The people of God are the church - but we are grateful for places to meet together!

The very first church service after our 4 easter outreaches was held in our lounge room!

After a few weeks of having church in our house we moved to having services at Cullen Bay in a conference room. Thank you to Rowan and Naomi Grosser for letting us use the facility! What a blessing.

The church grew quite quickly.

As the church grew we needed a bigger venue to meet together. Troy was already picking up students from the university to come to church on a Sunday so we asked - and they said we could use this 98 seater lecture theatre.

After a couple of months we were able to move into the bigger lecture theatre room. This was also a great move as before we didn't have a room to do kids church so we just had to make do with the foyer. With the new lecture room we were also able to use a classroom for kids church. This is still our current venue as of 2012.

A Church has been planted...

Soooooo........Its been a long, long time since I have last blogged about the adventure of planting a church in Darwin. Between this post and the last post a church has been planted and as all things do when they are planted - they grow! I could make excuses as to why I haven't blogged in such a long time. After all, we have been keeping ourselves busy with starting the church. At this stage I am not going to write a history of the last 2 1/2 years - although I will try to post some pics to give a snapshot. All I will say at this point is that God is faithful. Precious people have found Christ and are on the journey of discipleship. The church is made up of people who have been Christians for years, months, weeks and also people who are still checking out this whole Jesus thing! When the church was first planted the oldest person in the church was only 35 years old, and we only had a few children, whereas now we have a wide range of ages. During 2011 we had a church baby boom, I think I counted 8 babies born within the space of 12 months!! Darwin has an incredibly transient population so we have seen a lot of people pass through the church on the way to their next destination. It has been hard to say goodbye to so many people in only 2 1/2 years, however what a blessing that our church family has been able to play a part in their Christian journey for even a short space of time. I promise the next blog post will be soon!!

Easter @ the Uni

Last night we completed the last of our Easter Outreaches. We went into the University to feed the students who live on campus and do an Easter presentation. We cooked all day, making many dishes such as fried rice, vegetable korma, baked potatoes, stir fry and various pasta sauces. The local Brumbys bakery donated bags of bread rolls and other bakery items.
The night began with some fun and games by the university students, with Christina running one of the games. We then all went inside and we began our presentation of the gospel. Troy introduced us and then Matt gave a little blurb that went something like this: "Lady Gaga sings songs about pocking peoples faces, and Fifty Cent sings songs about coins, I sing songs about a King who sends his Son to die for all". He then sang "Amazing Love". Troy shared a very relevant message about who Jesus really is verses how Jesus has been represented. The team performed the lighthouse skit. I invited those who wanted to discuss the Christian Faith further to come and speak with us and I told them about the ALPHA course we are wanting to run.
Dinner was then served and everyone mingled and chatted. Josh had put together a loop with all the Missions videos playing so people could see what our church is all about.
We were told to cater for around 60 people. When we first arrived at the uni Troy was told they were expecting maybe around 30 people. A few of us did some head counts and the number of students was definitely around 90! We all had a great time meeting students, chatting and making some great connections. Due to the nature of the night people were quite open to speaking about their own beliefs and questions about the Christian faith were asked. It was such a fantastic night to finish everything off - although really......we have just begun!

Thank you Jesus, my saviour, my closest friend.

It's all about JESUS - He is RISEN

John 3:16-17
"This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again".

This morning at 11am we held a one hour Easter Sunday service in Lyons. We began the set up from around 9:15am doing a couple of trips in the bus to transport all the things we needed for the service. The team did a great job working together to get it all set up. People started arriving and we kicked off the service! Troy greeted the church. Laura and Matt led us in worship. The team performed "The Lighthouse skit". Troy preached a fantastic message. We showed one of the video clips from the missions conference about the wells that are being built in Cambodia and Troy shared the type of church we desire to be. I explained about the ALPHA groups we are wanting to begin and how people can become connected to our church. Christina ran a game involving custard and little Easter eggs. Chloe, Christina and Sean led us all in a super hyped up kids church song. The service concluded and we all went outside for the kids Easter egg hunt and a BBQ. It was so good to find that everyone who attended the service stuck around for ages chatting and getting to know each other. All up there were 35 people at the service (not that numbers matter - but people matter to God). This number was made up of adults and children - 7 team members from Penrith, 7 of us new "Territorians" and 21 locals.
I am so excited about the future of ImagineNations Church Darwin.

Yesterday was also such a blessed day. We went into the Juvenile Detention Centre. The age range I think is from 12 to 18 I think. 27 young people, all of them boys except for one girl. We were told that 98% of the young people are Indigenous. Chloe and I gave the one female a pedicure and manicure and chatted with her for awhile. The guys in the team played sports (a sports store donated 10 different types of balls to donate) and talked with the boys. We then did a BBQ for everyone (a local butcher donated 10kg of sausages) and then did a gospel presentation to the young people and staff. We had brought in a few bibles as they have a library the young people can get books from. I wish we had brought more with us as after the presentation quite a few of the guys were taking the bibles straight away and asking if there were more!
As a gift to the staff we bought the staff a coffee machine. Gloria Jeans donated mugs and all types of coffee so we made up a hamper and topped it all off with ferrero rocher chocolates! While we were there we also were able to talk with the staff who are just lovely.

I will never forget this Easter 2010. Thank you Jesus for that very first Easter :)

There will only ever be one "First"!

Today was the day we held our first ever service as ImagineNations Church Darwin. We held the service in a restaurant called "Seafood on Cullen" at Cullen Bay. We began the service with complimentary coffee and dessert (YUMMO). Troy then greeted the church, Matt and Laura sang a song as an Item (Amazing love). Troy spoke a message about who Jesus is. We showed a missions video from Penrith. We had a great time meeting the locals who came along to the service. I can't express how excited I was feeling today! We still have 3 more services to go over this Easter weekend. Jesus - Be Glorified :)

Media

Today the Northern Territory Newspaper printed an article featuring Troy. Yesterday a journalist interviewed Troy over the phone and a photographer dropped in to take a picture of him with bibles in front of him. The article did seem a bit choppy. I guess that's what journalists do - pick and choose what they want in the article. All in all though i think it was a good article and good exposure for the Easter services happening this weekend.

Neighbour Day

This week in our letter box we received an advertisement stating that Sunday 28th March is "Neighbour Day". We had already been planning to organise a BBQ for our street to meet our neighbours - this was our perfect opportunity! Christina made up invitations on the computer inviting the street to our place on Sunday for a sausage sizzle. We had no idea how many would turn up so Troy just bought lots of sausages and bread rolls! The BBQ began at 12pm. The first neighbours to arrive were three elderly women who live at the top of our street. A lot of our neighbours in our street are elderly people living in Territory housing. Laura and I had met a few of them already when we went to introduce ourselves last week. Some of them are unable to leave their homes due to health issues. Anyway, while Lachie cooked the sausages (I wasn't letting Troy anywhere near the BBQ), more neighbours arrived. It was a fun and interesting afternoon. All up 18 people came to our BBQ. Of course we invited them all to come along to our Easter services.

On Friday night Christina, Lachie (up from Sydney visiting Christina), Troy, Hannah and I went to Cullen Bay to put the invitations to our Easter Services in people's letterboxes. We also prayed while we walked. Cullen Bay is a beautiful suburb, right along the waters edge! It was quite interesting to note that in this suburb a huge number of letterboxes have a "no junk mail" sign on them and also we even noticed that some houses did not even have a letter box!

Tomorrow night we will do some more letter box dropping in the suburb of Lyons. This is where our Sunday service is going to be held.

I am so excited for this coming weekend....