A new congregation has been planted from Sunday @ 6 and we are calling it

Sunday @ 6.30 The Plateau

As the name suggests we meet at 6.30 p.m. on Sundays at the Venue, cnr Acacia and Claudare Sts, Collaroy Plateau. We are small in number (about 20 so far) which makes it easy for everyone to participate, interact with each other and try different things.

Our first meeting was on Sunday the 10th of February, 2008. It was a pretty normal affair with a sermon, prayers, we sang Amazing Grace, announcements, and something to eat and drink. Since then we’ve tried different forms or styles of meeting, inspired by an article by Tony Payne (see below). The best thing is the sense of community. We are friendly, encouraging, united in our love of Jesus and this sense of community just happened. All the work we did to try to make it good and then, almost by accident, the best thing was something we didn’t organise. People are coming, friends of ours or friends of friends, who haven’t been to church for ages - and we love it.

We had a few problems: Who would lead it? Where would we meet? Should we meet on Saturday nights or Sunday nights? Who would preach? Who would come (we didn’t want to take key people away from other congregations and hurt those congregations)? How would we present it to the rest of St Faiths?

We still haven’t solved some of those problems but God has been good to us and builds his church regardless of our failings. We hope to keep our focus on Jesus and give God the glory in all that we do.

[Paul] planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.
1 Cor 3:6-7

Come and check us out or ring

Steve & Sue Ross 9913 1857
Ed & Barbara O’Conor 9971 4897

The gathering: thinking afresh about church by Tony Payne originally published in The Briefing #302, November 2003.Different ways to be togetherHave you ever pondered, in those moments in church when your mind starts to wander, that almost all of the hundreds or thousands of church ’services’ you have attended have been almost exactly the same? I don’t mean in the topics addressed, or in the effect upon you personally. I mean in form. This is curious, is it not? Why are we not capable of more creativity? Let’s allow our minds to imagine some other possibilities; a blank sheet of paper. If a group of 120 Christians were going to assemble together each week, to gather around Christ, what different things might they do that would pass the edification test? And how might they do them? There are no doubt countless answers, but here are five that quickly came to my mind:

1. The meal-based meeting. The congregation gathers together around tables for a meal, and breaks bread in remembrance of Christ’s death. They talk about life in the past week, and about how things are going. After main course, they pause for a Bible reading, followed by a 10-minute introduction by the pastor to the main issues in the passage, followed by discussion at the tables about these issues, followed by a sharing of insights and questions arising from the discussion, and then a 15-minute wrap-up and exhortation by the pastor. There’s time then for individuals to share their thoughts and reactions with the group, before a time of extended prayer at the tables. Then there’s dessert and coffee, and more discussion.

2. The in-depth study meeting. The focus of this gathering is on coming to grips with a difficult or complex topic or Bible passage. The passage is handed out on a piece of paper, along with paper for notes, and the outline of a sermon. There’s time given to reading the passage, to marking it and scribbling down questions, to some teaching from the pastor, to discussion in informal buzz groups, as well as to asking questions, and discussing the implications. Other elements are included (songs, prayer, morning tea), but the focus, for that meeting, is on coming to grips with mind-stretching Bible teaching.

3. The training meeting. This meeting focuses on some practical issue of Christian godliness or ministry. It opens with a song and an open prayer time (using microphones stationed at a few places in the meeting space). Then Speaker 1 speaks from a relevant passage, and Speaker 2 addresses in detail some practical, real-life applications. The group then breaks for coffee and muffins, and an informal discussion of the issues, before coming back together to question the two speakers. There is a concluding prayer time, and a song.

4. The family meeting. The congregation arrives around 9:30 am for a kid-friendly morning tea. At 10, they do something all together: sing some songs, learn a Bible verse together, play a game, have a short talk, the kids do a presentation, and so on - focused on a particular Bible passage. At 10:50, there’s a short break while the kids move to a separate building. Then between 11 and 12, the adults focus on the Bible passage for the day - discuss it together, hear a sermon on it, pray about it, sing about it - while the kids do the same in their own format. Then at 12, there’s a family sausage sizzle, with cricket in the pastor’s backyard.

5. The missionary meeting. This gathering focuses on a particular country where congregational missionaries are working - for example, a ‘Tanzanian’ morning, where we sing a Tanzanian song, eat some Tanzanian food together, work through a day in the life of our missionaries, hear a talk from the Bible on mission and God’s work in the world, pray for the missionaries, and get them on the phone during the meeting.

I am not suggesting for a minute that these should become a new set of standard ’services’, or that they would work equally well for every congregation, or that there aren’t many other possibilities that I haven’t the wit to think of. My point is that these five ideas - as preliminary as they are - would not be considered valid or possible, as forms for meeting together, by the vast majority of evangelical churches today. The very possibility of meeting in these ways would not be considered.

My question is: Why not? I suspect the answer is that we are locked into a ‘worship’ model of thinking about our gatherings from which we have yet to escape. If we were whole-heartedly to embrace a ‘gathering around Christ’ model, with edification as the criterion for assessing our activities, it would free us to do all manner of helpful and encouraging things that we currently exclude from our thinking. Certain things, such as preaching and teaching, would still need to be central - but the form in which the teaching was delivered, and by whom it was delivered, is surely capable of being done in a great variety of ways which we currently ignore.