Church Army Australia

Church ArmyAustralia

Australia is a sunburnt country, a land of drought and flooding rains. It is an iconic description, not only of our landscape but our soulscape too.

As I travel around our nation, I see too many bone-dry neighbourhoods where the local Christian community dried up and cleared out long ago. Our nation needs water, especially the kind of abundant and life-giving water that Jesus promised (John 4.14-15). Church Army Australia is committed to bringing Jesus’ water to our dry and sunburnt land.

Local mission is the business of Church Army Australia. We are therefore an organisation dedicated to raising up a new generation of leaders for local mission in parched neighbourhoods. We train and support local people to work in places where the conventional church doesn’t. We are developing a new generation of leaders who go out with an offer, not an invitation, who say we’ll come to you and stay and if you want, help to start a church in a way that suits you, in your style, not ours. We call these places fresh expressions of church and they’re for folks who don’t and would never belong to an existing church.

Church Army is in the business of local mission so that all may drink and never be thirsty again.

You can find out about our leadership development activities around Australia through this website. All the news and information, prayer points and stories of hope are here too. Jump in, drink up – the water’s great.

In his grip and grace,

Tim Scheuer

Mining towns can have a tough reputation – long shifts, big pay packets, far from family and friends. Captains Stuart and Katherine Haynes have found another side to Blackwater, a desire for God that lies just beneath the surface.

Located on Australia’s old route 66, 190km west of Rockhampton, Blackwater is the coal mining capital of Queensland. People come to Blackwater to make money. If they stay more than a year, many discover that their treasure lies elsewhere. “Once a person’s made $150,000 in a year,” Stuart observed, “they soon value what they can’t buy – their wife and kids, their friends and community.”

Blackwater has been home to Stuart and Katherine since January 2008. The town has embraced them warmly because they’ve brought something to Blackwater – a desire to see the town develop its soul.

“In a town where everything is temporary,” Stuart observed casually, “people are thirsty to do something with purpose.”