Greetings from Hope Melbourne, where we are, we’re down under right in Melbourne, I' m here in Brisbane, with every body, its been a really fantastic convention, and we have really seen God at work here I think we feel particularly inspired to be more contextual and touch the local community in an even more powerful way.
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Oceania Convention: A Contextualised Church
In fact when we get back from this convention it has been in my heart that we need to touch families in our local area more effectively.
Our church is based in a community centre, so we have people coming in and out of our doors; the entrance to the hallway is sort of situated right next door to the entrance way into a community centre, where there are people from the local community coming in all the time.
- Please pray for us, because we really want to touch the people that are coming in through the door there, that are using the pool and other facilities in the community centre for Jesus Christ.
- Please pray that we will be able to upgrade our KFC (Kids for Christ) our outreach in that area of the church so that we can be more effective in touching the people.
One praise point from Hope Melbourne that I want to share is that we really saw breakthrough in the student ministry at the end of last year.
When we started our church, I think it was significant that happened when we started what happened was this we had been trying to register a club a Christian group on campus at Melbourne Uni, which is one of the main unis in Melbourne and we’d been tying for 15 years could you believe it? 15! About that much time. And we have never been able to do it. Countless times, year after year, people have gone and spoken to the student union and requested that we could register the club, but every time the door was closed, and we were flatly rejected. and some how by the Grace of God last year, the student union, we reapproached them and they were favorable and one of the guys that actually initiated the process went to a conference and he got a vision of how this club will take on a very special form.
Its called 'SALTS" (Student, Arise Learning To Serve) and the kind of angle of the club is related to focusing on people’s needs..
Anyway miraculously God has blessed that vision and enabled us to register the club and it happened just as we started the church, and its meant that this year we were able to be a lot more contextual and involved in peoples life on campus because we registered there.
Mission Trip to Papua New Guinea
And I just praise God for his goodness and another exciting thing is that this year we are going to PNG. Which is one of our target groups.
PNG or Papua New Guinea is based obviously north of Australia, we don’t know much about it, but im planning to lead a team of people and even last night during our conference, there were quite a number that volunteered to be a part, please pray for us, because we are planning to go in September I believe. And we are looking at doing an exploratory trip that will lead to starting a church in PNG.
God bless you, and it’s great to be a part of what God is doing in
Pastor Mark & Susan Rusic, Hope Melbourne City Centre
