Son shines on community festival

mission possible with stuart p. robinson

In 2005 Stuart Robinson will uncover some of the best ideas for mission and outreach. In this issue St Stephen’s, Willoughby has found great success with organising wide-ranging community events.

I’m looking at a bright orange glossy Sonfest brochure from St. Stephen’s, Willoughby. Some 30,000 are in circulation. In order to “Bring January to Life”, Ross Nicholson and his team are offering a veritable feast of activities. (Take a deep breath.) Outdoor climbing, tennis, quoits, bowls, board games, croquet, a ladies ‘pamper afternoon” (massage, pedicure etc), kids holiday club, movies from yester-year, bush dances, Christian basics courses and indoor cricket are some of the choices.

Ross is the energetic rector of St Stephens. He and his wife Jenny have been serving that community for seven years. Their passion is to reach and disciple people in the city of Willoughby. Here, in part, is what they’ve come up with.

SR: Ross, give us some examples of your creative outreach.

RN: Most of the stuff we do revolves around food and significant cultural occasions. The basic principle is to take a recognised community event and use it as an evangelistic opportunity.

On Valentine’s Day, we organise a seriously flashy dinner (in beautiful surroundings) and invite an evangelist to speak on relationships. We invite people to then sign up for The Marriage Course, Christianity Explained or Alpha.

In July, we have a Yule-tide Dinner which is more bridge building and in November we host a North American style Thanksgiving Dinner. We invite an American national to give a gospel presentation at this event. On Australia Day we’re having a community bush dance as part of our Sonfest mission.

SR: Tell us more about Sonfest.

RN: It’s probably our biggest annual mission event. We run it in January. It’s a great time of year because we get to follow-up all those Christmas contacts we’ve made, new people are moving into the area, and still others are church shopping at the start of the year.

During Sonfest we have an evangelist at all our services. We then organise lots of fun activities (all low key) to simply build community.

SR: I recall you ran a series of men’s cooking classes.

RN: We sure did. We called them, ‘Beyond Surviving’. One of the men from church is a chef and he did the teaching. All the blokes in the group then ate the meal together. We finished with a baked dinner (which really cooks itself) and a guest speaker (absolutely no shortage of Bible material pertaining to food).

SR: Let’s be clear. At whom are all these events aimed?

RN: Sonfest is an application of the principles of the Engle scale which recognises that (when it come to the gospel) people are somewhere on a continuum from hostile atheist to committed disciple. Our aim is to move people towards the committed end of the scale. It means that events are all part of a much larger process. The more events we host, the greater the opportunity our parishioners have to invite their colleagues and friends.

SR: How do you measure success?

RN: We do want to see people come to Christ. That said, when a person invites a friend to an event, it’s a real win. Keeping in contact with that person and building the relationship is our aim. And people have joined study groups as a result of our many outreach activities. We are not looking to carve notches in our Bibles; we do pray that God will grow disciples of Jesus who in turn will share their faith with others.

SR: Have you had any spectacular failures?

RN: No! I’m too positive to entertain the idea. We’ve had activities which have been poorly attended – but we’ve learnt from that. I have this saying, “it is easier to direct zeal than to motivate apathy”. I would much rather we had a go at something and failed than not do anything for fear of failure.

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