DAY SEVENTEEN: April 4, 2006 TOWNSVILLE: DAY TWO OF THE CROSSLINK LEADERS ROUNDTABLE

The first session of our second day started at 9:00 am blunt. Townsville culture is laid back and we spent the first twenty minutes getting gathered and started. Today we had a couple of extra people. Wayne Benn’s wife came (name??? once again a blank spot in the brain). Peter Patterson also came. He is the head of the pastors network in town but is also giving oversight to Matthew’s Church as one of the Board of Reference members. It was good of him to come. He is a great laid back kind of guy who is easy to like and seems to have a casual but distinct authority about him. We had to do a little backtracking just to get him oriented, but he participated with freedom and a good rapport. Rob Holmes began by sharing some features of the relationship between apostles and prophets. It was good stuff and came out of his own experience and from a study of the relationships in the Bible between people who represented those gifts in the Old Testament and New. We also shared our own journey of working together as a team (Rob and myself) and how that had developed and why it was helpful. He had some great insights from Acts 15 leading to the statement in Ephesians 2:20. There was some feedback and discussion about some of those things and we then launched into some discussions arising from the questions and issues we had put on a list the day before.

The first one was regarding the relationship between local congregations and para church ministries in a city or region. There had been some tension in Townsville in the way it happens everywhere, but this had been accentuated recently by the YWAM base pushing hard to have the Impact World Tour come to the city. This is a YWAM generated team that does outreach through the focus on some extreme sports people together with Christian rock bands and a few other attractions. It’s not just the fact that it is costing the churches $240,000 to run, but that it was introduced without the support of the full core leadership of the pastors network. It has been a bit divisive on that basis, but the program is very professionally organized and comes as a total package. I don’t know anyone who would say it is not a genuine gospel ministry. Its just that there have been some really bad experiences that we know of in both New Zealand as well as Australia together with some over-exaggerated claims about the results.

I spoke in response about the whole issue of para church ministries existing only because they are prophetic movements. I can’t think of one that is not a word from heaven to the whole church, bringing a message of something God wants to restore. Think of Scripture Union, Inter-denominational missions, Campus Crusade, Youth for Christ, YWAM; they all represent ministries that God wants to be mainstream church activities. As a result we have children’s ministry in almost every church due to Scripture Union, we have Youth Alive and its predecessors re-establishing teenage ministries of all kinds in most churches. We have missions teams and missionary involvement in most churches because of YWAM and the other missions organizations. There are not two kinds of churches (missionary church and local church) but one (church). So the para church ministries in my view are just different kinds of churches and should be regarded like that. Generally they don’t want to be regarded like that because they often draw from the churches, but they have their own structure and their own agenda. They only serve the whole church as far as it suits their primary and generally narrow agenda. I don’t have a problem with these groups. I just think if they were accepted as church groups and not ministries we would have to do some work to develop relationships that would work better.

Our discussion then turned to how the apostolic and prophetic worked into the life of a local congregation. We talked with the groups there about their oversight people and reviewed whether or not those relationships were adding value to the ministries. All of these discussions were important and valuable for everyone.

By three o’clock we had come to the end and we closed by asking the local guys to give some feedback as to the value of what we had been doing. All of them expressed huge recognition of the value of being in a smaller setting and being able to get into practical issues that gave them help along their ministry journey. This idea has been a very great success in everyone’s view. I will make a summary of the aspects of that at a later time.


After the session it was time for some sightseeing. Matthew took Graeme and Rob for a quick tour of the Castle Mount and the Strand. I had been there so I spent the time wandering around a few shops in a large mall.

We all took Matthew and Kathy and their two girls for dinner as a means of saying a huge thankyou to them for their generous and wonderful hospitality. They carried the organization of the Roundtable and did a great job with food and drink and the venue and all associated responsibilities. The venue was terrific. It was the local Salvation Army Centre. A great new building with excellent facilities and very suited to our purpose. Norm and Isobel are the officers there and are very much into the stream of working together for the sake of the kingdom of God. They were a delight to work with.

I can sense myself running out of steam more readily during these last few days. I’m not complaining about it because the whole thing has been of huge value in every way. I have gained immensely from the exposure to a wide range of ministry situations in all the major areas of the nation (except Sydney at this point) and when I couple that with this Crosslink stuff it multiplies the value. We haven’t really had a day without commitments since we started nearly three weeks ago and the constancy has been in the deep and earnest sharing going on all around the actual meetings.

Tomorrow we have no meetings. All we are doing is flying to Brisbane around the middle of the day. That might give some opportunity for a breather. I also haven’t really had the opportunity to keep up my exercise routine. I would normally go for a run when I am away like this, but for some reason my knee is not working properly and if I walk for more than a few kilometers it becomes painful and very weak. I guess the hot weather also plays up on an aging southerner like me as well. I hear that the temperatures have been down to zero in Canberra. That sounds really nice to me. Canberra sounds nice. It sounds like Nola, and the kids and grandies, and the church there. Lots to be thankful for and lots to look forward to.