Grateful For Gospel Partnership in Australia
An update from Riley Spring, Lead Pastor of Sovereign Grace Church Parramatta and National Director of SGC Australia…
Recently, we had the sweet privilege of having Jim and Trish Donohue from Covenant Fellowship Church PA come to Australia to serve our family of churches. Our aim was twofold: to have Jim teach and equip both churches and their pastoral teams on mission and evangelism, as well as having Trish teaching and spurring on our ladies in their womanhood at the inaugural SG Aus Women’s Conference. The Lord used the week in so many ways, here are just a few:
Evangelistic Urgency
Spending time with Jim refocuses your heart and head to see the reality of eternity in sharper focus and especially to face the uncomfortable truths of the judgement and wrath to come for unbelievers. As we spent time with Jim we were freshly awakened with these truths and emboldened to share the gospel with greater zeal. He helped us see that we had sadly become too soft and afraid to turn up the heat for fear of appearing too ‘full on’ or looking weird. Instead, many of us have now gone out with greater urgency for the task of reaching out to the lost with the news of the glorious gospel.
Evangelistic Intentionality
Not only were we stirred up, we were equipped with better tools to help take more steps forward as individuals and as churches to share the gospel. Each of our Pastoral teams has taken this time to review our current practices and now we are planning on working together to run evangelistic courses in a coordinated effort so that we can try and reach more people, more effectively here in Sydney, Australia. We have committed to running the Bridge Course, the course developed by Jim which has recently been re-filmed, and it’s looking great; ‘https://bridgecourse.org’ check it out! By running it well and at the same time pooling our resources together, we can actually do the ‘retreat’ element, and we are really looking forward to seeing what God will do.
Evangelistic Resilience
Jim also helped us to see from Matthew 10 that Jesus intends us to go out and preach the gospel and expects us to get hit in the process. Read the chapter for yourself and note the perilous situation Jesus puts us in, ‘sheep amongst wolves’ for starters! We often see resistance to the gospel as signs that we aren’t sharing it well but actually it can be the opposite, and though we expect people to be saved, because the gospel is powerful, we ought also to learn how to cop a hit, like a boxer, and keep going.
SG Australia Women’s Conference
The theme of our time together was: When Life Is A Lot, and Trish Donohue gave three helpful talks which spoke into our sense of overwhelm in the midst of a full and busy life!
It was a sweet time of fellowship between our two Sovereign Grace Churches here in Australia and a timely opportunity for many of our ladies to slow down for the day and hear what God’s Word had to say about the lies we may believe, comparison with others and distractions in the busyness of day-to-day life. The talks are now available on the Sovereign Grace Parramatta streaming channels on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify or on their website.
This event was put on by a few key ladies and lots of volunteers, but I want to thank Emma Taylor, Rebecca Song, and CJ Lick in particular for their efforts and initiative to make it happen. We’re already looking forward to our next one! And the only unfortunate thing is that they have set a very high standard for us guys to live up to for when we have Eric Turbedsky out in October for our Men’s Conference!
Grateful For Partnership
We are pinching ourselves that we have such gospel centered, generous, and gifted friends who’d be willing to fly all the way out here to serve our growing family of churches in Australia. It makes such a difference for our people to meet and make friends with our pastors and families from around the world. It helps build our values, and it helps build family.
Thank you so much Jim and Trish!
