Georges River Region: Bishop Writes

Webmaster | 25 June 2005

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Immense change calls for bold steps in working for Christ

by Peter Tasker

We are in a time of immense change, and we all know that it’s hard to bring the gospel to our region. So I wanted to share some of our latest thinking with you.

The Georges River Regional Council has been discussing what strategies we need to be developing for the next three years. The Council membership is made up of clergy and laity drawn from each Deanery across our Region. This ensures that whatever strategy the Council develops should represent grass roots thinking and possibilities.

At this stage it has five areas of major concern:

1. Planting Congregations – one of the most strategic ways of reaching out to a new section of society is to plant a new service or congregation. This could also be done by replanting a congregation in a new location or at a different time. Most of our parishes are able to do this especially with a little help and encouragement from other parishes in the Deanery. Our aim is to have three congregation plants per Deanery every year.

2. Resourcing Plateaued Parishes – a number of our parishes have reached a plateau and are keen to find ways to move forward again. Most need resource help, especially people gifts, to be able to do this. We will encourage each Deanery to identify one such parish each year. Some ways could be to help train service leaders, musicians, Bible study leaders, youth and children’s leaders, etc.

3. Resourcing Declining Parishes – once a parish has started to decline we believe more than Deanery resources are need. Regional Council knows that Regional resources are needed so that people help can be drawn from across the Region and short term financial help may also be needed. Our plan is to help and support two Parishes in the Region a year.

4. Repotting a non-viable Parish – we have a small number of Parishes where the population density and ethnic mix have so dramatically changed that it is hard to remain viable and grow. These parishes need diocesan-wide resources and strategies. With this in mind the Archdeacon and myself will work with at least one such parish a year.

5. Recruiting Full Time Workers – Regional Council is very conscious that we need to be encouraging and supporting people from our Region to consider and enter full time training for ministry in the Region.

Our Youth and Children’s Ministry Taskforce has seen this and a couple of years ago embarked on a strategy of giving scholarships to parishes to support young people entering Youthworks College. The course consists of two days at College and the rest of the week working in the Parish. There are 12 young people involved in this training at present from our Region.

We want to see the number of people training for ministry grow and also to see people from all racial groups being represented. We need to continue an active policy for recruiting people from our Region to consider entering Moore College.

You may have thoughts and ideas that the Regional Council would be interested in hearing. You can send them on to me at

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