The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele

What is Christian parenting?  How do we do family Bible time well?   How can we prioritize church, even when it’s hard?  Navigating social media with teens?  And how to parent teens who are doubting, drifting or deserting?  Parenting is joyous, magical, tiresome, boring, stressful and complicated. Harriet Connor is editor of ‘Parenting in God’s family: Biblical wisdom for everyday issues.’ ( https...

How to preach to build confidence so members want to invite Islamic friends and workmates to church and better educate our Christians for conversations with Muslim friends. What topics might we address?  How to best engage with the authority and authorship of the Bible vs the Qur’an, plus Jesus and Muhammed, the Trinity, Incarnation, Sin and human nature, Judgement and Salvation. Sam Green works f...

How do you work in a team excellently with those above you in ministry?  How do you as a team member take responsibility for the success of your church?  What can ministry team members do well to help the whole team function better? What mistakes do team members make? And what about confidentiality on team? Michael Davies is associate pastor of Lighthouse Church in Gorokan, NSW. Megan Stevens serv...

How do we help children in Christian families escape and recover from the devastating effects of domestic abuse? Pastoral consultant Jenni Woodhouse says there is a hidden epidemic of coercive control where a parent with narcissism or borderline personality disorder makes life impossible for their both their spouse and children. We also explore the impact of domestic abuse on children of all ages,...

What should the church pastor / staff team / church council or bishop do about the big drop in attendance?   A new report ( bit.ly/AttendancePatterns ) shows Adult Attendance in churches in Sydney is down 7% or 14% against population (over a decade).  Adult attendance declined at approximately two-thirds of Sydney Anglican comparable church centers, and only one-third of church centers recorded an...

Plus how the Tanzanian Church has been built through the labors and prayers  of Australian Christians, and why prosperity gospel preachers are as wicked as witch doctors! We are joined by Bishop Mwita Akiri from Tarime in rural Tanzania, Judith Calf who served as a missionary in theological education in Tanzania for 20 years, and Tim Swan who leads the Anglican Aid Ministry here in Australia. To s...

What impact does growing up in a pastoral family have on ministry kids?  Valerie Ling from the Sydney Centre for Effective Living joins us to unpack the ‘Ministry Kids Wellbeing Survey,’ revealing what Australian ministry children, say about their upbringing.  They tell of heightened responsibilities and an acute awareness of adult realities plus concerns about  feeling different from their peers....

One of the world’s leading New Testament Scholars Thomas Schriener is in Sydney for the Moore College Lectures on ‘The Battle for the truth of the gospel.’ At the center of his attention is NT Wright and the New Perspective on Paul, a debate that questions whether ancient Judaism was legalistic. Schreiner tells of his roots in Roman Catholicism, a transformative evangelical faith, and the enduring...

Religious Freedom leaders are calling on Australia's Government to quickly bring a Religious Discrimination Act to the parliament. Mark Sneddon says the Religious Discrimination Act is not about granting unlimited freedoms, but about preventing adverse treatment of religious individuals and organizations. He says there needs to be a fair compromise that the rights of all involved, which shoul...

What does Expressive Individualism mean for churches?  And what specifically does it mean for church music? Here is the expressive individualism worldview: ‘ Truth comes from inside me.  It’s important that I look inside to discover who I truly am’ and ‘I need to express my individuality and personal truth to the world around me to receive validation.’ That truth comes from within - is the unspoke...

Disillusionment is one of the great threats to the Christian life and to Christian ministry   A wise man said the worst thing in ministry was not a pastor who quits, but a pastor who doesn’t quit, but who keeps going when they’ve given up. Sydney Missionary and Bible College Karl Deenick shares his own experience of hitting a major wall after seven years of pastoral work.  We unpack how ministry c...

What would Dave Keun and Jon Kwan like to tell their younger selves if they could travel back in time before they took on the position of senior minister? How has their sense of ownership changed? What has been most difficult about the transition to the role? What mistakes have they made? Dave Keun has been senior minister of Kellyville Anglican Church in Sydney’s North West since March  2022. Jon...

Roadmap for a reset communion - with Paul Donison and Glenn Davies  The chair of Gafcon Laurent Mbunda and chair of Global South Justin Badi Arama are to meet to work out a roadmap for the resetting of the Anglican Communion.  Global South Anglicans have endorsed the Former Sydney Archbishop Glenn Davies call for the communion to be reset on biblical foundations.  The Global South have called on t...

All the time in church there are unexpected things happening.  We or someone else makes a decision to change something which then relationally or missionally impacts another area of church life that we didn’t expect. Sometimes we put  too much attention into one area of church - and now other areas are suffering. Whatever size your church is - the church system is complex, interdependent and inter...

How do you balance the instability and chaos of external ministry with adding a foster child or adopted child to a ministry family? What are the implications of taking children in crisis into the ministry home? What motivates ministry families to become foster parents or to adopt? How do older children and the church respond? Sarah and Mat Yeo serve at Hurstville Grove Anglican Church in Sydney Ma...

What is it to be #likeaman? There are not many places in the New Testament where men are spoken to specifically. Today we are thinking about being a Christian man. In the ESV and NASB the translation of 1 Corinthians 16:13 has ‘Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong’. (ESV) But what does that mean? Dominic Steele put that question to panelists at the recent Men Meeting the c...

There are three different ways that the adult population of churches can grow: Adults being saved.  Christians transferring from another congregation within your denomination of switching from another denomination.  Children of members growing up in the church and taking on their parents faith for themselves. Most evangelical churches - even growing churches - are underperforming in the first and...

A new massive ethical question has risen up with the advent of artificial intelligence. How will people decide what kind of morality to give to their artificial intelligence creations? There will need to be a morality.  But what should it be? The market is already making different choices. Elon Musk has said he wants the AI behind X (formerly Twitter) to be morally flexible.   He wants his AI to a...

How can a senior minister best train junior preachers (student ministers and assistant ministers) in preaching? There’s a tension we all feel: we want to be a training church raising up the next generation of leaders and yet we also want to make sure that the quality of what happens in our gatherings is high. We don’t want a Sunday morning ‘plane crash in the pulpit’, where people at church that d...

Artificial Intelligence is an oncoming tsunami that will catch all of humanity off guard. It is a change more like a wheel than a typewriter. But what will this do to our sense of self? Stephen Driscoll, in ‘ Made in our Image - God, artificial intelligence and you’ says artificial intelligence may do great harm - giving more power to sinful people, governments or companies. He says artificial int...

‘God wants all of me to love all of God all the time’ says Senior Pastor of Fellowship Dubai, Ray Galea. We want our staff and leaders to live and serve in ministry out of an overflow of the love of God for them. Grasping this love properly lifts our service from duty to desire. As pastors we are so committed and focused on encouraging our congregations to love God with all their hearts, souls, mi...

“It may be that God is destroying the Church of England and who am I to stand in his way?   “The real tragedy would be if, in this traumatic, confusing time, if all of the evangelicals and the broader Orthodox group fall out with each other…  if we can bear with each other in our different strategies, then that will be what we need (in whatever the future in England is going to be), whether that&a...

Australia’s former Prime Minister Scott Morrison releases a new autobiography this week where he speaks explicitly about his Christian faith, and there’s a bible quote on almost every page. Akos Balogh of Blue Fox Media joins Dominic Steele to review Mr Morrison’s new book where the former Prime Minister writes  of wrestling with whether to study at Vancouver’s Regent College, being helped by list...

It is almost D day in the Anglican Communion. Today we give the background for two highly significant meetings. One to take place next week in Rome.  The second in June in Cairo. The Rome gathering has been called by the rejected Canterbury leadership.  The Cairo gathering has been called by the leadership of the Global South. As background, The Church of England, the historic mother church of the...

We are moving into a post - post-modern world  But what does that look like and mean for truth - and us as pastors - as we attempt to communicate with our churches? Our church members have unconsciously adopted some of the presuppositions of our society in the way we process texts and information. We are living in a fake news world on social media with a parallel loss of confidence in institutions...