Mission at Earlwood

Jodie and I have just finished up a week of mission at Earlwood Anglican Church. From what i can tell, it went really well...

The deal is that as part of study at Moore, each year you get placed in a team with people across the years and do mission with various churches. Most are around sydney, some in rural NSW, one in the NT and one in South Africa! Ours was 2 suburbs away...just down the road.

The church has been in steady decline for the last little while, recently a new rector has started there and has been working with the congregation to grow the church. I think the church was glad to have us there and I hope that we've given them a boost and encouragement to keep at evangelism and community engagement in the future.

There we're lots of events:

- "God on the ropes" - a panel answering people's questions at the local pub
- a high tea for the seniors
- school scripture
- kids club
- craft with mums
- pilates
- Greek coffee and dessert night
- carnival + jazz in the park
- kids club spectacular
- youth event with a live band and insane water games.
- Indoor soccer comp for the men

There were around 350 ppl at the jazz in the park event and over half of them were not from the church. It was a huge amount of work to put on, but seemed worth it for that. We also saw about 20 new people at church on the 2nd sunday who had come to the events through the week. A number of those indicated that they had "prayed the prayer" after an evangelistic talk.

Was great to have been a part of something that was clearly very significant for a local church and to have seen God at work through his people there. Also, it was great getting to know some of the people we're studying with better and in a different context, seeing them preach, do magic tricks, make coffee, paint faces, and so on.