Leadership Update (30 Jun 2019)

Church Life Spot: Leadership Update

Each fifth Sunday in our Church Life Spot our focus is on an update from our congregation’s leaders. We want to highlight a few areas for your prayerful attention.

Worship Service Attendance: With regard to attendance, we thank the Lord for growth at Grace at both Sunday morning services and we see newcomers are coming through our doors weekly. Many of them have stayed. We’ve also noticed that attendance tends to be very erratic. There can be a difference of 20 people at each service from week to week. A national survey found in 2016 that only 11% of professing Christians in Australia attend church once a week. We believe that it is right and proper for a Christian to be in attendance each Lord’s Day unless providentially hindered.

Vision Statement We are continuing the work of reassessing our church’s current vision statement. The online response form will continue to be available until the end of July. We hope to finish this project in August with a view to uniting around a shared vision for our ministry at our 15 September 2019 AGM.

Transition Plan: We need the wisdom to know how to structure our church’s ministry following John and Marie’s end of ministry here at Grace in early 2021. Please pray for us as we seek the Lord’s direction to know how to engage a rapidly changing local community with the gospel and meet future leadership needs in the congregation. We anticipate sharing with the congregation in December what we believe would be the way forward in this regard.

Volunteers in our Ministries: Please pray for the Lord to raise up more people to serve in various ministries in a growing church.

Current Leadership

Teaching Elders Ruling Elders Deacons
John Butler
Clint Lombard
Brad Joyce
Tim Richards
Paul Beard

Johnathan Grieger serves as an assistant to the deacon. Renier Scheepers was nominated at our February Mid-Year Meeting to stand for election as an elder at our AGM in September.

Session meets monthly, usually on the last Thursday, and much of the meeting is spent in prayer and discussing the pastoral needs of the church family. Each elder has been assigned a block of families (members and regular attendees) to meet with at least once during the six months between our Mid Year Meeting and our Annual General Meeting. At the Annual General Meeting in September, the groups will rotate to a new elder. We hope this will better connect the leadership with the people of our church family. This has so far been very well received.

Please continue to pray for us, and that the Lord would raise up additional men to serve in leadership in our congregation.