DAY FOUR - Wednesday March 22nd - Launceston to Hobart

It sounds a bit pathetic to say that I got up early today and at 6:00 am wandered a hundred yards down the road to McDonalds. The truth of the “co-dependency” is not so much related to big macs or even coffee, but the fact that McDonalds around Australia have been set up by Testra as computer wireless hotspots. The same with Starbucks and a few different hotel chains. With a wireless port on the laptop you can go there and fire up Windows Explorer and when the Telstra website comes up you key in your mobile phone number and they immediately send you a code. When you key that in you are hooked up to the web as if you were at home. I actually went down twice. Once at 6:00 to pick up and respond to all my emails (and have coffee) and a second time when I had packed to send off some radio programs to Canberra.

I was there when Richard Holloway and the other guys called around ready to head off to Hobart. He had hired a great mini-bus. There was plenty of room for gear and people and the seats were really comfortable. Travelling down the main north south highway was a tonic in itself. Tassie is just a beautiful place no matter which part of it you are in. The north south road goes through the main sheep farming country in Tassie. There are a number of old towns, like Ross where we stopped for coffee. Ross is just a total snapshot from the nineteenth century. The morning was calm and warm and it was so good that it was almost worth dying for. The problem was that we were then running a bit late and Richard had the job of keeping moving with quite a bit of traffic. When we entered the outskirts of Hobart there was a huge traffic build up as if it were peak hour. We were passing the Hobart entertainment centre and thought for a moment that it might be revival and everyone had heard that a powerful ministry team had come to preach the word of God. Sadly this was not so. People were lining up in their hundreds to go to a Wiggles concert.

We wound our way to a church called “The Way” somewhere in the south west (I think) of Hobart where about twenty pastors or maybe a few more had gathered. It was good to see an older Anglican guy by the name of Robert Legge introduce us to the others. He has been the longstanding voice for unity here for decades. An AOG guy called Jim whose surname I can’t remember talked about the resurrection of the cause through the establishment of a group calling themselves Aussie Mates in Ministry. What a great name. We were all taken by it.

Each of the guys in our group shared things that were part of their experience in their cities. It was all short and sharp and good value. Robert summed the thing up well and we had a great time or prayer together.

Each of the mainland guys were introduced to our hosts. I was introduced to a guy called Kevin who is the associate pastor of a Bethesda related church here in town. He and his wife teach at a Christian school here and they have two boys. We went for coffee with the other pastor of his church, a young guy called Damon. Both these blokes have lived in Tassie all their lives and there were a lot of people we knew in common.

The meeting last night was at the Church of Christ in town. A bloke called Larry is the pastor. He had been to the One Heart conference in Canberra way back in the mid nineties. He spoke with deep conviction as to how the vision that had been birthed in his heart back in those days had been stirred again today and how he knew it was the desire of God’s heart to see this happen.

The Hobart guys had asked that one of us should simply preach after the worship and Ian thought that I should do that (a bad mistake in my view). What made it more of a mistake was the fact that we were going to have a testimony before the message and Les was going to do that. When I got up to speak I clean forgot about Les giving a testimony and just charged into it.

At the end of the meeting we prayed for all of the pastors and then we and them prayed for the people who expressed their commitment to pursue God to bring about a oneness that would not diminish, so that Hobart would experience the fullness of Jesus.
After the meeting Damon came round to Kevin and Michelle’s place and we talked till about 11:30 when I became a pumpkin and had to find my bed.