Mission in Henley

Hey everyone, this is Josh from Encounter Church Henley and thanks so much for tuning

into our podcast.

Our prayer is that through this podcast you can have an encounter with Jesus that will

change your life.

And now get ready for an inspiring message from our preaching team.

Simon, Lisa, we collectively lead a church in Albaton, a uniting church where you had

for the core team, you had your pre-launch in our building, one of your worship times

together.

So some of you know where that even is, just tucked away in the suburbs.

And it's a real mix of ministry.

This is just like a little snapshot of who we are.

So top left is us meeting in a more intergenerational setting.

If you look really closely, you can see some quite grey-haired people in there, as well

as some like two and three year olds right up the front dancing around and singing and

worshiping together, as well as some other people of other generations in there.

That one is the playgroup, one session out of two of the playgroup, and there's more

than 80 people in that room.

So they're all from our local community.

And then there's another session that happens straight after that.

So that's a little bit crazy.

This is just us hanging out at Christmas with our local community, about a thousand people

rocked up to just to hang out for Christmas and have some fun.

And this is the more kind of chapel-y formal space that some of you came into.

So it's a real mix of like knowing God, loving God and finding community within the church

and then going out and just exploring the bounds of what might be possible in your local

community.

And I think that's why Tim got me here, because we've been doing a bit in that space.

And I'm going to share a little bit about that.

In our local church setting, we're building a community of care and trust with our local

community.

And we make every effort to make sure people feel at home, known, loved, welcomed, remembered,

cared for, significant, valued, supported.

And that's not the, I mean, hopefully the Sunday people feel that.

This is the local community.

The people on the streets, the people connecting in with our, we run a cafe as well, connecting

with our cafe, connecting with our project.

This is the intent we have with every single person, regardless of where they're at in

life, as they enter our property.

As a church, at the moment, you are at the early stages of kind of forming.

You're still a baby, really.

I mean, I don't say that disrespectfully.

It's just you're still finding out who you are.

And part of that growing phase is to identify, well, what does that mean for you in this

location as you are at the moment, in this local context?

How will the local community know you as the local church?

That's a really important question over the next six months to start identifying, well,

how do we connect with the people out there?

Like, that person just there, like, how do we get to know them?

I mean, you're not necessarily going to go, hey, come over to church here.

But you need mechanisms and ways to do that.

And I think, hopefully, I'm going to give you some, just some thoughts and some tips

on some of that.

Now Tim, last week set up a mission quite broadly to start with quoting David Walsh.

Mission is alerting people to the universal reign of God through Christ.

And this is done in both word and deed, in both proclamation and action, in both explaining

and demonstrating.

And without both, we're in danger of either being hypocrites, of not walking the talk,

or of doing really nice things and at meaning absolutely nothing.

And we don't want to be either of those people.

But if I'm honest, this definition stage all sounds a bit big picture to me.

What does it mean for the way I live as a follower of Jesus?

And how might I need to live in practical, real world ways?

What changes might I need to make in real world ways so that God might use my life to

the fullest for His good works?

Thankfully, Tim did touch on some of this last week and he talked about friendship and future

friends and how he might seek to use the very ordinary, everyday run-of-the-mill lives that

we have to bring strangers to become neighbours and neighbours to become the family of God.

And this journey is a journey that has to be in genuine relationship.

Without genuine relationship, without trust, we haven't earned or established any real

ability to speak into someone's life.

They're likely to ignore us.

So for more on that, jump on the podcast, the Henley podcast and catch up on week two.

So this week we're going to broaden our focus from friends to local community.

The community around us, that might be for you, that might be your local community.

I want you to think in two ways because you're on site here sometimes and you have a local

community here and a church identity that wants to begin to connect with local community,

but you also have all of your own local communities.

And specifically I guess today I do want you to think a bit about how the local church

connects with the local people around it.

Because it's also highly relational.

It has to be.

Like with friends, I believe we need to have established trust for there to be an authentic

opportunity to point people to Jesus, especially in an increasingly secular age.

So what might it look like in the local church to be in relationship with your local community

and how might we be encouraged to embrace this?

Well, glad you asked.

I know you were thinking it.

Well I have some good news and some bad news.

Would you like the good news first or the bad news?

The bad.

Okay, let's get right into it.

I have nothing specific to offer you for the Henley context.

I don't live here.

This is not my local community.

I have no idea who is around you.

I have nothing specific to offer.

But the good news is I have many reflections from our own experience and I believe you

can take some of what we've learned and begin to journey with that in your local context.

So let's dive into mission in community.

Participating in mission in the local community, both individually and as a local church, I

believe requires us to think through some structure.

We don't just like go out the door as I said and talk to that guy necessarily.

We need some structure around what we do.

And I'm going to call this heart, head and hands.

And each stage of these is critical and the order of how we do things is critical.

Let's start with the head because that's the heart because that's at the top.

To start with, we need to understand God's heart for our local community.

And I believe the word hospitality, which Tim mentioned last week, gives us a really

helpful lens to actually consider this.

Now, I've been spending a whole month talking and unpacking the fullness of hospitality

in our local church context and I'm about to try and summarise that for you in five

minutes.

So bear with me and see what you can take away.

There's a couple of books that Tim mentioned last week that are great books.

Another book is Extraordinary Hospitality Brackets for Ordinary People.

It's only about that thin, it has seven chapters, really practical and three quarters of the

way through it.

And it's really good.

Now the initial problem with the word hospitality in the Western culture is that it is tightly

linked to food.

And that's not helped by the naming of the hospitality industry.

So we connect hospitality with food.

But yet even the dictionary, the Oxford dictionary, let's say, doesn't link hospitality to food.

So let's just see what the...this is what the Oxford dictionary says.

The friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors and strangers.

That's a pretty good starting point that takes us away from food.

hospitality is not food. But Holy Hospitality, as I've been titling at this month in our

local church context, takes us one step further.

When we offer a friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors and

strangers, it is often, at least in part, a way to impress others.

With that first definition, we're looking to impress others.

We're inviting them around, hey, check out my house.

Check out this delicious food I've cooked for you.

How good is...the car I've got sitting at the front.

We're just inviting people in.

Maybe that's not the case.

It's not the case for me, I'll do that.

Which...

A lot of hospitality in our secular world is around impressing people with what we have

or with what we can do.

So let me represent you with my working definition of Holy Hospitality.

That is, extending God's generous and gracious welcome to those around us.

It's actually not about us.

And if the Holy Hospitality God is calling us to share with others is not about impressing

others, sometimes it might look really ordinary.

And we might need to be okay with this.

We might need to swallow our pride in saying, reaching out and offering hospitality doesn't

need to look shiny and glamorous.

It doesn't need to impress.

We might need to swallow our pride.

And the beauty of ordinary hospitality to ordinary people in ordinary situations is

that it takes a lot of pressure off.

You're no longer trying to impress.

But it also might surprise people for new and more important reasons.

You see when people experience warmth, the warmth of caring, generous, gracious, thoughtful

hospitality that is done to extend God's welcome to those around us, it catches people's

attention.

It might not be shiny or elaborate, but it's real.

It's personal.

It's heartfelt.

It might even change someone's life as the Holy Spirit interprets, is the interpreter and

interprets what we're doing and offering for that person and points it towards the love

of God.

And what might be the motivator to offer this kind of welcome?

Well, it's the kind of welcome, the personal, undeserved, gracious, generous welcome that

we've received from God, each of us welcomed into God's family.

And God wants us to extend this same incredible welcome that he has offered us to all of humanity.

And he wants us to partner with him as kind of welcomeers like you might have out the

front.

They're the kind of people God wants us to be in real, hospitable, generous and gracious

ways.

To go beyond the Sunday service and the Bible study, to welcome strangers, to become neighbours,

and neighbours to become part of the family of God.

And God has been extending this kind of hospitality to humanity for all time.

And the scriptures are absolutely full of examples of God's hospitality to humanity.

Here's just a one minute summary of a few in the Bible.

Genesis.

I don't need to tell you too much about Genesis.

If you can picture Eden and the abundance of things that God gave Adam and Eve, like

all I'm asking is, just don't touch that tree.

But the rest of it, I've given you freely.

I've been so hospitable to you.

I've welcomed you.

Incredible.

God's hospitality in Isaiah 55 to a covenant people who had done just about everything

they could to divorce themselves of God.

And we're living in exile as a result.

And God speaks through the prophet Isaiah, calling them back to himself.

And he says, come all who are thirsty, come to the water, come all who have no money,

come buy and eat, come buy wine and milk without no money and without cost.

Why spend money on what is not bread and labour on what does not satisfy?

Listen to me.

Eat what is good and you will delight in the richest of fare.

These are the words of God through the prophet Isaiah, calling his people back, offering

them not just like bread and water, but wine and milk, which was only available to kind

of the fancy people.

This was a step above the bare minimum.

What about Jesus' words in Matthew 11?

Are you tired, worn out, burnt out with religion?

Come to me.

Get away with me and you will recover your life.

I'll show you how to take real rest.

Walk with me and work with me.

Watch how I do it.

Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.

Keep company with me and you'll learn how to live lightly and freely.

These are the words of Jesus, the invitation to come, partner with Jesus.

Incredible.

The good Samaritan, the prodigal son.

These different stories that just show God's love and welcome beyond what we can kind of

even grasp in our own lives.

So part one, if I should be so bold to give you two parts of Henley homework, because

I've heard it's a thing, this week is just to investigate, take some stories of Jesus

and just think about it through a lens of hospitality.

What is Jesus offering in here?

And sometimes that hospitality is going both ways.

Jesus is actually stepping out and someone else is offering hospitality and Jesus is

accepting hospitality.

This is a really incredible picture of hospitality in the life of Jesus.

So part one, have a little look at some of that this week.

We've also got the exhortations of Paul to the early church to live at peace with one

another.

He's also very self-compassion as we heard, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience.

And in fact, in the list of qualifications that 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 for church leaders,

it specifically lists hospitality as something that should be a quality of a church leader.

It's not just like a tack on at the end.

This is what God is calling us to in the church.

All of these and so many more point to the rich hospitality of God.

Jesus has been extending a generous and gracious welcome to us for all time.

So if mission doesn't start with your heart, if it doesn't start there, forget it.

Like you may as well not go out the door.

If that you don't have a heart, if your heart doesn't break for your local community, if

you don't see people struggling and go, oh, I really, not only do I want to find a way

to support their physical need, but I really want them to come to know Jesus.

If that's not part of your heart, then what's the point doing mission and community?

And we can't run ahead and skip to stage two, the head.

We can't before we've caught the heart.

The strategic planning for mission in our local community.

We can't rush ahead to the strategic planning and mission in our local community if we don't

first deeply care about the people we want to connect with.

And by a genuine relationship, Tina from Evangelism Australia, who I heard speak during the week.

She speaks of just ways to talk about your faith in everyday circumstances.

And she says a genuine relationship she describes as someone who you would commit to and keep

praying for even if they never turn to Jesus.

That's a genuine relationship because it's not got an agenda where, you know, I just

want to get this person to know Jesus and then who cares about the relationship from

there.

That's that, you know, like it's not, this is a person I'm committed to and I want to

see their life changed.

And if that never happens, I'm still committed to this person.

So it starts with the heart.

It has to.

Mission in community is most effective when the hospitality is both part of the culture

and the DNA of this community and is very strategic.

So let's move to the head.

In our context, Lisa is our chief strategist.

She not only has a huge heart for people, but she is committed to excellence.

She is an excellent planner, a researcher, a brilliant thinker with a huge capacity

and a huge memory.

And memory is a wonderful thing when offering hospitality.

But Lisa will tell you that's partly Holy Spirit inspired.

It's not just all her.

When the local church seeks to connect with the local community in relational and genuine

ways, it needs to engage the head.

You can't just be heartfelt.

You really need to think through these things.

And so I'm going to run through some of the categories of questions you might think of.

I'm going to flick these to Tim as well so that he's going to have all of the questions.

But what I encourage you to do is as I go through some of this head stuff, listen for

something that stands out.

A couple of questions that you think, yeah, that really resonates.

I want to be thinking about that in this context.

Whether you're here, you've a third week here or you've been here in the core team, just

give it some thought about what does it look like in this space?

So practical assessment.

This is really practical.

You've got to ask questions before you go out the door of where are we?

Who are we?

Who are they?

Who are demographic of people around us?

Who are we?

What is our demographic as a church community?

And what do we have?

What do we physically have?

What do we have as gifts and skills amongst this church community?

What needs exist around us?

And what gaps are there in the existing nature of community around us?

So in our local context, three and a half years ago, we were starting to think through

some of these questions and we identified there was a lot of young families in that

area and there was no place where you could just come and hang out with your kids and

meet with another family and it would be safe and you weren't worried about knocking over

the hipster like cafe thing in the corner that was all pretty and had some plants with

the leaves.

Not that one.

The leaves just going up and around and the kids were going to pull them off and then the

person was going to tell them off.

Not that kind of cafe but not a play cafe because that would just, it costs too much

and they're like $15 to get your kid in.

That's ridiculous.

You'll get it when you have had kids if you haven't had kids in the room.

It's just, and then they see it and they're like, take me here.

We need something that fills a gap that also cares.

And so a cafe isn't the answer for everybody but for us it was.

It was creating a space and transforming our building what we had into a space that would

just welcome our community into the building.

Come onto the site.

All of a sudden we've got like 300 or 400 people, some big, some very small, a week coming

through our building familiar with our property, familiar with the local church.

That doesn't scare them coming into the local church.

They're in the local church every week and they've begun to get to know a whole bunch

of the local church people who either serve or work in the cafe or just have their coffees

in the cafe or come and catch up with some friends or invite some friends to the cafe.

So all of a sudden we have identified a specific area.

There's a gap.

There's a potential to connect with our community in a way that no one else is doing at the

moment.

So that's an initial question like what is around us?

What is the need?

What is the gap in the sense of community in my area?

That's a question for this church but it also might be in a smaller scale, your own question

for your own like little neighbourhood, your couple of streets that you live in.

I've titled all these couple of questions identity and self-reflection.

What do you want to be known for in the local community?

Like as a church, what do you want to be known for?

Would people notice if you closed?

Which is a slightly strange question given you're fairly young.

But in the same sense, you know, in time as people get to know you, would it even matter

if you disappeared?

And that's a good long-term question.

Because if it doesn't matter, you're probably having no connection with the local community.

No one really knows.

Where is there an opportunity to meet a need that community can be formed around?

So for us, the cafe creates this perfect thing on our site that actually has people, the

average person would probably stay on our site for an hour, an hour and a half, through

playgroup or through the cafe.

We've set up an environment where they actually don't just come and grab a coffee, most of

them because their kids can play, just stay on our site for an hour and have conversations

that whole time.

So all of a sudden, there's building community around something where it's not just a drop-in

service like I can offer you something, but you're building that sense of local community.

How...

Yeah.

With an idea.

And so it's going to take time for some of these ideas to pop up, like, oh, maybe we

could do this, but how would we gather community around that?

Maybe we could do this, but how would that work?

And there's a lot of practical things like, you know, how would that continue?

Do we have the people to do whatever this idea is?

And specifically, how would people gather on the local church site or nearby to build

community?

Some questions for a specific idea.

How do you create the best community around?

Not just like average community.

Some churches, unfortunately, put on something well-meaning because they think they need...

We must have, like, a couple of programs, so we'll just put some stuff on.

And it's like, it's okay, but it's a bit average.

How might you...

There's no attack on anyone.

It's just saying.

How might you, as the church, aspire and actually create the best community around?

Better than down at Henley Square?

Like, how might this place...

It's a big question that how might you create the best community?

Because in our little area, if you're a preschool family, we arguably have the...

I'm not trying to be proud.

We arguably have the best community.

If you're a young...if you're a parent of preschool kids, you know about this café,

and you're probably hanging out there a few times, and people gush about the community,

the sense of community and the sense of it being, feeling like home.

How could you create that?

I don't know.

But that's a key question to ask and something to be working towards and something to be

thinking about.

How does the environment facilitate community?

So that is a question about how might this space, the practical space be inviting to

people?

Like, how do we welcome people in?

How do we set up something that we're doing so that from the very moment someone's on

the footpath, they're welcomed in.

They're like, this feels like I'm meant to be here.

What is...what does the space feel like?

How might there be a sense of comfort, belonging and a desire to linger in that space?

How might you create high quality community?

A place that people love?

And I'm not talking about Sunday worship.

I'm talking about like midweek or something, something that is actually the very first

step to connecting with your community.

How can that, whatever that is, be a place that people love?

And finally, when you have an idea and you've got it through those things, there's questions

about relationship building.

What specific ways will people experience God's generous and gracious welcome through

what we do here?

Like, you've actually got to ask that question and go, whoa, what could we do?

How could people come into this site and go, wow.

I just feel like people love and care about me.

They don't have an agenda specifically.

They just actually want to have a genuine conversation with me and get to know me.

How will it feel to experience the kind of community you might create?

If you're on the other side and you invite someone in, what would it feel like?

And how will people feel loved, cared for, known, seen, heard, safe at home?

And finally, how will this idea be sustainable?

Because that's a really important question for connecting with your community.

Ideas that are both missional and self-funding are great.

So like a cafe, if you do it well, can actually fund itself and be highly missional.

But that's a fairly rare option.

But how might you build into what you're offering some way of recoupings and funds, but also

offering wonderful community?

Lisa came up with this idea when we first started of BabyTunos, of making Adelaide's

best, not just some average ones, but Adelaide's best BabyTunos.

And we've been awarded that twice.

So it's true.

But it's genius because it's this little commercial factor to the mission that we offer as a church

that makes it sustainable.

It means that we as a church are not getting sucked dry through the cafe that's running

on site, but it's actually running a small profit which is invested back into the church

community.

And so if we were a bit low on customers one month, the next month we just do a slightly

better BabyTino, and people start rolling in.

So it's become this tool that actually literally creates an up and down waves of our missional

engagement with the local community.

Now you can't have BabyTino, or you could, but your answer to that is going to be something

completely different.

But what is your BabyTino is my question.

What is the thing that connects with people on a secular level, every parent wants to

be able to go to a cafe and buy an amazing BabyTino for their two year old.

Trust me if you don't have two year olds.

That is like, you want to be able to do that and then a lot of society wants to put it

on Insta and show off how good a mum or dad they are with their kids having these amazing

BabyTinos.

But all of a sudden there's this opportunity to connect, to build relationship inside the

local church.

So what is your BabyTino?

Evangelism is a word that some people like and some people don't like.

But in this current time, it's really a long game.

In many cases, there's a lot of value in the long game evangelism.

And finding ways to build relationships with people in a way that's genuine, that doesn't

have that feel of like I'm just wanting to get to know you so that I can bring you to

church.

But actually, you've got to really stick at it.

It takes a long time.

We've been running a cafe for a couple of years now.

And this year has been an incredible year of starting to see some fruit from the relationships.

And some of those relationships have been two or three years old.

And or some, a mum recently had joined us for Playgroup for a few years.

She'd experienced that sense of care, of genuine love and being at home.

She'd gone away for a bit.

Her daughter now goes to a Catholic school and her daughter's saying, mum, I want to

go to church.

And so she reaches out and goes, well, the only church I know of that I would feel comfortable

going is the one I connected with when I was in taking my daughter to Playgroup.

I know Lisa, old Senator of Text.

Do you think maybe I can come to church one week as my daughter wants to?

Of course you can.

That's awesome.

But that was from a relationship formed three years ago.

It's going to take time.

Some people will just walk in your door.

But the vast majority are going to need to get to know you and trust you.

And in that circumstance, you're going to be able to share stories and share how God

has been at work at different moments, offer to pray for people and get to know how to

love people well.

After all that thinking, let's get a little less practical.

With our head, we need to use it.

But we're going to look at the hands.

When a heart is prepared and a head is fully engaged in thinking through our approach,

we might just be ready to turn to our hands or our mouths.

Starting something new is hard work, like it really is.

Lisa and I spent some really long hours getting the cafe off the ground.

But it's been amazing.

But it is hard work.

In the church, on a limited budget, it usually involves lots of volunteer hours.

It often involves the tension between being good stewards of what we have with our property

and our finances, but also avoiding the trap of getting into a scarcity mindset where we

hold on to everything we have and make sure we don't overspend.

And there's this tension we sit in when we want to do something new, when we want to

reach out, when we want to be generous.

After all, if we're going to create community that people love to offer generous welcome,

it's going to cost.

It'll cost the local church initially, and depending on your model, it might cost ongoing,

depending on what you're doing.

It costs with staff and volunteers.

It's going to take up some of your time that you might want to do the perfectly crafted

sermon on a Sunday or the perfectly crafted worship set time, and suddenly you might be

throwing a few hours of that interconnecting with your community.

It has practical implications of wear and tear on your property.

You invite people in, you know, inevitably, things get a bit more tired and a bit more

worn down.

But it also offers incredible opportunities.

Because of the positive work and reputation within our local community, in our case,

we've had amazing support from local councils, our local councils, because we've actually

built relationship with our local council and they can see the immense community engagement

that's happening there.

And they're all about that.

We just take out the God when we talk to them.

We talk about how we connect with the community, and then we bring God back in after that conversation

and we get their grant funding.

And it's wonderful, but you need that relationship to actually get the support.

It has beautiful, as you build a network of community around you, it has wonderful security

benefits because, you know, people are your informal surveillance.

Because you know that neighbour, you know that neighbour, you're getting to know that neighbour

and you know that neighbour.

And they might not even be Christian, but in our context, if we leave a light on, someone's

going to give me a call and just check, you know, I don't think anyone's there anymore.

You left a light on.

People are suddenly part of your community.

And it has the opportunity as you host something, as you are running a something mission in your

property to actually upgrade the apply for grants and upgrade the property, which then

benefits your Sunday worshiping community and the ways you connect with your local community.

So there's plenty of good things.

But the blessings come when we get our hands dirty.

Opportunities to journey people with people through the hardest of times.

To offer hope, to offer purpose, to offer meaning.

Always looking for the people.

One way of saying it is the people who like you, listen to you and serve you.

Some of you may have come across the term people of peace.

People that lean in to the conversations that you're having.

That won't be everyone.

But you'll know when someone, whether they know God or not, is leaning in.

There's a chemistry even.

There's a natural leaning into the conversation and engaging well in the conversation.

Look for those people.

Here in here is the opportunity to respond with things like, tell me more about that.

Help me to understand that and all of a sudden you're allowing them space to share part of

their story.

And they're feeling loved and cared for and heard possibly for the first time in a long

time.

As you journey with them, you're earning trust, you're earning credibility and a permission

to share into their life from your own experience, from your own journeys.

It all takes energy and it all takes time, but the fruit of this long-term investment

is incredible.

I'm just going to give you a couple of quick stories to wrap up.

I have a hairdresser who's just around the corner from church.

So I've been going to see him, Dion.

Oh yeah, I put other names.

His name is not Dion.

His name is Dan.

Just in case he's listening.

His name is Dan.

And we've been just chatting as you do with your hairdresser, but I've intentionally,

as I got employed in Alburton, finding the closest hairdresser to get to know.

And he goes to a Greek Orthodox church.

And so there's a lot of different stuff about the way he experiences God and some of the

practices that he participates in.

And we've been chatting about that for a long time.

And last month we were journeying through Lament, the process of just coming before God and

being real with God.

And I got up the courage to ask him, because I knew the year before his wife had been through

a cancer diagnosis and treatment, all of this.

And I said, I just plucked up the courage and said, how did you get through that?

How did you trust God in that time?

Because I didn't really know where his faith was at.

He seemed to be participating in a lot of things.

But I figured, what's the worst that can happen?

He'll tell me, forgot God or he hated God.

But he told me that his mum died when he was two of breast cancer.

And so to have this diagnosis was huge in their family.

And yet he never even second guessed trusting God.

There was this amazing faith that he talked about.

But come the next haircut, which was only two days ago, he said, you're the only person

who I'd be willing to talk about faith and Christianity with and religion with in the

whole world.

And it's because I feel safe having a conversation with you.

And that was just, you know, that's just come from sitting down in the chair, having GNU

and conversations, occasionally being a little bit bold to just ask, tell me about that.

Tell me why that's important to you.

And all of a sudden, I've got this relationship with my hairdresser that he's now promised

he's going to come to our church one time at the risk of getting kicked out of the Greek

Orthodox Church.

And we actually were scheming about how I was just, because he was talking about how it

wasn't very accepting.

And I said, oh, just come on week and we'll see what we can stir up a bit of trouble.

And then he said, no, you might get me kicked out.

But he's going to come along one time.

Just we have a bit of fun.

But that's just one local person that I'm getting to know.

Our neighbor, a neighbor just moved in a couple of street, a couple of houses down from our

church.

And so she'd heard already that there was this reputation in this local church.

And she just had seen what was going on and just wandered across because we were right

in our street.

And she was almost like, well, she felt like it was almost meant to be.

She hadn't been at church for a number of years.

She'd been through a divorce and she has a one year old child and it's really messy.

But she thought, well, I've moved here.

I may as well give it a chance.

And she has been the last four weeks because it's just across the road.

And because we're in the community and there's people know that there's people finding a

home here, people feeling welcomed here.

Brett, no, Ben, my neighbor, I'm not doing very good at this.

My neighbor across the road, he's a plumber.

And I was talking, I just mentioned to him that we're talking about hospitality in the

church anyway.

He comes back to me the next day and he's like, I was thinking about it.

After you've had a long day at the cafe and you've packed up, do you reckon I could just

wheel the barbecue across into your car park and we'll just share a meal together and we'll

invite the other neighbors who are just the other young family who are just nearby and

we'll just hang out.

Yes, what a wonderful idea.

All of a sudden, like the things I'm talking to about with my church community, this guy

who doesn't even know God, but we have got to know over three years really intentionally

from across the road, wants to just bring his barbecue round and shout us dinner after

a long day at the cafe.

How many more of these shall I share?

I'll stop sharing stories, but you can ask me a few afterwards if you want, if you want

to hear some more.

But there is story after story after story of just God lining things up as we, as the

local church, are being willing to just like look for every opportunity.

There wasn't actually a guy at there last time, but if there was, look for, you know,

what is happening with that guy walking past?

He's not there, Jordan, don't look.

Like is he struggling with a trolley that he shouldn't have walking down the street?

Can I help him out?

Like what is the opportunity to strike up the very first conversation with that neighbor?

Are they putting their bins out and they're trying to bring two in at once and it's really

awkward and you go, oh, can I just help you with that and we'll start a conversation?

That may be in your local context, but every time you were on site here, every one of you

who calls this place home, I encourage you to begin to think about what does it mean

to, for this church to become a local hub of community?

What does it mean to get to know all of the neighbors around here?

Whether it's just like they're going out to check the letterbox and you just want to say

hi.

And you just keep doing that until you get the first conversation.

This is mum, she had a couple of weeks ago in our church service about a lady she knew

who would intentionally do this and walked past this same man for 10 years, giving him

a smile and a wave and saying good morning because that was part of her walk.

And after 10 years, she got a hello and a smile back.

That is persistence, my friends.

10 years.

What would it take to actually like connecting with community and building relationships

takes effort?

It takes intentionality.

It takes constantly surveying your ongoing.

How can I have a conversation with people?

And let me tell you, as Tim shared last week, he's not a big people person.

Like he feels a bit socially awkward at times.

That was me probably 10 years ago and the Lord has delivered me.

You know, the Lord has given me a heart for people.

I still don't get energy.

I'm going to need to go crash tonight and just recharge by myself.

But the Lord has given me a heart for just getting to know people, just stepping out

and having a silly conversation that might actually lead to a relationship with someone.

Who knows?

What's the worst that's going to happen?

They'll just ignore you.

It's about just beginning to be comfortable with just taking every opportunity to connect

with every person around here.

And you might be down at Hanley Square.

You might be at the Grainge Jetty and you do the same thing there.

And then that person happens to be walking the dog back past here and you're like, oh,

and they're like, oh, you're part of the local church.

That happens to me all the time because I meet them at the shops and I have a conversation

with them there.

But then I'm out doing some gardening or just out in the car park and we have a lot of people

that walk their dogs around their area.

So they come walk past the fence and they're like, oh, I've met you before.

We caught up in the shops.

And that begins another relationship in the community.

I don't know what that looks like for you, but you've got to get a heart for it.

You've got to then think through it and then you've got to go and get your hands dirty

and take every opportunity up to have a conversation with someone, to love people.

And yeah, that's probably about it.

That's probably enough for tonight.

I will just say that the head, the heart, the head and the hands, there was a lot of

stuff there tonight, but the head, the heart, but starting with the heart, the heart, the

head and the hands, all you need to do is remember those three and you'll begin to remember

what is it that I need about my heart before I go out and connect with my community?

What is it that Simon said about the head?

Oh, that's probably a thinking thing.

So it was some of the things we think through.

What is it about the hands?

What are they going to get dirty?

It's just going to be hard work at times and you're going to have to put yourself out there

a bit, but building community is so beautiful and so rewarding and all of a sudden we see

people coming to know Jesus.

Thanks so much for tuning into this week's message.

If you felt challenged or need prayer, would love to hear from you on Instagram at encounterhennie.

If you're interested in how you can support this ministry, please go to our website, encounteradelaide.com.au.

Thanks again for listening.

God bless you.