G’day Church,
A few things to flag that are coming up for us at church:
– Q&A this Sunday. We want to be a church that humbly wrestles with God and his word, asking our questions and looking to him to answer them through his word. Perhaps something has come up in recent weeks that you’d like clarified, or that has prompted some wider reaching questions you have about God and the Bible. If you want to submit a question anonymously, feel free to use the contact card on the website and just put your name as “Curious…” https://www.trinitybay.church/sundays/contact-card/
– CMS Online Dinner in person on Wednesday July 26. Come join us for a bring-and-share dinner and hear from missionaries on the ground about what God is doing in different parts of the world as well as a great Bible talk that will remind us of the great love of God for his world. We’ll make the most of the online content while sharing a meal together in person in the room that our Minis group uses over in the Community Centre. It’ll be a great chance to get to know each other and be inspired by God’s goodness and power. Bring something to contribute to dinner, 7pm, Wednesday 26th.
– Evangelism training on Sunday August 13 and 27. As we are inspired by God’s global mission we also want to be practically equipped to introduce our friends and family to Jesus too. We’ve asked the team at Engage Work Faith to share some of their top quality training material with us in August. So we’ll have lunch together after church and then spend an hour being equipped with ways to help our friends get curious about Jesus. This won’t just be a three-point summary of the gospel that you need to tell people. Rather we’re going to learn how to appreciate how our friends and family view the world and their lives, and how we can help them grow in curiosity about who Jesus is. It might be helpful to think of evangelism in three big steps with the first as simply getting curious about Jesus, second is hearing the gospel, third is responding to Jesus in repentance and faith. On those categories, we’re going to skill up in helping our friends engage at step one. And it’s really exciting to do this as a church family, as we look forward to running a really helpful gospel overview course in October that we can invite friends who are ready for step two along to.
All of this is because we want to be people who hear and share the invitation to Taste and See that the Lord is Good (Ps 34:8). We bring our questions and our struggles, we know that life is complex, but we want to taste his goodness more and more in it all (Ps 73:28). And just as we want to look to Jesus through it all we long for our friends and family to come and taste too – knowing that he really is so very, very good.
See you on Sunday.
Cheers,
Simon