[0:00]
Before Andrew brings his first talk, I wanted to ask Andrew and Heather a couple of questions so we can hear a bit about their story and why they're here. First question, Andrew, you've been in full-time gospel ministry for a pretty long time. I wonder if you can think back perhaps to the early 90s, maybe you were a similar age to me back then. No, I'm just joking. Anyway, so back to the early 90s, right, no doubt you had some hopes and dreams for your ministry back then.

[0:30]
I'm wondering, as you look back, have those hopes and dreams been realised? Yeah, thank you. It's a very good question and Heather and I were talking about this as we were coming in. We thought we'd take you back even just a bit further. I figured I've been in ministry about 35 years and when I was just exiting from theological college, I thought I would go to, these were my goals, desires and dreams, that we would together go to inland Australia to work with an organisation called Bush Church Aid in a rural parish, probably central Queensland, somewhere like that.

[1:05]
Those dreams have never reached fruition. Heather had slightly different dreams. She always wanted to be a missionary in Hong Kong to the Chinese. So that one sort of reached its fruition because the Chinese came to us instead. But apart from that, as we reflected on it, most of the significant things that have happened in our ministry life have happened by, if I can put it in quotation marks, casual events that have happened that have shaped our future ministry. Yeah, great, great.

[1:37]
And Heather, I'm just wondering, what have you found as a conference about church planting and starting new ministries? And you and Andrew have done a bit of that over the years. What have you found most exciting and most challenging about church planting and starting new ministries, both in Perth, that's right, in Perth, and now here in Doncaster in Melbourne? Well, I find starting new things very exciting. I'm a bit of an optimist and so I look at it and see all the good things and all the possibilities.

[2:08]
So just looking ahead, I find exciting. But it's also very daunting. I find it a real challenge also thinking about the issues of security and what we give up. So for instance, even coming from Perth to Melbourne, we came here for a purpose, but we left family, friends. Basically, when we came to Melbourne, I knew one person in Melbourne. That was Peter Adam, who was never going to be my best friend.

[2:39]
And Peter Leslie. Oh, and Peter Leslie. Yeah, two Peters. So it was really quite daunting. So sometimes the moving has been a challenge. The other thing that's a challenge is you start and then you realise it's not what you were hoping. And you pour your energy in and then you start to run out of energy. So we found around the third year, we used to look at each other and think, what have we done?

[3:10]
And you sit there and you pray and you say, are we doing the right thing? Why did we do this? Please God, help. So sometimes it's exciting. But the hard things are the things that actually drive you back to God and make you realise that he can do better than anything that you planned. I think Gabby and I have had some of those conversations two, three years in. What on earth are we doing this for? Yeah.

[3:42]
Andrew, I'm wondering, as you look at the kind of landscape here in Melbourne, I'm wondering, what do you see as the major needs for the gospel or major opportunities for the sake of the gospel? Yeah. I think, Aaron, you alluded to it earlier on. I think in time Melbourne will be the largest city in the country. Yeah. I wasn't just joking about that. No, no, I think the stats are heading up. The stats show. Yeah. And I think it is an incredibly rich multicultural city. The Chinese are flocking here.

[4:12]
This is the major city that they come to around the country. And yet I think we are thoroughly unprepared for that. And we have not touched some of the subcultures of Melbourne very well for the gospel at all. And so I think the challenge is related to multicultural ministry, which we have not done as well as we could have. And I think particularly the Chinese. And yet, same as I spoke at just one incident earlier on this year at Acts 29 and looked around the room, and the same as looking around the room now, where are the generation of Mandarin-speaking people that are going to minister to the Chinese that are flooding our shores?

[4:55]
But it's not just the Chinese. People are coming from all around the world. And I think we are unprepared for them. That's the first thing. The second thing is Aussies are incredibly hard-hearted. For every Chinese person, ten Chinese people that are converted at Holy Trinity Doncaster, one Aussie is converted. And as I say to my staff, we put in ten times as much effort for that Aussie. And it's just, you know, so there's lots of work we need to do, and there are some incredible challenges.

[5:27]
But one of the great things is that we've seen church planting movements spring up around the country. And I think that that bodes well for the future, as long as we don't just hit our own subculture. We must go broader. Thank you.