Becoming a Movement of Hope
At our best, Seventh-day Adventists are called to be a people of hope with a message of hope. What does this look like for us here at this time and in this place? As a result of a two-year process of prayerful reflection, discussion, and consultation, I’m excited to share where we believe God is leading us over the next four years. It builds on what has gone before and brings several things into focus.
Instead of having separate mission, vision, purpose, and value statements which get confusing and easily forgotten, we’ve adopted a single statement that defines our purpose—our what and our why:
To be a disciple-making movement that brings the hope of Jesus to every community in Western Australia.
The first line highlights discipleship and being a movement, which aligns us with the AUC and SPD emphasis. A movement is living and active. It adapts to new challenges and contexts. The church is not an organisation; it’s an organism. It’s not a business; it’s a body of believers. And it’s propelled by bringing the hope of Jesus to others. Ultimately, hope is not an abstract, intellectual thing. Hope is a Person. Hope is found in a relationship with Jesus. This is the gospel—this is the invitation of the angels in Revelation 14. All that we have and all that we are as a church finds its meaning in this mission. The last line of our purpose statement defines our mission field—every community in Western Australia. This is aspirational and multidimensional. Every community includes geographical, cultural, social, and even digital spaces.
To position ourselves to carry out this mission, we’ve identified four building blocks that need to be in place. Each one of them describes a shift in the way we think about things. They are all shaped around the Kingdom in the context of a praying community.
Kingdom Living
Jesus was and is all about the Kingdom of God. The kingdom is referred to over 120 times in the Gospels. It’s the thread that ties everything together. Jesus began His public ministry by saying, ‘The Kingdom has arrived’ (Mark 1:15). He began many of His parables with, The kingdom of heaven is like… When Jesus spoke about the signs of His soon return, He said the final sign that will precede His coming is the gospel of the kingdom going to the world (Matt 24:14). Jesus was all about the kingdom. Not only did He speak about it all the time, but He told His followers to make it their top priority. He said, Seek first the kingdom of God (Matt 6:33). If you get that right, everything else will fall into place.
So according to Jesus, this is where we need to begin. It’s about living as citizens of His kingdom, every moment of everyday, everywhere we go. What does this look like? It looks like Jesus. He revealed what it looks like when God reigns perfectly in and through a person’s life. Jesus is the embodiment—the incarnation—of the kingdom. The place where heaven and earth meet. The language of the kingdom is love: other-oriented, self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing, cross-like love. The kingdom looks like Jesus and we participate in the kingdom to the degree that we look like him. Are we growing in our capacity to love as Jesus loves? To serve as Jesus serves? The foundation of our strategy is following the example of Jesus in seeking first the kingdom in every aspect of our lives—all the time.
Kingdom Leadership
Churches rise and fall with their leaders, and we need to grow more leaders—kingdom-minded leaders. The church was the healthiest and grew the fastest when it was led by ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the power of the Spirit. According to the New Testament, elders were the spiritual leaders of the local churches. But over time, as priests and pastors were put in place, the Christian movement began to slow, and a dependence grew on the professional to do the work of ministry.
That same pattern has been repeated in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In the early days, our paid pastors were church planters. In fact, to be ordained, you had to have planted at least one church. Following the apostles, they would go into new towns, plant a church, appoint the local leaders, then move on and repeat the process. Having pastors assigned to local Adventist churches only really started in the 1940s. This is not how it’s always been.
To fulfil our purpose of being a disciple-making movement, we need to recapture that apostolic approach and adapt it for our context. The role of the pastor is to equip, empower, and mobilise local church leaders (Eph 4:11-13). The pastor can’t do everything. Their role is to focus on training the few in order to reach the many. I appeal to our elders. It is time to realise the full potential of your calling. God has important work for you to do. This move from being pastor-dependant to being elder-led will take time and careful planning. Employing more pastors isn’t the solution. We need to release them to plant churches and raise up elders and leaders to oversee those new and existing churches. It’s about getting back to the kingdom leadership of the early church.
Kingdom Communities
When we do that, it opens up space to become the priesthood of all believers. Every follower of Jesus is given spiritual gifts for the building up of the church (1 Cor 12:7-11). Our experience of church shouldn’t be a few people using their gifts up the front while the rest sit in their seats and not use theirs. We don’t want to be oriented around programs. We want to be oriented around people, where everyone participates and contributes. What is God calling you to do in your local church?
Our churches are to be visible manifestations of the kingdom—communities where heaven and earth meet. And kingdom communities are missional by definition. We don’t exist for ourselves. We exist for those who are not yet part of the family. This is going to be particularly important in 2028 as we engage in Australia for Christ—a nation-wide missional effort to reach our communities. More will be shared in due course. But it’s going to require prayer, planning, building relationships, and creative thinking. We have to gain credibility with our neighbours in preparation to share the gospel. We need to mingle among people, desiring their good. Meeting their needs.
Friends, let’s not get distracted by conspiracies and gossip and other things that cause us to be suspicious of others. If that’s what YouTube and social media is doing to us, we need to unplug. There is no us and them. Time is too short. Jesus says we will be known by our love for one another—especially when we may disagree on certain things (John 13:35). The credibility of our Christian witness depends on us striving for unity in our diversity. We need to think carefully, what kind of spiritual climate do we have in our churches? I appeal to you to do your best to make your local church a warm and attractive community where people, no matter who they are, what they’ve done, can know and feel that they belong. I think that’s what Jesus would want His church to be. A community of hope and healing in the midst of a divided world.
Kingdom Expansion
When these building blocks are in place, you cannot stop the mission from multiplying and expanding. Being with Jesus leads to going for Jesus (Mark 3:14). It’s not about building bigger barns, inviting people to come and stay. It’s about inviting people in, building them up to maturity, teaching them how to minister, and sending them out on mission. Our mission is both local and global. What’s interesting is when you engage in mission work overseas, you return home more fired up and willing to engage in mission in your own backyard. We need both mission at home and mission afar. There will be many opportunities to participate in overseas mission in the coming years.
Jesus said, The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into His fields (Luke 10:2). This is a matter of prayer, which is at the heart of our whole strategy. None of this can be achieved without our complete dependence on God, seeking him in prayer, individually and together as a community.
Each of these four building blocks belong together and build on each other. For practical purposes, as a Conference we will emphasise one each year:
Kingdom Living (2026)
Kingdom Leadership (2027)
Kingdom Communities (2028)
Kingdom Expansion (2029)
We will be holding leadership summits at the beginning of each year to cast the vision, and to come together and pray and plan about the emphasis for that year.
The question now is, how are we going to do this? These are pretty significant things. How are we going to do this in our schools, in our care facilities, in our local churches? It will require prayerful conversation with each other. It will require the power of the Holy Spirit. It will require creativity. It will require the left and the right, conservatives and progressives, young and old. It will require you—all of us working together. Are you willing to say, Jesus, sign me up to your kingdom? I want to partner with you in the mission of your church. I want to be part of a disciple-making movement that brings the hope of Jesus to every community in Western Australia.
