The One Thing

On this week's episode, Scott and Derek head down to Tasmania to talk to St. John's Presbyterian's Senior Minister, Al Bain from in Hobart, about what it's like to lead a church on the edge of Australia.

Scott and Derek talk Geneva Push's Recruit and Assessment Coordinator, Madeleine Galea talks about how to do church food well.

On today's episode, Grahame Fuller joins Scott and Derek on The One Thing podcast again to talk about whether your church reflect your community.

Grahame Fuller from EV Church joins Derek Hanna and Scott Sanders to talk about what needs to be done when working with volunteer leaders and how do you do it well.

Join futurist and grumpy old man Derek Hanna as he talks about the sorts of spiritual maturity that technology cannot counterfeit.

Over the last ten years church planting has grown in prominence in Australia, with several local and imported networks starting up to assist the creation of new congregations across the country – so what lessons can be learned from the past decade?

Student Ministries have always been a fertile ground for evangelism and training of Christians throughout the world. One of the challenges for the local church can be how they can support this ministry, and how they can encourage that ministry to support and value the local church.

There’s no doubting that those born in the shadow of the new millennium have a particular way of seeing the world – never knowing a time without digital technology and raised in an air of international optimism have to count for something! So how do you best reach them with a message that is already thousands of years old?

Mission isn’t just ensuring your congregation are all ready to share the Gospel, but that every event is organised so that it adds to your Gospel impact.

In this episode Al discusses with Derek Hanna what the Bible would call ‘healthy masculinity’ and the basis for promoting a particular viewpoint of manhood today.

Derek Hanna speaks to Christian speaker and author Al Stewart on putting to death that sort of behaviour which the world rightly criticises, but also remembering that Christians take their source of manhood from a definitive source.

Derek Hanna speaks to Paul Webb, church planter and Anglican minister from Chester Hill, who has pioneered a range of techniques for both evangelising and maturing members of a congregation where there is no clear cultural ‘majority’.

Scott and Derek talk to Adam Ch’ng, the pastor of Cross and Crown in Melbourne an ABC (Australian Born Chinese) about what pastors need to understand about the Asian heritage if they’re to successfully recruit Asians to the ministry.

Scott and Derek talk with John Dickson, author of A Doubter’s Guide To The Bible and 16 other books, about how ‘live’ this question is in the modern mindset, and what Christian leaders can do to prepare believers to face it.

What are the questions people are asking about Christianity today – not the ones we want to talk about, but the ones unbelievers really want answers to?

Scott and Derek discuss the importance of self-awareness in serving God across a multitude of responsibilities, and talk about key ways of understanding how your Creator has ‘wired’ you.

Derek caught up with Richard Coekin while he was visiting Sydney on a series of speaking engagements to ask him about what he would say are the keys to resilience in Gospel mission during an age of increased global persecution.

It’s harder to get a bigger vision for ministry than what we might find in Matthew 28, Colossians 1 or Ephesians 1 – the ministry being preached to the whole world, and God bringing all things under Jesus. However, how do we cast a vision in our local ministries that both aligns with what God has said and takes people on from where they are?

You’re part of a church that has a vision to plant another church. But the place you have in mind is possibly too far away to reach with the resources you have. How do you build a ‘ministry beachhead’ that will put you in a position to reach that goal?

Being stressed out can actually help a ministry; being burnt out can be fatal. Being able to tell the difference is essential.

Women make up statistically more than half of the people in any Australian congregation, but so often male preachers end up preaching to themselves. What do speakers need to include and exclude if they want to impact both genders for Christ?

There are many ways to plant a church out of your existing church – parachute, team, mother-daughter and of course the campus plant. But like every model, planting a new congregation that remains essentially linked to your primary location has its challenges.

Handing over ministries is a skill – being aware of your own feelings so that you’re able to loosen your grip and effectively enable someone else to take that area further for the Gospel.

There’s a natural lifespan to every human endeavour, and all things come to an end, especially in ministry. How do you prevent yourself so identifying with a ministry that it’s impossible to move on?

Derek Hanna and Scott Sanders move into their fourth episode of their first in-depth TOT collection: Growth barriers.