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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
The discussion is broadcast live on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thepastorsheart">Facebook</a> then on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ThePastorsHeart">YouTube</a> and on our <u><b><a href="http://www.thepastorsheart.net">thepastorsheart.net</a></u></b> website and via audio podcast.
The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Growing by five percent conversion growth - how might this work? - with David Jensen and Chris Braga
What change would a leader and church need to make for a congregation, denomination or movement to grow by five percent annual conversion growth.
The Gospel Coalition pulled together a mini summit of evangelical movement leaders from across Australia in June.
That gathering set an aspirational goal of doubling the number of evangelicals over twenty years.
They said a key way to do it is by pursuing a target of seeing five percent of the average attendance saved each year.
David Jensen leads the Evangelism part of the Department of Evangelism and New Churches in the Sydney Anglican Church.
Chris Braga is senior pastor of Grace West Church at Glenmore Park in Western Sydney.
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What about the 5% number? Setting a 5% conversion target? How might that work? Dave Jensen and Chris Braga are our guests it's the Pastor's Heart and Dominic Steele. The Gospel Coalition Australia, a few weeks ago pulled together a mini-summit of evangelical movement leaders from across Australia. That gathering set an aspirational goal of doubling the number of evangelicals in Australia over 20 years. But key was that they said a way to do it was by pursuing a 5% annual conversion growth target. And here's how Rory Shiner and Andrew Hurd explain this on the Pastor's Art.
Speaker 2:Doubling is simultaneously imaginable. I think anyone could look at the ministry they're currently involved in and think what would this look like if it was twice as many people involved? And you can imagine that. But then I think the thing that got me and maybe got a number of us is I thought that's enough of a change that I would need to change and we would need to change so close enough to be encouraging. And you know, if someone says, oh, wouldn't it be great if this was, you know, 10x or whatever, I think that would be great and it's almost unimaginable. But twice as you know, to see things double, grow twice as much, is simultaneously imaginable. You know, one would think achievable, but not achievable by a situation normal, steady as she goes. I think there's a thing there that puts the right amount of fire to your feet to think okay, I would need to think differently about some of what we're currently doing and we're talking 5% conversion growth a year.
Speaker 1:Really, yes, that's right. So probably a bit less. Actually. That's Rory Shiner and Andrew Heard. Now today, on the Pastor's Heart, we're asking what would each congregation need to do for a denomination, for a movement to grow by 5% annual conversion rate? Dave Jensen is our guest. He leads the evangelism part of the Department of Evangelism and New Churches in the Sydney Anglican Church and Chris Braga is with us from Grace West Church at Glenmore Park, just near Penrith in Western Sydney. Dave, let's go first to your pastor's heart and seeing the lost saved and as you listen to Rory Shiner and Andrew Hurd, it is exciting to hear but also daunting.
Speaker 3:I think it's a wonderful opportunity for us to, before we do anything else, realise that at the very heart of what we're talking about is eternal life. It is something of such weight and measure that the very prospect of our being involved in God's plan for humanity in this way should always strike us. But I also want to say the reason I love this conversation is that any opportunity we have to consider the gravity of what we're discussing here, that people are facing an eternity, a crisis, eternity, and that under God and through his sovereign power, we may be involved in seeing people rescued. I think my hope and my prayer, for myself and for others, is that to be gripped by that is the fuel that should drive us forward and if we fall short of it, so what we had a crack at it and we're not going to go to glory wandering, you know.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that we give a damn about the damned that's the line I use and this sort of thing. You know it reeks of that that we care what happens to the lost.
Speaker 1:Now just let's explore the word daunting for a minute, because I mean, I'm imagining there are people going to be watching, listening to us now when we say 5% conversion growth target based on attendance at our church. They're just going to be going. We haven't seen anyone converted for five years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the most helpful way to think about this number is to realise it is actually palatable. But the most helpful thing to do is to apply it into your congregation. I'll use an example of I've worked at churches of all sizes and I remember having this number several years ago at a church overseas and thinking oh my goodness, 5%. There hasn't been a conversion here for years. But then I realised, as I applied that percentage just to the adults, I was talking about five conversions.
Speaker 1:Okay, so tell us about the size. Let's make it real concrete. How many people in the church at the time? Well, there was 100 adults there or thereabouts, and so you wanted to see five converts.
Speaker 3:And I wanted to see five conversions that year. Now I was beginning the conversation in January with myself and thinking, okay, that's not beyond us to get to five Now and when we did that and that was very manageable. But I've also worked at much bigger churches where the 5% has been huge. So I've worked at EV Church. In fact, my first ever job as an evangelism minister was at MBM in Western Sydney and I remember my first day I was the mission pastor and Ray Galea said to me Dave, we're aiming for 5%. That's 52 adults.
Speaker 3:And I said that's one a week. And he's like, what are you waiting for? And I was so overwhelmed. But after a while I realised I don't know, this is manageable If I make it a solid number and it's under God's sovereignty. I realized I don't know, this is manageable if I just if I make it a solid number and it's under God's sovereignty, but I make it a solid number and I have chunks of it, I don't have to. And if I don't reach 52, if I just actually try and aim for half of that and then build up to that number and they're under God.
Speaker 3:And that year we were able to hit it. But over other times I've sort of gone right. 5%, how do I get there if I'm at zero? Well, I'll go for 2.5 the first year and then build to 5% the next year, but to have it as an outcome I'm seeking to pursue, I've never felt proud or but actually felt in a way, hey, it's stretch, but I can grab it under God. So I think it is a number that it might feel daunting, the percentage part of it, but when you break it down and just use it for adults, that's what I like we could talk about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're going to have an adult discussion.
Speaker 3:I think it is palatable and doable. Yeah, it's absolutely manageable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I wanted to bring you in here, chris Braga, because Dave came along and did a presentation at your staff team. That was kind of game-changing for your team.
Speaker 4:Yeah yeah, three years ago Three years ago Dave came and visited us as a staff team. We'd kind of put together some plans for mission and Dave really encouraged us to think very deliberately about where people are going to hear the message of Jesus you know what's the environment where they're going to meet other people, meet other Christians, open the Bible, be able to answer their questions and have that time in the Word and really clear.
Speaker 1:So the evangelistic course, the time in the Word.
Speaker 4:Time in the Word. Thinking about it, we called it at the time the TEC, the Trusted Evangelistic Course.
Speaker 3:So we're an acronym-free program. We changed it after that.
Speaker 4:So we didn't have a name for it, but we called it that because we weren't. Primarily this was Dave's advice was we're not trying to persuade non-Christians and invite them to this course. So trusted is your big word. That is, it's trusted within our congregation as the place where you can bring someone along and have them hear about Jesus, and so it's building confidence with our congregation with our church members.
Speaker 1:Essentially, I mean, that's one of the reasons why introducing God has worked well here, because so many people here have been saved by doing that course. Yeah, Therefore they trust it. Therefore, I'm prepared, they're prepared, to bring people to it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and so I think that over the last when we started, you know, trust gets built slowly and so it's taking time to build momentum and also explain why we don't do all the things we might have done in the past. So lots of events, lots of other things and our diary really revolving around the start date of those courses and even Dave's encouragement to say, chris, don't just do something and see who wants to do the course, but put the date in the diary. And we've even been in a situation where we don't know anyone signed up and we've been literally standing in the car park, you know, praying that people would come and they have, because people know we're going to do it, they know there's going to be somewhere to hear about Jesus. The last course, I think, we had four people signed up and then when it kicked off, there was 16. So people brought their friends because we know we're going to run it, we're not going to cancel and even if there's one person there, we'll have them run it.
Speaker 4:So if he has been running a course four times a year, that kind of timeframe and sometimes they've succeeded, sometimes because we've got a second site and so sometimes we haven't been able to pull it off at the second site.
Speaker 1:So you're running in the two sites. Your aspiration is to run it on the big site four times a year and on the small site Once or twice. Okay, Now, what's happened under God in terms of I mean, Dave just talked about percentage change from no one had been converted to what's happened at your place?
Speaker 4:Look, I think that under God is. I love reporting and just sharing people becoming Christians. Two years ago, I shared that six people, six adults, had been converted and that's great news.
Speaker 2:And last year.
Speaker 4:I was able to share that 24 adults had become Christian.
Speaker 1:Okay, now let's do that in terms of percentages. What's that look like?
Speaker 4:Well, adult attendance is about 350 each week and the total number of adults in our community is about 500.
Speaker 1:Okay, but if average Sunday attendance.
Speaker 4:Adults, yeah, adults.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if we go 24 divided by 350, that gives us a 6.8% conversion rate. Well, that's good, David Jensen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's pretty good. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Praise God for that.
Speaker 2:Praise God.
Speaker 3:Can I say one of the key things I've been struck by at Glenmore Park is the key words about whatever you're doing in evangelism. So if we can go with, hey, you're going to have an intentional plan. Let's use a course as an example, which I think is a good example.
Speaker 3:To use a course as an example, which I think is a good example, biblical, repeatable, reliable, dependable and scalable, and it's the opposite of a quick fix. But that doesn't so. It requires patience. It takes several years to build social capital with your congregation, because the demographic that will be most often converted in Australia they've actually got something in common that 95% of them or so know a Christian, and so the Christian is the person who brings them to the course, and that's been the case at Greenwood Park hasn't it? People bring in people. Some people do just turn up.
Speaker 1:I mean that's interesting. I think our experience has actually been. We've probably seen more people, um, I mean, we've been running course once a term, uh, for a long, long time. We've probably seen more people come because of the website, because of the social media, that kind of thing. Uh, I kind of call it corporate village, you know, rather than the individual attention. And and that really worried me because I thought, oh, it looks like evangelism is going well here, but actually are our people hungry enough, you know? And so we then changed it. We said, look, we want to have a goal of bringing 100 to a gospel moment this year, so that we set the goal of our members bringing 100.
Speaker 4:Nothing wrong with doing both, Dominic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because we were unhappy with what was going on?
Speaker 3:Yeah, do both. Is that a new phenomenon, though? The people coming in unbrought and uninvited? Has that been a new?
Speaker 1:one. I actually think. Well, I'd probably say it was more five years ago than now. I think we're getting better. That change, that bringing 100, was a five-year-ago kind of initiative. Yes, and so now our members have got higher ownership. Yes, and so I think it's actually switched back. Because there is undoubtedly we hope I shouldn't say undoubtedly- but then we're in a pretty transient part of the city.
Speaker 3:You are in a very transient part of Sydney, yeah, but also it looks as if there may be, under God, a cultural moment taking place where people are, in fact, covid. Actually, right now there's a moment Right at this moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And COVID didn't cause it, but COVID displayed it the emptiness, the desire for meaning, the deep, deep desire for community, for knowledge and in the midst of all sorts of social disorder, as we've talked about here on the podcast on Pastors Heart before that, if our churches are ready to evangelise clearly, effectively, engagingly to the people who are brought and the people who just rock up, that's the strategy. You know that, in essence, that we're ready and I've got to say in my experience, the churches that see the most conversions they're not the ones necessarily with the best signage or the best website that can often play a part they're the ones who've got the clearest, most simple plan of what to do to non-Christians with non-Christians when they arrive.
Speaker 1:So let's just take a little digression for a moment, because I was in a prayer meeting with a group of ministers yesterday and every one of us said it feels like there's something going on in the softening of the ground at the moment. That's a little bit unexpected. We've talked about this on before, on the pastor's heart before, but compared to what you said to us, I don't know when it was four or five months ago what's your read if anything's changed in the last five months?
Speaker 3:I think we are. It's a funny one because I think we may be. I've the great privilege of preaching around the place a lot. And I've seen a lot and a lot of people converted young adult, young adult men in particular in the last couple of years at these sort of guest events, preaching evangelistic rally type events than I ever have before. It's worth identifying that those events, the ones that I've seen the most fruit, are often at churches who have got a great evangelistic program already happening and this is sort of the culmination of that there's riding on that program.
Speaker 3:But here's what I think is potentially going on. I think it's going to take time for us to identify whether this is real or not, but the perception that it is real is giving us gospel optimism, which we should always have.
Speaker 3:I'm watching a tone change amongst my peers and the tone change has meant that we no longer are going. Oh, everybody hates us, so we're not going to go out. It is like, well, everybody hates us, but hey, maybe everybody kind of likes us as well. And there's a moment and I'll use a small illustration, if I may my sons play rugby league, god's favourite sport and their favourite players all pray after a game because they're Pacifica, they're Tongan and Samoan, and you live in Penrith.
Speaker 2:Yes, I do.
Speaker 3:And so when I was growing up, the Christians were Jason Stevens, brad Thorne, a couple of and Dave Simmons great guys. But now there's a Christian subculture, so that my children when they play they draw a cross on their wristband and they write Jesus. There's zero embarrassment and that's a little confidence piece because they've seen other people do it. Now that's not to say that's conversion, that's revival, but here's what it is. It's different to what it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. I would have been embarrassed to do that as a kid. 10 years ago or 20 years ago, I would have been embarrassed to do that as a kid. And I think there has been a change in that and I think there's an emboldening that the optimism causes Christians to feel like I can do this and you know what, even if there wasn't a moment, we should always feel that way.
Speaker 3:So let's make hay while the sun shines.
Speaker 4:Dave, we work very hard on building that kind of confidence in the gospel and helping people recognise that there might be fears but actually take that step anyway. Like you know, we know the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of the people you bring you to. So have that confidence in Jesus to be able to have those conversations and bring people along Chris.
Speaker 1:what impact did it have on you that discussion about setting a target at Glenmore Park?
Speaker 4:I think that our On your team, yeah.
Speaker 4:Look it's, the big thing for us was actually to shift to having a priority of growth, to be very deliberate about growth and to invest into mission, and the numbers are just kind of falling out for us in one sense. In that sense, I know some people are really big on numbers, but I always want the action and not necessarily a commitment to a number. So you know, if there's conversations about numbers, I love that. I always think you know what would it look like for our church to be ten times the size, double the size, or you know, for lots more people to become Christians, a lot more churches. So 5% is kind of like. If that captures people's imagination and enables them to think differently about their ministry and think about the outsider more, because often we're thinking about the insider, then that's great. That's really a motivating piece. In our church we use the vocabulary of more and more people transformed by grace, so we're just thinking about more people all the time.
Speaker 1:Now, david, let's talk. 20 years ago your dad, when he was Archbishop they set a target goal of 10% of Sydney and in this discussion, talking 5% of average adult attendance, people are going to be talking oh, 5 is half of 10, and that kind of thing. How do you respond to those kind of comments?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, on one level it's worth identifying that they're completely different targets. So the 10% target, which I think was terrific to have, any number that drives our eyes out to the fields outside of the barns, I think it's a wonderful thing to do, but that was a target for 10% of the city of Sydney, which just felt overwhelming.
Speaker 4:Which I'm sure, but was only ever a stepping stone to reaching the rest. Yeah, it was big.
Speaker 3:And so 10% of the city now that's a particular number. Now, that is not what this is. This and so 10% of the city now that's a particular number. Now, that is not what this is. This is 5%. Now where's the 5% measured against? And this is an important thing to articulate? You've hit on it already this is your weekly average attendance across a year. What is 5% of that number? And that's the target? Now, that's not 5% of the city, that's not 5% of your suburb, that's 5% of the current church attendance. So if your church is 40, that's two people a year, you know. And so I want to say there's pros and cons to all this type of thing. Sinful hearts can take us any number of places when we're thinking of targets and whatnot, but I enjoy both of them, but they're very different things. I think the 10% target was for a diocese and a movement of evangelicals in Sydney and beyond to go right. Let's really aim high. This is also aiming high, but it's actually almost a subset of the big one.
Speaker 3:To go hey, let's break that down. What does that look like?
Speaker 1:It feels more like that. Well, a smart girl, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based, all those kind of things.
Speaker 3:Yes, and it's also very helpful because it's measured against your congregation, it's tangible, so you're able to go. Okay, well, that's where we are. When I worked at MBM with Ray Gilear, ray would always say um, numbers are people, numbers are named, they have names and people matter to god. And one of those helpful things we did at nbm was we had a spreadsheet of people who become or who professed faith, and that wasn't. We didn't publish that anywhere. That wasn't for us to wave and look at us. In fact, at the time I remember visitors to our city would often say, oh, the era of evangelism has gone, and I'd go. Well, nbm had 70 adult conversions last year. I've got their names, but the reason we had their names was so that we could track them and make sure that they were still in a Bible study and follow them up. And so numbers are one thing, but they're people.
Speaker 1:Names is the key thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're names, and numbers have names, they're people and it's not as if I can. Just, you know, I can't think of one church I've had anything to do with who is so pragmatically driven that it's just like, oh, someone put a hand up. They're actually stretching, but they put the hand up Christian that's not how it works here.
Speaker 1:What about as you've gone, because you've been doing lots of consulting with ministers? We've just heard the Glenmore Park story. But what are some of the other stories of churches across the places you've consulted and they've thought, ah, because I've got to, I mean we'll put a graph up from the REACH Australia where they've done a consultation and their consultation got a number of prior to the consultation, maybe 1.54% conversion rate, something like that and then a massive change when they've started to implement that kind of intentional strategy that you've talked about with the trusted evangelistic course and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would just offer that, generally speaking, a consult either with myself or with Reach or anything like this is not a silver bullet to fixing things. It requires a clear-eyed leader who's willing to make changes and to listen to, but, more than anything, to understand reality and to go hey, what's the lay of the land at the moment and where do we want to get to and how are we going to get there? And it's been a great privilege. One of the things that I get to see is, yeah, a lot of churches in different contexts across the city, but not just Sydney. By the way, I coach guys around the world and in Australia and so a really exciting story is a local inner city close to the city church here in Sydney who have had a fine gospel pulpit ministry for many, many years, but never a real pathway for non-Christians who get converted to enter into church easily. So they'd often lose people and have an identical story to Chris, and one of the key things was that it was the rector, the senior pastor, who was speaking at the course in this case and just was able to really pour his confidence into it, which was infectious around the place.
Speaker 3:And another one is in the western suburbs. They're in a very lower socioeconomic area Now. Traditionally speaking, those are actually very easy places to run courses and get people to come to things. But they've had a very, very long-term approach of going right. We want to not just get people to five weeks, we want to make sure they plug into a Bible study afterwards and they're finishing up their second year of running things and they've gone from really one or two a year for probably 20 years to they had seven last year, 14 this year I got a text message this morning in the eastern suburbs so far this year, seven and Sutherland Shire.
Speaker 3:I mean it's all over the place actually. And the thing is what's fascinating is that it's not a big personality at play or anything. It's really just slowed down, consistent, planned, thoughtful prioritization and it's. It's difficult because it's always prioritizing invisible people over the visible and that's difficult, but it it does work because the saints, we have the holy spirit within us. We want to evangelize, we want to bring people in. So, yeah, it's happening. People become Christians in Australia every single day and young people become Christians every single day. It's astonishing.
Speaker 3:So yeah lots to be encouraged by.
Speaker 1:One of my mates was at a meeting with a number of senior ministers the other day and they were discussing the feasibility of this 5% target and he said the big discussion was do we count kids and youth as well as adults? And they said if we include kids and youth, we're killing it.
Speaker 2:But if we don't, include kids and youth we're getting nowhere near it and what's your?
Speaker 3:Well, I offer we count youth and adults separately so that we have two spreadsheets, because we want to rejoice over the profession of faith in youth. 80%, so we're told you know, profess faith under the age of 18. However, that is indicative. What do you make of that?
Speaker 1:Well.
Speaker 4:Dave, I think that number is about 50% of that number are our children.
Speaker 3:Just not us.
Speaker 4:But the children of Christian people. About half our churches are filled with those people.
Speaker 3:But you have eight children, I have six, so it is us as well.
Speaker 4:So we're seeing conversions in that younger age group About 50-50 in one sense.
Speaker 3:So it's kind of underage 18. There's another way of skewing it, which is to say it's not that it's saying 80% of our population are getting converted under the age of 18. It's saying 80% of our Christians, which actually is saying we're just is it possible? We're just really bad at evangelism to adults. You know that we see, but we haven't put enough effort into it, and that's what I think.
Speaker 4:It's a different game, thinking about what does it look like to take the message of Jesus to young people as adults, and I think that historically we've been doing fairly well in that teenage space. But the idea of actually focusing.
Speaker 1:We're just noting that you are the chair of the former chair of Anglican Youth Works and we love young people becoming Christians. I was spoken to a youth council recently. The 80% number is actually a sign that we're failing in adult evangelism.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so we need to be thinking about everyone, and there are a lot of people who are over the age of 18.
Speaker 1:How do you count? I mean, I was in a discussion with somebody the last 24 hours and I showed them essentially my equivalent to your spreadsheet, my list of names. How do you qualify to get on that list? What I mean is it's not just putting up a hand or ticking a box at a card, it's when do you write somebody down on the list of? We saw them saved this year at Glenmore Park.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean Phil Colgan, I was talking to him last week and he kind of joked that at his church he almost had to go to Bible college before he was prepared to write you down on the list.
Speaker 4:Well, I mean, the book you want to be in is the Lamb's Book of Life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the one, so we're trying to.
Speaker 4:We want to find expression of faith in someone, and really it's. We're thinking about someone that we now know trusts Jesus. Their life is turned around, repentance and faith. They're embedded into the life of the church. So it's not someone who came along to something and is left again, but really someone who's grounded in the faith and you're actually seeing the fruit of the gospel in their life.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I completely agree. I think there's two ways of doing this that I've seen as effective together. The first one is a profession of faith, using that language, not conversion, because we don't know they're converted, but we want to rejoice and trust in the profession if it's from what we can tell to be a genuine profession. So that's why courses and things are helpful, because you get to know the people, because you've been talking to them for six, eight weeks.
Speaker 1:And when they actually say I believe in him as my Lord and my Savior, and if they do a feedback form.
Speaker 3:You do evangelism explosion diagnostic question or something like this how do you get to heaven? And if they answer that in a way and you're like, wow, they seem to have got this and they're, and we get to the language of conversion, I think it's most helpful at that point to say you've got to the point where you've handed them over from the evangelism world to the Bible study maturity type world, and that will take a year in some frameworks. So that's why having a follow-up Bible study is so important. So if someone makes a profession, we rejoice, but if they drop off eight weeks later, what do you do to that name? Well, you take it off the list.
Speaker 3:They're no longer professing faith and that protects you from doubling numbers, because otherwise, I mean, I would have been counted eight times. I made eight professions of faith. And it's the same that you've got records and they're not using the records in order to impress or in order to pretend, but in order to track people and see where they're at. But I think, yeah, that language of profession is a helpful one and we rejoice, trusting that he who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. But we are cautious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I also find that just having that document and we use a Google document super helpful, because it stops me from counting them in November last year and March this year. Otherwise, if I just had a number, I'd be tempted to do that.
Speaker 3:I can see how evangelism has so often led to both liberalism and accusations of sneaky lies, because, oh, the temptation in all of us to attach ourselves to these sort of things and think it reflects us well. So we must be cutthroat on genuine evangelism and genuine conversion, and genuine whilst at the same point being optimistic and rejoicing, and just persistent, you know, and able to keep going through it, dave.
Speaker 4:There's an irony in that in one sense, because when you think about mission, you often think about yourself or yourself as a pastor, like you know. Am I doing a good enough job? Am I doing this well? Am I a failure? When actually mission's always about the other person, it's kind of like I don't care about myself, I'm actually concerned about them, their salvation, and so taking our eyes off self and just thinking about the other person and even performance as a minister, you think. You know, there are years where this hasn't been the case at our church and it's kind of like we just faithfully keep going, yes, but just really have our eye on the other person and not us.
Speaker 3:And the term that's used when I worked at EV the term I love it is a mission. Work is people work it's about the people and you can't do it if you don't know them. And then you weep when I remember sitting there with one of the other pastors weeping as one of the guys left as he made a profession and six weeks down the track he was gone and it was just devastating. But also I walked away going man, we've known that guy for two months and we're crying about him leaving.
Speaker 3:Jesus and it's not over, but that's the kind of you need someone in there who's really got eyes on these people. They're people, they're precious people.
Speaker 4:Yeah, this is one of the things that for for our church. We invest heavily in terms of the staff. So Steve Gooch is on our staff team. He's responsible for running our evangelistic course and the mission element of our church life and that's actually a big sacrifice in the sense of he's really good at it.
Speaker 4:He loves people. They know that he'll walk over hot coals for someone, so they feel deeply loved. He explains the gospel clearly, but also in terms of our staff team, it means it's a significant proportion of our budget in effect has been dedicated to mission, when it could be dedicated to a whole lot of other things that made our life easier, and so it's a big cost.
Speaker 1:Last question, David the small church, the church of 150 and the church of 500, what's going to be the hard thing for each of those different sizes about adopting that 5% target?
Speaker 3:I think the hard thing is always the same, which is the self-reflective nature of the entire endeavour. In essence, that to begin it all, it will require a mirror on the current state of play and addressing if we're not hitting that at the moment, we're going to have to change something in order to hit that. And my take has been it's not about finding a plan, that's quite simple. Executing the plan. That's a bit trickier, but it's that first step of being able to go oh well, if we haven't been hitting it, that's not great, but it's not living and wallowing in it and that's what I want to.
Speaker 3:I've always loved the book Glenmore Park and many others. It's actually saying, okay, so that's happened. Well, what do we learn from that and how do we move on? And I think that, small, big or large, once that happens and you can purse through that, then you're free to be able to go okay, well, what can we change? What can we do slightly differently, differently? But if you're unwilling to acknowledge that it hasn't been happening and actually that's not great, it's going to be very, very difficult to make it happen.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for coming in. Gentlemen. David Jensen has been my guest. He leads the evangelism part of the Department of Evangelism and New Churches in the Sydney Anglican Church, and also Chris Braga with us. Senior Pastor of Grace West Church at Glenmore Park, to the west of Sydney. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we'll look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
