Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.

AMEN Australia 2018: Healing, Surviving, Thriving

<p>Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Aaron Koh

Gateway Lighthouse Mission Project

Today I'm going to talk about blended ministry and I've been asked as a privilege to come and share a bit about my testimony as well as my church testimony as well.

My name is Aaron, I'm a GP from Melbourne And it was about 6 years ago when I first came to AMEN conference, and that was in Melbourne.

And when I came to AMEN conference with my wife, my girlfriend, well, my partner then, and it was a real blessing at that time when we came.

And I remember walking away, feeling very blessed, and really have a passion for Christ and wanting to pray for a patient.

But something was really troubling me when I was, after I walked away from that.

Ellen White says that, I can see the Lord's providence that the medical missionary work is to be a great entering wedge whereby the diseased souls may be reached.

So this was something, and the end point is the disease source may be reached.

I walked away because we are very active in our church in health talks, and at that time, I just want to give you a brief history about Gateway.

We started about 2003, and it was a campus ministry that was set up in Melbourne University.

And essentially, our church expanded about in 2008, Gateway East was formed, and 2012, Gateway West was formed.

And it was a campus ministry, and a few of us had a very passion for health.

And we've been holding a few health talks, health events, including health expo as well.

We have people coming in, but there was a missing link.

People were coming into the health talk, people coming for the health expo, but we have very little yield in bringing them into our church and evangelism.

And that troubled me, because Ellen White says, the medical missionary work is a great entering wedge where diseased souls may be reached.

And she goes on to say, again and again, I've been instructed in the medical missionary work is to bear the same relation to the work of the third angel's message that the arm and hand bear to the body.

And we also know that the health message is not the main message, but the health message will bring people into the body of Christ.

So that being said, we held a lot of events and I was very troubled because the entering wedge was not happening in Gateway City, in the campus ministry.

But little did I know that God was working very powerfully, training us, those people who were involved in organizing the health talks, organizing the health events, organizing the cooking classes for something that was to come in 2018.

So, some of you I've spoken to, we actually started a lighthouse, gateway church plan this year.

And it was essentially a providence by God being that we have a mission in Gateway.

We want to multiply our church every 3 years.

When we get too big and too comfortable, we wanna expand, we wanna go.

And we don't allow us to be very comfortable within a church.

When people start to get comfortable, we feel that, look, we need to start moving.

And since it was a campus ministry, those people who came into our church, they came as students.

And they got baptized, and they graduated, they found their professional job, they got married, they have kids.

And little do we know, about 2014, when I was in Gateway City, and in Gateway East, in Monash University campus, a group of families were also praying and having the burden that God was showing them they're gonna have a church plan.

And I was in Gateway City, we didn't know that, but God was moving at the same time.

And Johnny Wong, as some of you may know, our elder, realizes that because you were speaking and coordinating with different churches that God is moving these 2 together.

So we were essentially singing the same tune and it brought us together and we decided to do essentially a pilot community health talk program in Glen Waverly as well as in Doncaster.

And again, the pilot essentially is to gauge whether there is a community need for health, using the right arm of the gospel to bring people to church.

And again, people came, but then there was 1 mistake that we learned from it, is that they came, but we have nowhere to put these people into a church.

And we realized that we were stepping on 2 boats.

On the left, we were still on the main church.

On the right, we were wanting to push this church plant ahead.

We come together again and we start praying.

We start coming together and say, God, show us where are you gonna lead us?

You already told us that we're gonna have a church plant.

So we came and we prayed and we came out with a mission statement.

And this is the mission statement, to build and multiply a vibrant, soul winning Adventist lifestyle center of influence in the Eastern suburb for young families.

And when we start to come together, we start praying together, we realize that because in Gateway City and Gateway East, we have grown so far apart in terms of we're having our own culture and we have our own way of thinking, of running things, our own way of worship, and we needed that bonding time together.

So we came together in the members' house, we started praying and planning, and then we started really molding us together with the same vision for the church plan.

And what we realized was, as we continue to bond together, we start to form our vision, our values, our mission statement.

And I believe that is very important because we do not want to have the church dividing itself because of how we were in Gateway East or Gateway C, how we were before, but we want to start anew together in unity in pushing this work forward.

And what we realized something very quickly as we continue to pray together, that we have to have a total member involvement.

And we only have about 10 families that come together from these 2 churches to push this work forward.

Jimmy Lam and my wife, We were very passionate about the health message and the right arm of the gospel.

And we really wanted every member to realize that we need to push this forward with the church.

And alongside, we have the right arm bringing people into the church.

And Ellen White says here, we have come to a time that every member of the church should take hold of medical missionary work.

But the question is, what is medical missionary work?

And Mark Finlay had a very good definition from there.

And he says that medical missionary work is to reach out to sin-sick souls on a personal level to meet the physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual need so that through this work that Christ can be revealed.

So we see here that we have to write on the gospel, bring them to Christ so that it can be revealed to the people who were coming into our church.

Well, we see that in the book of John, in John 2, in John, actually, this should be John 2, in John 2, in the wedding of Cana, we see that Jesus performed his first ministry and he addressed the social need.

And in John 3, we see that Jesus ministered to Nicodemus and addressing the spiritual need.

And in John 4, we saw that Jesus ministered to the Samaritan women, addressing the emotional need and the mental need, and John 5, the paralyzed man in the pool of Bethsaida, drawing him into the physical need.

And we felt that this is biopsychosocial model that we have been talking about in the past 15, 20 years is actually more than 2, 000 years ago when Jesus was meeting to the needs of the people.

And this is just a bit of demonstration of what the timeline that we had was that it actually took us 2 years to really, from the praying phase, planning phase, to the launch phase.

And some of the steps that were taken towards the church plan, basically we, step 1, we have the friendship phase, coming together and pray.

And then we start training on how to plan the church and pray.

We were successful in our campus ministry, but this is the first time we're doing community church plan, which we've never done before.

And we started to set a date, and what was interesting is that we also set a date for home worship.

So we don't actually have a location, but we wanted to come together to worship in the home before we have a official launch in the physical church itself.

Then we had the first member retreat in Marysville in 2017, and we started to really get to know 1 another.

And that's crucial, because we really want to get to know the members really knowing our strength, our weaknesses to push this work forward and in fact 9 out of 10 of the core members were trained in new and at least depression anxiety program and we actually did run it last year and it was very successful in the sense that we have got people coming in and they were essentially done very well in terms of their depression recovering from that and anxiety without the use of medication.

And finally, we decided to launch in the home worship.

And you can see Johnny Wong there was, led us in the first church plan and home worship.

And we have the children's worship as well.

And we conduct health talks and cooking classes.

And this time, in the past we used to run cooking classes for adults.

But we sensed there was a family need for children and we launched this children health talks and cooking classes through meetup.

I think there was a talk about meetup and it was fully booked on both sessions and there was a challenge because we have 2 health talks running 1 month each leading to a health retreat and I remember thinking I was organizing this I was just thinking how are we going to lead the public to trust us coming only to 2 health talks for them to sign up for the health retreat in Jambana?

We prayed about it, And God gave us 12 families heading to the 12th retreat.

And it was run by Sabilla Johnson, and we're privileged to have her lead us in that.

And then we have members from Sunday Christians as well coming into our official soft launch in public worship on the 14th April of 2018.

Subsequently, We continue to run Mother's Day worship program attended by 88 people with many first visitors and ongoing outreach program that we're running on a weekly basis.

We have weekly Happy Hearts, reaching out to young children.

We have Fortnightly Care Group, which also from existence from our campus ministry.

We also have weekly Sunday bird watching as well and really bonding time.

And then we have the first evangelism that we have which is very, very health-focused, something that we've never done before.

In the past, what we used to do is to do 2 health talks, the health talks followed by the main evangelism.

But this time, we decided to combine using the health message and gospel ministry into 1 sermon, and we run it for over 2 weeks.

And praise God, we have people coming in for the first time, staying in for the 4 sessions.

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Gateway Lighthouse Mission Project

Transcript

Description

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Medical Missionary Work and the Loud Cry

58m

Offering Our Firstfruits

44m

General Sessions

Mission Program

59m

Plenary

Evaluating the Final Impressions

51m

Onward and Upward - Maintaining the Vision for Medical Evangelism

48m

What Is Revival and Reformation

What Is Reformation? Part 2

55m

OYC 2011 Seminars

Kellogg vs. The Ministry: A Century of Collateral Damage

56m

Gospel Medical Missionary Company Evangelism

Picking Up the Pieces - Learn the Lessons

55m

The First Angel’s Message: Come in Before the Call to Come Out

51m

The History of City Evangelism

1h 28m

Plenary Sessions

Life More Abundant

1h 40m

Medical Missionary Work in USA

1h 12m

Sound Doctrine