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g'day everyone my name is dave i'm one of the consultants in the reach australia network and you've tuned in to a reach australia podcast where we are going to be talking buildings and i'm joined by andrew robson uh great to have you here mate good to be here uh now andrew you've been involved in all sorts of different buildings uh all around new south wales you watch one happen it's springwood in the lower mountains uh you played a coordinating role at uh ev church on the

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central coast for a couple of their buildings and uh again i caught a role that's uh at carlingford in the northwest suburbs of sydney so it's great to have you and your expertise with us i really just want to start by going why should we even care about buildings um i mean let's let's just think theologically together just to sort of kick us off i mean we we could meet under the tree and isn't that sufficient you know the what are we putting in buildings for churches about just people gathered together right yeah no

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absolutely we can meet under a tree and and in fact churches have been meeting under trees for two thousand years in different places and in different situations and you can you don't need a building to be a church yeah and so you can meet under a tree you can meet in a school hall you can meet in somebody's garage uh you know the basic uh pattern uh in the early church was people would build a a big basically they'd build a rumpus room on their house the wealthiest person in church would build a rumpus room and

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that's where we'd meet for church yeah and so you know the idea that you need um a sandstone building with a spire or something or you don't need a building to be a church i think it's really important that we um we express that however um let's think about meeting under a tree yeah um first of all what happens when it rains so it's hard it's hard when it rains and um you know some places like l.a you can probably you could probably run an outdoor church because only rain is

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like two days a year or something but if you're if you're in sydney yes uh it rains more in sydney than in london despite the fact that we bash the ponds about about rain and you know all around australia there's different climates and things and meaning outside is pretty tough actually yeah um it's you know you think about perth or adelaide you think about adelaide on one of those 48 degree days they had brutal yeah you did half your creation would die so so many on a tree while an ideal and a lovely ideal at some level we probably

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should all give it a try yeah um it's it's not really an enduring long-term strategy at some point you need the rain shelter you need something to keep the rain off so that you can meet every week yeah walls help with that as well yeah and is there is there a mission part to this like well yeah i'm gonna say if you um if you want to meet every week reliably you need walls and you need a roof so you have a presence um you then need to you're occupying land in some way so

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then you think about well how do i how do i occupy land i've got to rent it or i've got to buy it or i've got to borrow it somehow um and and all of those strategies are doable and we're doing those things we're doing those things everywhere but that presence thing is really important for our mission it's important in two ways one is that they know we exist yes um and of course when we were meeting in the rumpus room in the at at times that was because the government was out to get us yeah you

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know you think about the the early church and their persecutions it very much this is the pattern in china they they often have the secret room somewhere or the big room at the back and they meet in secret um but for us in western countries in australia having a presence that people can see is really helpful because they can say oh that's that church you you invite your friends to church you go you know the church across the road from the butcher or the church with the the colorful thing out the front or the whatever it

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is you know yeah and because i know where that is the other thing is as we think about buildings i think theologically and think about meeting under the tree yeah um the faithful will meet under a tree in the rain yeah the faithful will come yeah the person who isn't yet a christian if we're wanting to engage them in hearing the gospel yeah they're not going to be happy to sit under a tree if they come to your church and it's a disgusting experience and to

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be honest i've been in churches that are disgusting as in it smells of mold or the roots literally leaking or it's dark and dingy or there's something that's utterly uninviting there's a there's a hurdle they've got to overcome that's not the hurdle of the gospel now of course you can take that we don't want to run churches in mega yachts with you know but um there is there is kind of a reality that there's a there's a level of

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comfort and and niceness that has to be there for it to be inviting to be used as a ministry center in a culture like we have in australia yeah so theologically we're thinking you know churches about people gathered together and yes we can gather in all sorts of different locations you know but a little bit of the imperative of mission uh and wanting to reach as many people as we can to gather as many as we can for the sake of god and his glory you know it does drive us towards you know

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some sort of rain shelter um in in some way shape or form that's really helpful uh to start just just to start to think what sort of drives us in this space but again isn't buildings the um you know isn't it just for big churches like you know if you're a church of over 500 then you start to be thinking about building projects and how to manage i mean the average church in australia is less than 100 people yeah you know so you know to smaller churches what should they be thinking about in this space yeah so so

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i think um we can we can talk later in this in this series or uh however we work at that uh we can talk about bigger building projects and how they work but i think all churches need to be thinking about their space yeah and you can do a lot with a little yeah if you're if you are thinking critically as in being critical of your space and bringing a mission eye to it how does this look for the visitor yeah

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i would start with disgusting remove the disgusting so we just told the church being a rain shelter yeah make sure it is yeah okay it make sure it is a range holder that'd be my first tip because some of the disgusting comes from not attending to that fix the roof for goodness sake fix the roof because the other thing is um if you don't fix the roof you're damaging the structure too you're letting rod in you're actually really not being a good steward of whatever limited building you have somebody spent

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believe me a lot of money a lot of time building that thing and you look after it at the very least look after the building you've got think about it critically look at if you've got a if you've had a leaky roof fix the roof then look down you probably need to rip up that carpet and replace it yeah now straight away you might have spent ten twenty thousand dollars there and that might in your setting might require serious planning it might require you to get church together and think into how we're going to afford this but we need

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to do it and connect the doing of the thing with the gospel the gospel help them to see that we need to replace the stinking carpet so that when a newcomer comes they come back yeah they don't just go away going i've got a headache now from the mold yeah i'm not going back there have you got any um examples outside of the the roof and other bits and pieces you can point yeah so um i could pick on our own church here at north light um so so

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we're we're we're a two-side parish so we we have west uh pinball which is the building we're in and we have west linfield over at the west end field site we had um that building was built in the late 50s and it had you know that it's all over australia i think i think everywhere in australia has the 1950s for some reason they put in yellow glass everywhere oh yeah you know the yellow and i think the idea was you put in the yellow glass and then later on you put in the the lead light pretty class

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but it was about the 50s when the cost of doing that skyrocketed and people's got stuck with yellow glass so we've just run a process of removing the glass putting um clear glass in with a uv tint on it it is amazing the difference so we we thought through our after church space and we um we realized that where we were doing our after church space wasn't working so well this is a smaller building with a small congregation we were very hidden so we thought

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actually better to do it out the front where everybody can see us yeah but to do that we had to re-landscape the front so we've re-landscaped the front actually today there's fencing going in so we're we've put a nice fence in so that we can now use the front yard mums and dads with little kids can be a bit relaxed about their kids their kids are going to run straight out on the road because there's no barrier yeah there's now a bit of a and it just makes it just warms it up we occupy that space we now have morning tea out front

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and people can see us people wave us as we we go by we're there they can see us they can see that we don't have two heads they can yeah there's it just opens up that yeah so you know what you're saying is you know in terms of you know your smaller church sort of listening in um there's all sorts of little things you can do even you know attach potentially even down to decluttering your entrance yeah yeah so that's what we've done a bit of an exercise on on that building and one of the things we did was simply remove some old furniture and stuff that wasn't ever going to be used

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we moved it out we went through the process of doing that um and and it's just freshened the thing up and and and also the thing to say in new south wales um there are grants you can apply for through local councils and so a lot of that work we we got funded by um a grant not all of it some of it and um we rebuilt a toilet block as well we renovated a toilet block to make it not so horrific and um all of that just warms warms the thing

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up and i don't know i don't know about queensland or or west australia whether there are grants but i suspect there would be that kind of thing out there so find out so smaller church can often apply for those grants like you know a solar panel grant which then makes putting air conditioning in your church economically feasible because although air conditioning will cost a lot yeah the the solar panels will largely offset that you know so there's there's different things you can do there yeah okay and i guess lastly as we we start just to introduce this space is um

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who around australia should be thinking about buildings is like is this just a suburban thing and you know major cities uh who who needs to start engaging with this conversation i i think everybody i think i think the principle is there that we we just expressed um there's more to be said there theologically but but i think that principle of using your building for mission is an important thing and so whatever you're going to do requires that you you think about your space it's not just

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thinking about missionally too it's thinking about it for the congregation does it work can they hear the sermon is it lit well enough so that they can see their bibles when they are looking at their bible or is the building so dark that you're driving them all to use their phones which i personally i personally just the bible works better because you can see more of it at once but um they have to use their phone because it's any way they can see it or you know is is is the space conducive to

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continuing the the congregational meeting after the service finishes or is it the case that you have you effectively are telling them to rack off yeah as soon as the service ends because there's nowhere to go yeah we've got to go now because the next service is coming in and or now just while we stand around here and outside there's a road whatever your setting is try and work out how you can make church work better in the built space yeah no it's really helpful so churches are all over the country absolutely we're saying you know

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urban suburban regional different states everyone starts and he needs to start engaging with this conversation we had um curt langmead who's at um lightning ridge yeah um come in and talk to us at church and he showed he showed how um one week at church recently a mine shaft opened up in the church car park because lightning ridge's open mining a mine shaft they put up right over the the aged and disability parking very good some poor old lady turn up a park open

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the door and step in a mine shaft so you know you've got a well they're they're a very extreme kind of outback it's very small church but they've got to deal with you don't want people dying when they come to church you want you know people feeling welcome yeah and so you know they're working on thinking about car parking and and how they how they fit it all together and anywhere you are yeah but it'll be different so you know lightning ridge is hot sydney wet um you know darwin hot and wet wherever you are

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you're going to have a particular set of things that that are probably it's going to tilt in a direction i think if you're if you're in a lot of regional australia i think you should be seriously thinking about air conditioning if you don't have it i know that's mildly controversial in some circles but i think in modern australia mostly people live in air conditioning so they turn up to church and they've got this again this heinously hot sweaty experience they just they just won't come back yeah or and your own people at

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that point i think engaging with you speaking yeah because they can't breathe anymore yeah their maturity to engage you know and have an undistracted sort of experience where they're focused on who jesus is and encouraging one another becomes i'm so hot you know i can't concentrate anymore so yeah they impact on that level as well as we continue to think about you know uh why to think about buildings uh i guess for a lot of churches they

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basically fall into a few different categories they've either purchased they're borrowing or their you know process of buying what impact does that start to have on as i guess we think generally about buildings yeah so um obviously if you own the building you're in it gives you more control over your ministry it gives you gives you more security of building your ministry which helps in many ways um obviously it

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helps with you can leave the building set up you don't have to yeah but or if you do pack it down it's on your terms and someone else's um if you're borrowing a building you're very much in the hands of the person you're borrowing from if you're renting a building you're still in the hands of the person you're renting it from often churches are renting buildings that are institutionally owned so we're renting school buildings community centres these are often controlled by very much government

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um organizations and i know you know in different states in australia the government is is variously um positive or negative on churches and and i know under victoria for example that there's a bit of a bit of negativity coming from governmental structures there which means i'd be even more concerned if i was in rented if i was renting a public school in victoria on a sunday that there's potential for that to go wrong for us and so i think there's an impetus to move

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up the security chain to move from borrowing to renting to move from renting to owning and i know that's difficult but i think it's important because i think long term you can't really plan long term if you're um in in rental accommodation because that could change and since world war one in australia and i think this is true in all states we stopped building community buildings yes so you look a lot of a lot of parts of australia in town you'll have the the

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cwa hall or the progress association hall although where we stopped building those between world one and world war ii and after world war two we did not build those at all and so there's a there's a retreating number of community buildings that we can use and the danger will be if they put um content bars on you know you need to send this on this document supporting this um work theory of the day and unless you sign that you can't rent and so we go on we can't do it and so there's a there's

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a there's a there's a problem there so i think there's an impetus to move towards owning if you can although sometimes it's just difficult and that's why i think as we think about these things whatever scale you're at partnering with other organizations reaching out not being your own little lone ranger yeah um we're in difficult environment here it's not like 100 years ago you could get six guys together in a wagon and some lumber and you could build a church in a weekend you can't do that anymore so

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what what what impact does this have on church plants i think church plants need to be thinking about building from day one they need to be thinking about their building from day one of of course they where are they gonna meet yeah um we're gonna find something we're gonna rent something we've got to can we control the space at all or have we got no ability to modify it but but thinking from day one about moving towards owning something so one of the things that ev church did before i was there they bought a house

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they bought it quite quite cheaply they did well and it went up quite a bit in value they sold that and then used that as the the seed funds to buy the land i remember that the land deal the first bit of land they bought from selling that house that deal went through andrew got the phone call when he was interviewing me for the job there in my lounge room in spring and um i remember that i mean that was a very important moment for that church because they got the land they needed but you know it was a long time ago now

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it was a regional area there's a large church i think i think there are there are headwinds now that mean we need to work together yeah on these things more than we have been yeah that's really helpful this has been great just as a introduction to get to know a little bit more i guess you know why we should we start thinking about buildings uh we love you to keep listening along uh as we've got a couple more episodes to go and we're going to do a bit more of a deep dive uh into i guess the process uh of what building a building sort of

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looks like but thanks for joining us for this episode uh we'd love to see you at the reach australian national conference uh you can come along to that you've got to check out one of the buildings that you've been involved with but you'll get to also get some great content and we'd love to think about how we at reach australia can help your church start to thrive and grow in this space of buildings

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you