Abundant Life Church of Christ with Tola Ten

Tola Ten stepped out in response to a call from God to plant Abundant Life Church of Christ during the COVID-19 pandemic. It seemed like an unlikely time to plant, but in obedience, that’s what Tola did. And Abundant Life has flourished. 

Tola had worshipped at Springvale South Church of Christ for seven years, and was serving as a deacon there when he was called to plant Abundant Life. During 2019 the leadership team had begun to discern together whether they ought to begin a second service on a Sunday, or whether they ought to plant a whole new and independent congregation. It was discerned that a new and separate church was the direction in which God was leading, and that Tola was the person to lead it. It would be a Cambodian church, for Cambodian people in Melbourne. Excitement was building, and then the pandemic began. Even so, the leadership was clear that the church ought to launch, and so Abundant Life launched online. 

People joined the livestream from Springvale South, from the broader Cambodian community in Melbourne, from Cambodia, and even from the United States. For almost a year, the church met solely online. Then in December of 2020 Abundant Life had its first in-person gathering outdoors. Around 30 people met for this inaugural gathering. Tola says this was crucial to members beginning to feel a sense of belonging. Belonging, Tola says, is important to Cambodian people, and is what members of the Cambodian community in Melbourne are looking for. Of course, the international members could not attend, but the online service continued alongside public gatherings for over a year. 

In January of 2021, Abundant Life held its first indoor public worship service. They used an Anglican Church building near Springvale to meet. The search for premises had been a long one, with a lot of closed doors, until Tola made contact with an Anglican minister who was sympathetic to the cause of Abundant Life: this minister had himself been a missionary to Cambodia for twenty years. The partnership is a strong one, and Tola and all of Abundant Life are grateful for that.

When Tola began to lead Abundant Life he was studying theology, and was drawing on his life of experience in churches and, more recently, in lay leadership to shape and inform his leadership. It was not until 2022 that Tola joined a Church Planting Cohort with City to City Australia to help him develop the leadership necessary for leading a new congregation. He articulates that participating in the cohort “opened up a different window” for him through which to view church – it showed him other practices and perspectives to which he had not previously been exposed.

The other significant benefit to Tola was the knowledge and assurance that he was not alone in planting, which can feel very solitary. He gained great encouragement and support from the collegiality and fellowship of the cohort, which was deeply nourishing at that particular stage of his planting journey. 

Tola believes that his engagement with City to City, along with Abundant Life belonging to the Churches of Christ, has given his congregation assurance. For them, he says, it shows that planting is “not a whim”, that he is “not on his own”, and that he is part of something “bigger than himself”. He feels this is very important to Cambodian people. He says “they are more willing to bet their life” on Jesus since they are seeing Tola be taught by others, and not merely relying on his own understanding. 

One of Tola’s many joys in planting Abundant Life has been eight new families begin attending the church in order to have their children accepted for enrolment at a local Christian school. This occurred about halfway through 2022. These families are not believing families, yet want their children to have a Christian education, and are willing to become church members to do so. Abundant Life has welcomed these families, which took their membership to around 70 people, and the families have expressed a genuine sense of belonging.

Again, Tola observed that this is very important to Cambodian people. He also noted that belonging frequently precedes believing. It is his prayer that all these families will become believers in Jesus, and he is delighted to have the opportunity to walk alongside them, read the Bible together, and gently lead them towards Jesus. 

Abundant Life is a Cambodian church which “fosters fellowship over food” and has an “intentional and relational” way of operating. With the City of Dandenong home to over 25,000 Cambodian people, and fewer than 500 of those professing Christians, Tola is excited for the future of his church. He is praying for more and more Cambodians to find belonging at Abundant Life, and that that belonging will in turn lead to belonging to Jesus.

Persian Ministry in Eastern Melbourne

Pedram and Leili Shirmast arrived in Australia from Türkiye in 2019, settled in Doncaster and, being Iranian, chose to begin attending Emmanuel Church, the only Farsi speaking church in Melbourne. The couple had lived in Ankara, the capital of Türkiye, for six years immediately prior to coming to Australia, and ministered together during their time there (Pedram was also ordained in Ankara in 2015). Prior to this they had lived in Iran and had ministered together there for two years. 

Even with an extensive experience of ministry life, neither Pedram nor Leili assumed that they would continue with ministry in Australia, and each of them pursued other career paths while they discerned whether God was calling them to minister again in a new country. Leili began pursuing childcare, and worked in the field while she discerned her future path.

As time went on, she discerned that she was being called to ordination here in Australia. Running parallel to this, Pedram began the process of applying to the police force, having been interested in the profession from a young age. Pedram prayed that as he pursued discerning between ministry and the police force, God would firmly open one door and close another. God did not answer this prayer definitively, and Pedram was left with the choice between accepting a position in the Victorian Police Force, or as a candidate for ordination in the Anglican Church. After consulting with Christian mentors, Pedram felt that God was calling him into ordained ministry.

Having been made Deacons in the Anglican Church in February 2023, Pedram and Leili look forward to being ordained as Priests in ten months’ time in November. In the initial stages of their training, they were able to do a placement at their home church in Australia, Emmanuel, and serving the Farsi-speaking community there: “We found ourselves in the middle of God’s mission”. Doncaster and the neighbouring suburb of Templestowe are home to the largest Persian community in Australia. There are 2,500 Persian people in this area, with few attending church or professing Christianity. In 2021, Pedram and Leili began thinking about how to begin a Persian church in their local area.

Coincidentally, there was a church that Pedram and Leili drove past several times a week very near their house in Doncaster. They would look at it and wonder about the services, the congregation, and what church looked like for that community: Deep Creek Anglican Church. It’s this church where the couple now lead a Farsi-speaking plant. Megan Curlis-Gibson, the parish minister at Deep Creek encouraged the couple to pray about a way forward for planting in Doncaster, and to potentially engage with City to City Australia as a means to pursue planting.

Both Pedram and Leili describe engaging with City to City as bringing them ‘huge hope’ for their call to plant, and ‘light’ to the journey. By receiving funding via City to City they are able to work alongside Megan at Deep Creek and minister to the local Persian Community, a small number of whom attend church at Deep Creek. In July of 2022 they started a Farsi-speaking Bible study on a Friday night with just five members. Membership is now at eighteen. They conduct various evangelistic activities in their local community, as well as providing ESL classes for Iranian refugees. (Although Pedram laughs when he says ‘ESL’, saying that English is often class members’ third or fourth language.)

One of Leili’s weekly activities is attending sewing classes for refugees in a neighbouring suburb. During her time attending these classes, Leili provides pastoral care for attendees, often offering assistance with things like language, technology, and navigating bureaucratic processes in Australia.

Recently Leili invited any of the attendees who had come that day to come for prayer. In a neighbouring room many of the women came, some with no faith, some with other faiths, and Leili prayed aloud for them all. She said the response was overwhelming. The women were so grateful, some were crying, and Leili had felt a palpable presence of the Holy Spirit as she prayed, guiding her prayers. Leili and Pedram are praying for more opportunities to witness like this, and to continue in relationship with those who responded favourably to the offer of prayer. 

Of City to City, Pedram says that it was such a welcome relief to discover an organisation that could walk with them in planting a ministry to Persian people, which they would like to become independent and truly multicultural. Pedram says that there are many churches which stay true to their culture, whatever that might be, who will minister to other cultures in various ways, but there are very few that attempt to embody more than one culture and be truly multicultural.

Pedram and Leili dream of seeing this happen in Melbourne with the Farsi-speaking community alongside ‘Aussie’ culture. They feel strongly about advocating for refugees, about helping both Persian people and Australian people understand one another better, and about sharing the challenges that Iranians face when they become Christians, both here and in Iran.

With City to City, Pedram and Leili articulate that they are so delighted to have found more than they were looking for. They had sought an organisation which could help them with tools and strategies for planting, but have also gained through the planting cohort “…hope that we are not alone, since we have so much support through the ups and downs of planting”.

My Notes on Keller

It was the footnotes that got me about Tim Keller.

Maybe that’s predictable for a second generation academic who is also married to an academic. But I still recall the surge of relief that came with reading Keller’s Center Church — and finding it had footnotes.

I had read plenty of other ministry manuals and practical church growth books. Many of those were great, built on one or two insights around which stories and anecdotes were woven. Nevertheless, I would often feel that I’d got hold of the idea and its application well before I was flipping the last page.

But with Keller it was different. Each new page bristled with fresh insights anchored in ancient wisdom and current research arising from on the ground experience around the world. In fact, many of the sources he cited were books and people I’d interacted with at seminary. Keller clearly believed that theologians, scholars, and missiologists — past and present — had things to say that could inform ministry practice, deepening and sharpening it. This contrasted with much of my post-seminary professional development, where we were frequently told not to bother reading theology anymore — it was secular leadership material we needed to marinate in.

Although I work for the church planting movement he founded, I never met Tim Keller personally. I have no personal conversations, no special phone calls, no chain of emails — nothing of that nature that I can point to. And yet Keller had a profound influence on me.

Keller influenced not only my professional trajectory and my approach to preaching and ministry. More significantly, he impacted my personal walk with Christ.

Professionally, I’m sold out on the vision Keller articulated for movements of churches and ministries cooperating, interacting and organically functioning as a gospel ecosystem in any given context. Of course Keller anchors this not only in a careful consideration of biblical patterns and principles for gospel movement, but the sources on revivals and special outpouring of the Spirit. 

One of the things I most long to see is churches in a given area or community banding together — across tribal, cultural and denominational lines — to multiply disciples, leaders and churches, to collaborate on initiatives to serve and bless people, and to prayerfully call on God to renew and give life in the way only God can. Everything I get to do in helping church plants through City to City is oriented towards this.

Keller also influenced my approach to preaching in particular and ministry more generally by pointing me back to the Puritans and behind them, Augustine (and ultimately, I believe, the Bible). Specifically, he pointed me to their understanding of what human beings are and how we change by the grace of God. If ‘we are what we love’ as James K.A. Smith puts it, then preaching and ministry needs to go beyond addressing the head to educate, touching the emotions to celebrate or lament, and pressing on the will to motivate. More fundamentally, we need to engage people’s hearts to help them reorder their disordered loves. To the extent that we can find rest in what God has achieved for us in Christ, we’re enabled to repent of seeking rest and satisfaction elsewhere so that we might walk the good path God has prepared for us. This is the Spirit’s sovereign work of course. But engaging with Keller stirred into flame a longing to preach and minister in a way that keeps in step with the Spirit in this. And he pointed me to sources that are helping me do it.

Beneath these two more visible ways in which Keller impacted me is the influence that his ministry has had on my own spirituality. This influence was mediated primarily by City to City’s Incubator program. I first experienced the Incubator in 2014 and 2015 as a participant and then for the next six years as a facilitator.

The Incubator is effectively a sustained exploration of the dynamic of spiritual renewal — which is anchored at one end in the Puritan and Augustinian understanding of what human beings are and how we change, and which is aimed at the other end towards the vision of movement I mentioned earlier. This dynamic is unpacked explicitly at several points in the Incubator program as well as being the theme that is constantly returned to in examining the various tasks of ministry: from designing ministry systems to preaching to promoting evangelism and creating discipleship pathways. The key to this dynamic is learning to take repentance and faith beyond the safe surface of outwardly visible behaviour and 'down' into the affections of the heart.

The way repentance and faith is pressed in through the Incubator begins with helping Christian leaders identify how they tend to get in their own way — whether in caring too much about controlling things in a desire to ensure church aligns with their preferences or in over-investing in the approval of a particular person or group in the church. For me, it was my deep longing for comfort that I've discovered plays out again and again as the chief obstacle in my own maturity and in my leadership. It fuels my reluctance to face hard things like conflict and difficult conversations head on. And it feeds an unhealthy sense of entitlement to compensation when I do.

The Incubator program facilitated reflection that helped me start to spot this tendency in my heart. Better, it also introduced me to tools for uncovering and addressing this — tools arising from ancient wisdom (again in his sources). Best of all, it also gave me practices that I've now incorporated in my life that help me continue taking repentance beyond the surface to start to 'mortify' my sin, poisoning it at its roots.

But the Incubator goes beyond helping leaders become aware of how we tend to get in our own way. As these tendencies are surfaced, the community created by taking this journey together with other planters and pastors provides the opportunity to speak and receive the grace of the gospel to one another's hearts. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, 'the Christ in the mouth of my brother is stronger than the Christ in my own heart.' I experienced and witnessed that reality often among my sisters and brothers in the Incubator. Learning to apply the goodness and grace of Christ in ways that spoke not only to surface behaviours but to what was going on in my heart, brought me fresh joy and freedom.

At one level, none of this was new. (Remember, everything was footnoted!) Yet at another level, the way the Incubator enabled me to personally explore and appropriate for myself the grace of God in Christ still sustains me on a life-giving journey of deepening repentance and faith.

---

Written by Chris Swann

Director of Church Planting and Coaching

"Given Focus" at Cootamundra

A vibrant and inspiring leader of a regional church ‘given focus’ at Cootamundra

Yvonne Gunning had been serving at Cootamundra Anglican Church for around five years when she was introduced to the services of City to City Australia’s (CTCA) Revitalise Australia initiative. 

The Diocese of Canberra-Goulburn launched Revitalise Canberra-Goulburn and engaged CTCA as a strategic move to reinvigorate five of their regional centres.,Cootamundra was selected as one of those five. Those in leadership within the Diocese had been noting a decline in the vitality of several of their regional centres, and this was only exacerbated  by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yvonne is a vibrant, clear thinking, and inspiring leader in a church where seventy percent of the members are over seventy years of age. More broadly, she noted that there are only a handful of churches in Cootamundra that were still operating with a trained and paid pastor. Several churches have folded, while some have kept meeting informally with lay leaders. She is gravely concerned for the future of the church in regional areas, given Cootamundra is not alone in its experience of a dwindling church presence in the community.

In the first years of her ministry in the town, Yvonne focussed on helping her congregation to develop the groundwork for change in the congregation. She had taught about the need for the implementation of new strategies if young people and young families were going to come and join the congregation. So when the opportunity to engage with the RA program was presented, she eagerly embraced it. The process, and the results thus far, have been tangible and very exciting. 

In Yvonne’s words, the RA process, led by a City to City consultant in her church, has “given focus” to all members of the congregation at Cootamundra, in looking to engage a younger demographic. This has been instrumental in implementing change. The process has resulted in all members of the church responding to an invitation to pray for the future of their church, both in whole-church gatherings, and in smaller groups. Seeing people pray with focus and excitement has been a wonderful encouragement to Yvonne and the whole leadership team. 

One of the key recommendations for implementation in the congregation has been the launch of a 4pm service. Yvonne said the hall was full, and the church ran out of chairs. Members of the congregation had to learn to be children’s leaders on the spot! Similarly, the café the church added to their Op Shop a few years ago has been revitalised with a stronger focus on making connections with members of the broader Cootamundra community. This is particularly bearing good gospel fruit. 

One of the leaders from Yvonne’s church had this to share after their Revisioning Day last weekend: 

““Our consultant is so good. He comes so totally objectively with a clear approach. I guess it’s his work but he sees exactly where and what we need. It has been a very good experience. Thank you for the opportunity to be part of City to City’s programs.””

— Quote Source

Yvonne describes Rod as someone who listens, and observes the full gamut of information provided to him when he consults for the RA initiative.

The highlights for Yvonne have been the  character of the City to City consultant, the renewed commitment of her congregation to prayer, and the wildly successful launch of their new family focussed service at 4pm on Sundays. Yvonne observed that CTCA’s RA program helps with the processes involved in running a church, in ways that the whole leadership team can access and work within. At the same time she emphasises that RA is NOT a program; it’s an approach to leading change that is tailored specifically to an individual church. 

And to anyone considering using the program she says “Go for it! But are you willing to change?”