A note from our Pastor

Hi there, my name’s Dermot and I’ve been involved in pastoral ministry for the last 37 years. First as a youth pastor and then as the senior pastor of 2 churches. I’ve been at Grace for 24 years now. During that time I’ve had a dream to see our church become such an integral part of our community that if we were ever to close our doors our entire community would notice.

  • What would church look like if we were to become that type of church?
  • What would our practice look like?
  • How would we measure our effectiveness if bums on seats on a Sunday weren’t a key performance indicator?
  • How would we reach our community given that the public perception and engagement with church has been declining rapidly in Australian communities?

These were some of the questions we set out to answer over the past 9 years in our local community here in Clarence Plains, a social housing community in Southern Tasmania on the outskirts of Hobart.

For a long time I’d felt that the way we did church too often followed patterns of ministry that no longer worked in the context of our Australian culture. A new model of ministry was needed if we were to have any hope of reaching our community with the love of Jesus. Now it would seem that everyone has an opinion these days, but any new model needs to be tested and proven in the wild before giving it airtime and to that end we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.

9 years later we’ve arrived at a number of startling conclusions, the main one being that reaching a community is surprisingly easy if you start with an attitude of service rather than service provider.

Too often churches are guilty of making their love for their community transactional rather than unconditional. We run our community programs looking for a return for our efforts. Now there’s nothing wrong with wanting people to have a relationship with Jesus but that should never be the only reason we do good in our communities. We do good because that’s what followers of Jesus do, it’s part of our new nature. When we do good, people get to road test the love of God toward them. We give opportunity for the Holy Spirit to work as people see the authenticity of our care for them.

At Grace we did that by finding out what our community was doing and offering to help them rather than setting up programs ourselves. Along the way we discovered it was a sustainable model because it’s focused on helping people do what they’re already doing rather than starting up programs that we had to keep running.

Out of that journey has come our statement about the heartbeat of Grace which you can read below.

The Heartbeat of Grace

“The world isn’t looking for a successful, powerful, all conquering church. It’s looking for a church that looks like Jesus, our Servant King.”

A church that will love them authentically through their presence with them, and service to them.
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A church that will prove to them that they’re worth dying for.
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A church that’s willing to sacrifice its treasure for the hungry, the homeless, those in prison, those that society shuns. Not simply using it for the building of places of worship for itself, but reaching out and caring for those that everyone else forgets.
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A church that’s willing to lay down its own agenda and follow Jesus wherever he leads them.
(If you’re following Jesus you will find yourself amongst the poor, the hungry, the broken, the refugee, the forgotten and the overlooked)

This is the love that overcomes the world. This is the love that leaves them undone.

This is the love that our Saviour demonstrated when He left heaven and lived amongst the poor, the outcast, the powerless and the weak.
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This is the love that saw Him lay down His life for every single person on the planet, not just the Jews.
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This is the love that He’s offering us and asking us to share with the communities that we’re planted in.
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This is the love that opens wide the door to our salvation.
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