In February 2011 my wife, Anabelle, and I moved to the city of Newcastle to plant a church. The Bishop of Newcastle at the time, Brian Farran, appointed me to undertake this work, understanding that the church we set out to plant would be clearly evangelical. We spent our first four months in Newcastle familiarising ourselves with the context of ministry in the city. At that stage, humanly speaking, there were just the two of us. We had no musicians, no children’s ministry leaders and nowhere to meet. Worse, we were both over fifty and our kids had left home. If the church planting books were right, that meant we were too old to plant a church and had no automatic connection to the community through our children.
With all this in mind we commenced a weekly prayer meeting on Sunday 19th June 2011. We invited people to come and pray with us. Through the kindness of God some people came, and together we prayed for God’s hand on the church plant and that he would bring people who would form the core group to plant the church. Some families with children joined the prayer meeting, so it soon became a prayer meeting with a children’s ministry!
Three different categories of people joined our prayer meeting. Some people who were very content with their present churches and had no intention of leaving them prayed with us for a season, that God would establish an evangelical Anglican Church in the city. There were some people who were looking for a church, and attended the prayer meeting for a while, but it became clear that they did not wish to belong to a church with as evangelical a focus as we were proposing, and so they stopped attending. Then there were those who joined the prayer meeting because they were looking for a church with an evangelical focus and have stayed with us.
By Christmas 2011 we had a core group of around twenty-five people who were keen to work with us to plant a church. I also had a church planting colleague—Cathy Young, a Moore graduate who had taken time off from paid ministry work to care for her children but was keen to resume ministry. Cathy immediately began ministering to women in and around the church and organising a variety of evangelistic activities. Cathy also thought of a name for our church—ANeW—Anglican Newcastle Evangelical Worship. In February 2012, with this group, we commenced church meetings on a Sunday night.
After some time, an existing parish, All Saints, New Lambton, invited us to join with them. There were a few people from New Lambton who did not support this. These people chose not to stay with us. The majority of the original church have been a great blessing to ANeW. Our church committees and Growth Groups now contain people from both original churches. At times it is hard to work out who came from which group. Indeed, these days there are many people who have only known the merged entity, which is now referred to as All Saints ANeW.
Fast forward to 2021 and we have come out of Covid with four weekly congregations with a total attendance of around two hundred and forty people. We have a paid Pastoral Team, which consists of three full time and two half time staff, one MTS trainee and an administration co-ordinator. The three full time Team members (Sam Broadfoot, Beck Bishop and myself) are all graduates of Moore College.
Now why did All Saints ANeW grow when several Anglican churches around us have recently closed? I would suggest three reasons.
- The exposition of the Bible is the core activity of the Church. We have endeavoured each week to be opening the Bible and working through it in our sermons. We further endeavoured to establish mid-week Growth Groups, where the core activity would be the reading of the Bible. There are many people who have commented that the reason for joining our church was to hear the Bible spoken about in a clear and precise manner.
- The exposition of the Bible is undertaken with children as well as adults. We are an all age ministry with age appropriate teaching. So, while for adults this teaching is a sermon, for children this is putting them in groups and teaching them the Bible through age appropriate activities. People have joined our church saying that they wanted their children to be taught from the Bible, not simply be removed from church for secular activities.
- The church has a focus on reaching out with the gospel to bring people to faith in Christ and eternal life. We have supported others undertaking gospel ministry overseas through the Church Missionary Society (CMS), across Australia through Bush Church Aid (BCA) and locally through Newcastle Christian Students, the local university group. We have also done this ourselves through evangelistic events and courses. We have had a number of Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES) teams come and assist us. We have also had Youthworks teams and a Sydney Missionary & Bible College (SMBC) team on mission with us. We now have our own local evangelistic course (Knowing Jesus) which was designed for Zoom as well as regularly running Christianity Explored. There are a number of people in our church today as result of this local evangelistic ministry.
None of these are rocket science. In fact, it is hard to imagine why any church would not undertake ministry in this way. More than that, in all of these we are conscious of our weaknesses. We long to be able to reach out more to our local community with the gospel. We know we have at times been too internally focused.
The result of undertaking ministry in this way has been a gospel unity within the church. It is the gospel which has united those who came from the New Lambton Parish with those who came from ANeW. It is the gospel which has led those from the original New Lambton Parish to propose repeatedly that what happens in the church building needs to now be different from what it was in the past. We consider our ministry to be gospel focused, and others expect our ministry to be gospel focused. After all, we are evangelicals!
All Saints ANeW now has a church vision: To see more people transformed by Jesus. It is our hope and prayer that as we look to the Bible as God’s Word, both for ourselves and as the basis of the gospel for the whole community, that we will see more and more people transformed by Jesus in Newcastle.
Originally published in Moore Matters Winter 2021
