DAY NINE: MONDAY MARCH 27TH PERTH

WAPSSLT Western Australia Prayer Summits Servant Leadership Team

John picked us up from the hotel at a bit before 7:00 am to take us to the church. There was a breakfast meeting with the group designated above. I think John McElroy was the only one away, but Bob Burton, Robin Cullen, John Yates, and a few others were there.


Once again, the people who gathered for this breakfast are top quality people. They have carried the load for five Pastors Prayer Summits. All of these have been run on a city wide basis and have attracted around 300 difference pastors and leaders. The biggest number they had was 120. This has been a mammoth effort. They are planning another Summit in June this year and Colin Shaw is going to be the facilitator.

As with other gatherings, we discussed the matter of large city plan and municipal city plan. When we raised the issue of whether the load of gathering pastors on a city wide basis, and the issue of whether there was a city wide plan. The answer to that question can only come from the answer to another question. Is there a full Perth (or Adelaide, or Melbourne or Canberra) expression of church. The answer is probably in the negative. It is nice to think of big numbers and big gatherings, but it is probably impractical to think that there could be an expression of church that would represent Perth. Not an active organic one. It could only be an institutional events based identity and that probably would not be capable of being an organic body.

If that is so, then church can probably only ever achieve organic expression in a unit the size of a municipal city. I think John said there are twelve church congregations in South Perth. South Perth as a municipal city has a population of about 36,000 people.

John has felt for some time that pressure has been placed on him to do a Perth wide work, when he feels that he would be much better off working on his municipal city. We all agree. It was great to be able to affirm that in him. He is a great bloke doing a great work. Already his own congregation and a local Baptist congregation have developed great favour with the Council and other organizations in the City.

At about 10:00 am we were joined by some pastors and others from some other cities around Perth. Not a great number but a good committed group representing various ministries as well as local areas. I think it would be good if we did this again to see if we could work hard to gather as many of the regional leaders as possible. Maybe it would be good to spend a few days just connecting with key regional leaders and encouraging them.

Each local person shared what they were doing in their own regions.

Ian shared a great word about the things that bind people together in a city expression of church and mentioned some of the things they have learned. He also spoke powerfully about his own experience of God speaking to him about how he wasn’t the important factor but other people were….and how he had grown to love the idea of serving things that helped others to be effective and the part the cross played in this whole enterprise. We can only gather at the foot of the cross. Ian has this great idea that only internal integrity will produce external integration. It must also be true that a person’s capacity to integrate externally will be a mirror of their internal integrity. If this is true, then one of the problems we have to face is the lack of internal integrity in some people who might otherwise be thought of as successful Christian ministry leaders.

I shared some things about the nature of church in the localized sense. We referred to the Watchman Nee article that said the only name a church should take should be the name of the city or region.

After lunch we discussed some of the matters that arose from the input and finished by praying for all the local people.

Richard had to leave a bit before we finished. He has some other meetings to go to in Perth before flying out to Launceston on Wednesday. It was a bit sad to have him leave. We have packed in together a bit like a rugby scrum and with Richard going we have probably lost our hooker.

When we finished the meeting, I went over to John’s office area and did some internet stuff and at about 3:00 I met with John and a few of his staff people to talk a bit more about Monday Church things. They are a great bunch of outgoing people who want to connect and impact their community. They are already doing all kinds of stuff, but they have a desire to do Monday Church better. We had a very practical grass roots conversation which was of great benefit to each of us.
I met up with the other guys for tea and we all retired to our rooms to rest up a bit after what has been another consistent but extremely worthwhile time.