I wonder what’s on today? Let’s look at the diary.

1pm-3pm – Meet up with Paul. Oh, and it’s circled.

That’s right, Paul (Spackman, my boss) and I are meeting up to discuss a discipleship pathway and some sort of church membership course for St George’s. Coming from an FIEC [Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches] church in Perth, discipleship pathways and membership courses were the norm for us. I hope we can work out together what that could look like in our Anglican context. I’ll have to bring along that new graphic I made.

But we really need to get onto these things. God has grown our church so much over the last couple of years. A few people have said to me lately “there are so many new faces at our 9.30am service. I feel like I don’t know a lot of the people there anymore.” I think they’re right. But my fear is that we might become a revolving-door church. We need to welcome these new folk, evangelise those who don’t know Jesus and integrate those who do. Hopefully, whatever we do, we’ll be prayerful and intentional about it.

We’re also going to need to talk about crèche. It’s hard for the young mums who [my wife] Laura has been inviting to church from her Bible study and from the toy library. Back in Perth we had a big staff team, ministry apprentices and an army of volunteers. But the resources don’t flow so freely here. We don’t have enough volunteers or a usable room for a proper crèche. Maybe when our church hall renovations are done (and, gee, did we need those), and we are meeting back in the hall, we’ll have enough room for a really good crèche. But in the meantime, there must be a better solution we can come up with.

I wonder what else is on today.

Minister in charge Paul Spackman with assistant minister Brendan Hurley.

7.30am-8am – ‘Revive’ prayer meeting.

I can’t wait for that. How I’d love to see that grow. It feels strange that I keep praying that more people would come to a prayer meeting. But if that happened each week, I reckon it would bring incredible growth to our church. What was that great [Charle] Spurgeon quote I read the other day? It was something like “We shall never see much change for the better in our churches in general till the prayer meeting occupies a higher place in the esteem of Christians.” I reckon he’s onto something there.

What else have I got today?

8am-1pm – Good, it’s blank.

A good opportunity to get onto a few things. Better look at my to-do list. Give JP a call. I’d love to meet up with him and see how he and Julia are finding St George’s now that they’ve settled in. It’s great having them at church. I reckon they’d do a fantastic job of leading one of our welcoming teams. I’ll have to ask him about it.

What’s next? I also need to get onto our Sunday school leaders, our youth leaders and our Kingdom Men (men’s ministry) leaders and see if we can catch up. They’re doing a great job, but I want them to feel incredibly equipped and empowered as they serve. Oh, and I have to organise kids club, plan term 3 of Sunday school and write a sermon for Sunday. What’s this week? Philippians 4:10-20. Partnering together in the gospel. What a sweet passage. I wonder what would be a good angle for that? Consumerism? Maybe. I’ll have to think more about that later.

Is there anything else today?

7pm-9.30pm – Growth Group.

I am looking forward to tonight. What a great bunch they are. Though we miss having Mike and Sue there, since Sue went onto chemo again. I wonder if there are some more ways we could help them feel the love?

Anything else?

The Hurley family: Brendan and wife Laura, with their kids, Ethan, Jake, Ollie and Grace

3pm-7:pm – Blank.

It would be good to spend some time with Laura and the kids here. Maybe we could do a family bike ride along the coast. That’d be fun and relaxing. It’s so beautiful at that time of day. It’s so nice not having those long city commutes home anymore. More quality time for the family. I should also see if Laura wants me to do dinner on the BBQ tonight. It’d be good to see if we can have Tristan and Jules over for a BBQ one week. Maybe next week. Oh, and I really should give Mum and Dad a ring and see how they’re doing with the Sydney lockdown.

Okay, that looks like a full day. Crumbs look at the time, I better get going.