinking individually and reflecting with them on where their life's at trying to offer words of encouragement trying to bring them forward one step at a time and we often think of the pathway we want people to grow from forming in the faith to devoted to centered to i give up my whole life and everything's about jesus you know that

[43:52]
whole pathway and we're experienced at shepherding people one step at a time as leaders that is in our community we're always trying to train people to do that but when it comes to evangelistic ministry we can see it a bit too removed as a group vibe and we're not thinking individualistically enough and we're not going after lost individuals so for me this is the fourth principle which is kind of the glue it's not another program or another you know later activity that i'm going

[44:22]
to add in the future the shepherding is from the beginning how do we look after people into christianity explored we had to one person at a time invite invite invite talk to break down barriers look after them at the course they didn't want to do the next thing we had to meet in a cafe and persuade them to do the next thing and then a year later they became a christian and you go a lot of ministers find it difficult to

[44:54]
carve out the space to do the personal pastoral work and it's the same with our growth groups we've got growth groups we need leaders to lead that group to pass to the people evangelistic ministry it's just the same we need to think one person at a time so as an example share life the 180 people that came in 2019 every single one of them was brought by a guest and we knew their name we knew every name of the 190 people and we knew the name of the inviter and

[45:25]
we rang the inviter and said what's the next step what's your plan well and inevitably they didn't have one a lot of the time and we said what about this course they said i don't think they're ready for it said okay that might be true so what's your next step i don't know i don't have one well let's think about it together what could it be i don't think i could do that or i don't i can't that kind of thing we hit lots of blockages in the personal pastoral ministry and so we invest a lot

[45:55]
of time in that 2020 during you know the year of cohort um we had us a different season of the share life mission we pivoted we moved our fridays because we had no gatherings we moved everything online and we introduced a digital evangelistic pre-evangelism thing in that season we had 90 names that we could name that came to watch our church services online as guests and we knew who invited them yeah uh

[46:27]
there were in doubt undoubtedly more than that but that we captured 90 names over those three sundays and we rang every single one of the people and they're the ones that ended up we had to persuade and help people to think it through but they're the ones that end up bringing people to the course so the the course where you want lots of people if you just advertise it and then run it people aren't coming i reckon you'll get two to three people sign up but at the course this year we had 90

[46:59]
percent attendance compared to last year even in so i'd say this year last year we're filming this in 2020 but during this time there's the covered uh crisis and you know we had half attendance on sunday but 90 at the course because the follow-up of individuals translated into the same outcome yeah it's that principle of caring for non-christian people knowing them by name sometimes

[47:32]
i find it helpful when i'm struggling in my motivation with with non-believers to consider them as my most loved non-christian friend or family member i go how would i want that person to be treated if i'm the christian now and i've been praying for this person they finally come what experience do i want them to have my closest friend we need to give that experience to everyone if we can if possible at the very minimum personal follow-up personal acknowledgement of who they are

[48:04]
prayer love um it's crucial uh elliott as that's been incredibly helpful and those four principles um just to close a lot of people here uh listening or watching will be from churches of 70 people 70 to 130 fact the majority of churches in australia of that size some people are now considering okay well i've got a blank slate we're not doing much mission i could probably do anything i'm here but i'm distracted with a lot of things they're not on their own

[48:34]
they're they're on their own and a million things on what do you think is the most important first step for them as they consider these principles and put them into practice smaller church solo sort of staff member what's the first step that you'd recommend for them to make well if people reflect on their priorities for the week and their schedule and they see that there's just a bunch of stuff that they must and have to do if they're a senior pastor and they've got all of these responsibilities

[49:06]
that they can't imagine leading a ministry of shepherding personal follow-up training people for that and i guess if it's courses running the course and and doing it well it's obvious that we need to get the support of congregation members and and carve out or if we're a bigger team carve out space on the team the staff team we need to carve out the space to put energy into that i'm 80 of my load

[49:37]
is in this and i can say each course we run takes a lot of energy and the fruit is great but evangelistic work takes many hours per individual to get the outcome so we have to carve out the space and if we carve out the space with the right empowered leaders and we work with them and support them and give them the air time so they can talk about it and do what

[50:08]
they need to do with the authority that they need to have that i think the first thing we do is run the reefing and we go through the four principles we get them to do it we get them to lead those things and just a quick observation from our share life ministry now we're in a staff team of about 20 staff with admin and everything like that but the people that run share life for congregation members and that's because we want to celebrate

[50:39]
the contribution of congregation members and we want to empower people to say this is our mission and so the leaders of each of the arms of the share life mission the congregation members and i just think we need to recognize as pastors and leaders there's a lot of work in this a lot of good work let's draw people up who have the energy and let them fly and god has given us those people in our churches to do it he loves to see people saved elia thank

[51:10]
you so much uh for your wisdom there and and your thoughts and insights and uh it'll be incredible to watch over the next few years uh to see how it continues to unfold we pray to god with great reaping great harvest of people one for jesus if you're watching and you're interested in getting evangelism back in the center of your church in becoming a church rediscovering your missional heartbeat well there's plenty of resources and help available at reach australia go to reachaustralia.com.au

[51:42]
and together we can partner to see australia one for jesus christ see you later you