DAY THIRTEEN: FRIDAY MARCH 31ST TOWNSVILLE

The “Back to the Future” Tour Band played its last gig this morning. It was a seven o’clock breakfast with the pastors and one of the Mayors. When I got back to the motel room from ironing my shirt, Les was looking everywhere for his glasses. I thought I would help him but no matter how hard we looked we couldn’t find them. I had picked up my glasses when I got up and was trying to help this poor man remember where he had put his glasses. I could sympathize with him because I can put my glasses down and then forget where I put them. While all this sympathy was going on, I suddenly saw where I had left my glasses…..and they were still there. There was absolutely no doubt as to why it was difficult to find Les’s pair, because they were sitting on my nose. There is just no end to this strong bond of brotherly love we have. Les put it well by quoting from the experience of the early Christians in Acts: “they had all things in common.” He said I should feel free to help myself to his glasses anytime, as long as I told him where mine were.

There were between forty and fifty pastors at the breakfast. We had a good time hanging around with various ones. One of the guys from Calvary AOG (the largest Pentecostal church in town) reminded me that he had visited Dorrigo when I was there as the pastor. He was part of a Lay Witness weekend with a guy called Ron Jennings from Grafton. I can’t actually remember Jim, but I did remember the weekend. One of the husbands of a woman in our church gave his life to the Lord that weekend and we became really good mates. He knew a lot of people I knew, including a certain evangelist by the name of Dan Armstrong.

Ian shared a great word of encouragement that included some stuff about Toowoomba, but more to point out how important it is for the church to serve the city. He pointed out how our cities were filling up with family and community dysfunction and that they needed what only the churches could offer. I then responded to some of Peter Patterson’s opening remarks about the comparative success of the Townsville Cowboys and the Canberra Raiders by speaking about how blue was so much more powerful a colour than red (State of Origin). I asked if anyone knew how I could put some money into someone’s hand to make sure the Raiders won the next time they played the Cowboys. I think told them I was going to give an altar call to give opportunity for North Queenslanders to repent of their sense of superiority. It went on a bit like that in some great Aussie exchanges. It then spoke about how the city of Townsville deserves to see the fullness of Christ in this generation, and the only way they are going to see it is if the church becomes one.

After the breakfast and some packing up all of us One Heart people egressed to the airport to try and put some of our ideas together about the value of our trip and the things we had learned. Here are a few of the headlines:

· Unity cannot be a movement it must be a wholesome pursuit
· It is not really unity that we should seek but oneness (a la Jn 17)
· The idea of one church in a city or region is the most common Biblical model
· Churches in cities transformed cities and cities then transformed nations
· Nations must be won city by city.
· The major capital cities are not cities but metropolises. It is going to be counter productive to try and get a vision for a metropolis.
· We must concentrate our efforts on working together in smaller regions or municipal areas (I think Canberra could be thought of as five separate cities and Queanbeyan as another separate city).
· We need to pitch our efforts at gaining oneness and that must be qualified by the organic oneness modeled by the community of the Father, Son and Spirit. We must measure our success in terms of the kingdom coming, not bums on seats at church.
· We need to start with those who believe in building the one church in a city and embrace by faith the whole church, not try to involve people who don’t believe in “one church in the city” and end up compromising the only clear biblical model.
· We need to gain understanding of what the church in a city might look like from reading the New Testament and assuming city church where “church” is referred to, not congregation.
· We need to expect that Jesus will only reveal the “keys of the kingdom” to the “church of the city” that he is building, not to a particular congregation representing only a smaller part of the whole church.
· There is great, great value in going to where people are and listening to what is in their hearts rather than having them come to a conference in a single national location.
· We need to give more priority to seeking out the places and groups of people who have the vision for one church in their hearts and encouraging them.
· It is so, so, so easy for the vision for one church to be built in a city to be sacrificed on the altar of denominational pride, personal ego and on the false idea that a particular local congregation has some kind of sovereign priority. Leaders will have to make choices in these areas as to which “church” they really serve.
· There is clearly an idolatry that is associated with some local congregations and their identity.
· We have lived for 200 years with a sectarian model of church and it has failed every generation of Australians in every community. We must not continue to fail the people who are prioritized by God as worthy of his love (the lost) by using a failed model for another generation


Anne Harley came and picked me up from the airport. I had to do some radio programs, so I went to her church and used one of the rooms there. I didn’t have time to send them off before Matthew Bolte came to pick me up. He and Cathy are pastors of a Crosslink Church in Thuringowa (the other twin of the Townsville twins). Its called Hope Community Church and is a cell based church that has been doing really well. They have a great heart for relating to people outside the church and have done some terrific things around town. Matthew is also very much part of the church in the city pastors group.

We talked till tea time and after tea they had to go to a school music performance, so I read for a while and crashed into bed by nine o’clock.



There are no doubt other things that are important, but I will reflect on them further as the days move along. This trip has made me much more hungry to move around and seek out the people around the place who have this heart