Turn on your TV this September and you’ll be sure to come across an advertisement with a difference! Coming soon to a TV and a billboard near you is the church’s biggest and sharpest media campaign since Billy Graham – ‘Jesus All About Life’ (www.jesusallaboutlife.com.au). Backed by all the major Christian denominations and the Bible Society, similar campaigns have already proven effective in Canberra, Adelaide and Tasmania.

How will it work? Over the course of about 40 days, professional and high quality advertisements aimed at different sectors of the community will promote the person of Jesus, the one who promised ‘life to the full!’ (John 10:10) and invite people to consider his claims found in Luke’s Gospel.

Enquirers who respond to a Freecall number will receive a booklet containing information on knowing Jesus and Luke’s Gospel. They will also be given details of their nearest registered ‘Jesus All About Life’ church where they can get further assistance. Churches will also be able to purchase booklets to give away to their non-Christian contacts and are encouraged to equip their congregations to make the most of conversational opportunities during the campaign, as well as being prepared to follow up enquirers.

Combining media saturation with personal invitation and local church evangelism, this is an evangelistic strategy we can be excited about! But we need to prepare to make the most of it. Here are some ways we can do that:

1. Personal connections

The noise created by the media campaign will open up opportunities to talk to people about Jesus. The ads are aimed at encouraging people to find out more, and that is where you come in.  As individuals we will need to think about how we can initiate conversation using the advertising as a launching pad to move them closer to knowing him. Here are a few tips to get you started…

• Pray regularly for your friends
• Talk to them about the ads
• Read the Essential Jesus AND give copies to your friends AND follow this up
• Work at being able to explain the gospel of Jesus simply and clearly

As members of Hunter Bible Church its great to keep up to date with all that is going on in the Life of the Church.  You can do this by either reading the Church family notices or the calendar on the website.  A couple of things to invite people to:

Church - during September I will preaching on the book of Luke at Lambton and Unichurch and will be consciously encouraging people to trust in Jesus over those 4 weeks.  As a congregation we will need to be prepared to welcome new people who have been prompted to consider Jesus.

Hunter Mens Convention - whilst Hunter Mens Convention is particularly designed to encourage Christian men in their walk with Jesus this is a great place to bring unbelievers also as they will see the Christian message in action among men!

3. While church will be organising many opportunities to promote the gospel over the next couple of months, we are keen for you to tailor make your own activities. You will have ideas about how to connect with your friends, family, workmates, school friends, fellow students and so on. Inviting people to church is an easy way to build on their interest, but there is probably more you could do yourself.

We would love you to come up with the ideas and we will help you plan an event or activity, and even connect you with someone who could speak and answer questions. Each of the pastors will be able to guide you in this.

4. Pray

Above all, we need to pray that God will by His Spirit open the eyes of many to see Jesus for who He is and welcome them into life to the full!  You can join with us and pray with the Renew Newcastle teams on Sundays.  Check here for details…

I look forward to this exciting opportunity with you and welcome any comments or suggestions you may have.

How on earth could a normal mother of babies or toddlers ever keep the OT Sabbath laws? This is a question I wrestled with while preparing a recent sermon on the Sabbath laws in Leviticus. You can listen to the sermon here:

The constant command in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers is that none of the Jews were to do any ‘work’ or ‘regular work’ on the Sabbath. That is, the Sabbath was meant to be a day of ‘rest’. But how is that even possible if you’ve got young kids who need feeding and changing and chasing and dressing and cleaning every second they’re awake? How could you really keep the Sabbath with all that going on? (more…)

Apparently, couples are increasingly abandoning traditional church weddings. They don’t want to pay $18000, spend time planning it, plus commit to attending pre-marriage counselling or church services. Instead, they are opting for a cheap reception, with a civil celebrant at the location of their choice. Cheap, easy and convenient.

I will bite my tongue about what I think of churches that charge hundreds, let alone thousands, for a wedding (Jesus has plenty to say in Matthew 6:24). But surely its worth putting some effort into getting ready for marriage. Weddings are over very quickly. Marriage, the joy of marriage, is for life.

We know marriage requires work, effort, planning and sacrifice. Marriage involves sacrificing my desires to do what is best for my spouse, putting aside my anger to forgive, speaking and engaging with my spouse, enduring and persisting at trying to grow in love. This is the nature of love.

This is the nature of church. Church is not meant to be easy, or cheap, or convenient, or selfish. We are to love each other deeply from the heart (1 Peter 1:22). This involves costly sacrifice; putting aside my anger to forgive, spending myself to serve others, speaking to and engaging with each other. This involves time and effort.

And we reap the joy of being loved in return by our brothers and sisters. We reap the greater joy of hearing words of praise from our heavenly Father. He delights to see us loving as his Son loves.

Surely its worth thinking about how we can love each other more. It may mean coming to church early to say hello to guests at church. It may mean staying late at church to get to know others better. It may mean initiating conversations with people we don’t know, or remembering to give someone a call during the week, praying for people at church each week, providing meals or. The opportunities to love are endless. We just need the eyes to see. So pray God will enable you to see how you can love someone this week.

Hey guys, imagine this… A Christian brother confesses to you that he struggles to keep his eyes away from internet porn. Then he asks you to help keep him accountable… what does that mean? What does that look like? Here are some tips.

Our friends at Central Coast Evangelical Church have organised Texas preacher Matt Chandler to speak at the central coast before the Engage conference.

He’s an engaging speaker who will be calling on Christians to live gutsy Christian lives centred on Jesus.  It would be well worth the trip down!

YouTube page:  

It’s on Wed 26th August.  Find out more info at www.chandleronthecoast.com

Registration opens online 8am Monday 13th July.

Series: Looking into the lights #1, Looking into the lights #2

In the previous post in this series, we posed the question “Why would we use lights anyway? What’s it meant to help?” I wonder if the answer is “everything”. But I want to be careful how we say that.

See, we need to hold on to two seemingly opposing truths.

1. God, and only God, can soften people’s hearts to hear the gospel and respond appropriately - if God chooses not to soften someone’s heart and move them to respond appropriately, they can not and will not receive the gospel nor respond to it. (John 6:44; Acts 13:48; Rom 9:16; 1Cor 1:25; 1Cor 2:14; and so on)
2. We must make every effort to speak the gospel clearly, effectively, sensitively, faithfully, and helpfully. We must try and remove all hindrances to Christians and non-Christians hearing the gospel and responding to it. In other words, we must endeavor to make hearing and responding to the gospel easy and even enthralling for people. (Rom 10:14-15; 1Cor 9:19-23; 1Cor 10:32-33; 1Cor 14:23; Col 4:4; and so on)

Although these seem quite different, we need to believe both of these things at the same time. If we hold #1 stronger than #2, we’ll end up ostracising people and doing things in ways that suit “us” and say things like, “We don’t need to change how we do things… if God wants to save people he’ll do it without us!” However, if we hold #2 stronger than #1, we’ll end up thinking that God’s sovereignty is limited by our efforts, and that the gospel is insufficient without worldly wisdom and human power. A tendency to either side is wrong.

So what does this have to do with lights? Everything!

Do we need to use lights for people to hear the gospel and respond with their lives?
#1 tells us “No, God can grow his Kingdom in the dark if he so chooses!”.

Could we use lights to help make our gospel centred meetings effective and enthralling for people?
#2 tells us “Yes we could! Discerning use of lights might help people feel more comfortable and relaxed, or more thoughtful and reflective.”

Will using lights mean that more people will become Christians and Christians will understand the depths of the gospel more?
#1 tells us “No”, and
#2 tells us “We hope things like lights will help the kingdom grow!”

Do you see how we have to hold both of these ideas together? On one hand, we don’t have to do anything, its all up to God! On the other hand, we must do all that we can, and work hard to make the gospel “attractive”. An old friend of mine calls this “Being creative with everything, except the truth!”

I think the measure of how we use things like lights and how we run our groups and church meetings is our prayer. Prayer is where #1 and #2 come together! Prayer is where you say, “God, we think it’ll help people if we do things this way… Please use our humble feeble efforts to draw people to you in Christ! Amen”.

So, before my next post about lights, why don’t you leave a comment and tell me how using lights could have a good effect on a meeting’s “feel” and “experience”. In other words… by God’s grace, what does using lights “do” to a meeting, that would be good?