Room 338, Hotel Nexus, Seattle. It's 12:20am Tuesday morning here. We've settled on something. Something that may, possibly, under God's sovereign hand, define the next few decades of evangelical Christianity in Australia.
We will lead an independent, Australian church planting network, with warm friendship and support from Acts 29. We are building to a launch in Melbourne and Sydney in late November 2009. We're agreed to move ahead with it and Acts 29 are keen to give their support to us.
It's big and scary stuff. Next time we meet back in Australia, we've asked Al Stewart to lead a devotion with us on the topic of right, godly fear.
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11 comments:
and THIS is just awesomely exciting.. God is really working through this trip you're all taking..
Yes, great news - glad to hear there will be both independence from and partnership with A29.
does it have a name?
Michael
Acts 30. Just cuz.
No name yet, it's very hard to setle on something. Even a professional publicity guy had trouble.
I'm really pushing Al Stewart to not stick with something prosaic like 'Australian Church Planters' it's like 'Campus Bible Study', horrifically bland as a name :-(
That's fantastic! We're so glad it's going well.
I'm totally with you on the name thing. Apart from being boring it would make it sound like a Sydney Anglican thing, not that I'm against Sydney Anglicans, but it needs to represent a wider group than that.
I really like your questions from Murray (http://mentonebaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2009/03/aussie-acts29-network.html).
As someone at the other end of the country from Melbourne - Townsville. I wonder how we can and will be apart of this.
I think the most important question is
How will the Church Planting network help bringing forth the Gospel through planting churches?
Personally I do care what we call it but what we do. As someone from Townsville I would hope that it would not be Sydney-Melbourne centric and to me this plays out into structure, communication and events.
Theologically I am going to be controversial and say that we should set the bar high, which is probably the wrong terminology. My thinking is that we don't make it so broad that it is just "Evangelical" but that we are planting churched that are focused on holding to certain beliefs. I think that this is something that needs a group to sit down and nut this out identify the controversies and where the network would stand. Some of these won't even be core gospel things but might be things like complementarian and egalitarian. I think it is the Gospel Coalition that has a list of things that they DO and DON'T stand for I think this is a good approach as it clarifies the boundaries on both sides. But after saying all that I think it shouldn't be too smaller a door that we don't get anything done.
TOPH
Hold out against the bland name!!
And keep 'Bible' out of the name, too.
This is good news.
Given that the US is the new Jerusalem and we're essentially grafted in to the Acts 29 network as Gentiles and heirs - the name should be Pauline in nature but still capture the ongoing missiological focus of the church planting movement - maybe Romans 17.
*As someone from Townsville I would hope that it would not be Sydney-Melbourne centric and to me this plays out into structure, communication and events.*
Chris, I understand that the leadership are very keen to make this a truly national movement. But Mikey can speak with more authority than I can...
yeah, yeah God forbid you should have something like a CBS-esque name. I mean how boring, and look it didn't work as a name or a movement on any campus.
I mean using Campus Bible Study or that style of name would be as bad as using something like TBT
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