IN HOUSE

SUNDAY 19 November 2023

In House is a significant gathering for the members of New Life, where it serves as a platform for fellowship, reflection, and collective visioning for the New Life congregation.

New Life’s Journey: Our last In-House was held on April 5, 2020. Due to COVID lockdown rules, preventing physical gatherings, the meeting took on an article format. It highlighted our accomplishments, the impact of COVID on physical Sunday services, the suspension of Sunday groups, and the unfortunate cancellation of Wintercon.

Following the end of the COVID lockdown, the Pastoral Search Committee was established for the first time in New Life's history. This enabled us to find our own pastor under the oversight of the Saesoon elder board. Consequently, we invited Pastor Young and his wife, Bora, to join New Life as the head pastor at the end of 2020.

Pastor Young introduced Vision 2025 to the ministry directors, resulting in the election of our first self-selected team leader in early 2022 and the appointment of 20 deputy deacons in early 2023. These deputy deacons have been faithfully participating in Saesoon's general board meetings and discussions in our own meetings regarding New Life's governance.

New ministries such as Family ministry, Hebrews, and Women’s and Men’s discipleship have been established, along with the revival of our Prayer ministry. Life groups have replaced our Sunday groups, providing members with a platform to meet weekly, share their faith, and grow together.

Since 2022, we have resumed sending out mission teams after the COVID lockdown. A new approach involves combined teams with PG (second-generation ministry) and KM, yielding positive effects for both ministries. Currently, we are preparing to send two teams (Perth and Ceduna) in two months.

Lastly, starting from this year - New Life and KM have been putting a lot of efforts to unite as one church, overcome our differences through God’s wisdom and start planning a vision that acknowledges what we need the most and not intrusive for both of the ministries. Few of the key outcomes of this effort is New Life and KM leaders having dinner together for the first time in Saesoon history, participation in wide church events such as Sports day, Cleanup day, Saesoon festival and supporting with dishwashing as rostered ministry.

Starting this year, New Life and KM have dedicated efforts to unite as one church, overcoming differences through God’s wisdom. Key outcomes include New Life and KM leaders dining together for the first time in Saesoon's history; participating in wider church events such as Sports day, Cleanup day, Saesoon festival and supporting various ministries such as being on a roster for dishwashing and signing up to service second generation ministry in FG and PG.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that without God’s providence and the outpouring of His heart, none of these achievements would have been possible. The right people were selected by God to serve in their respective areas at the right time. Everything shared in this meeting and beyond serves as a testimony to God’s work displayed through His church.

New Life’s 2025 Vision: At the beginning of 2022 after much prayer over that first year and examining our context and history, we talked a bit about the Vision of New Life until 2025 (can you believe 2025 is only a little over a year away now?)

Vision 2025 was shared in the context of two sermon series: “A Better Life is Waiting” which went into the details of the vision itself and “Kairos” which talked about the timing of how we could expect God to bring us to realising this vision.

First a little about the timing aspect: Vision 2025 means that we carry on with building culture around the areas we’ve identified, but not necessarily that we’ll “arrive in the promised land” so to speak by 2025 - rather that by 2025, we will take time to pray and reassess, and see where God is leading us once again it’s possible God will help us to focus on particular aspects of the vision areas, it’s possible God will guide us to different vision areas entirely.

Everything we seek to do is based within our mission statement: for the glory of God in the gospel of grace and so we seek to work together for a grace-based culture within New Life - a culture of grace renewal.

The three areas Vision 2025 looked at are:

• Families

• Discipleship

• Church planting

Families

First, about Families: We want to grow in this area because families are God’s idea. He creates family units, He extends blessings to the families of the world and He invites us in to join His family.

Historically, New Life has struggled somewhat to integrate families into the church congregation. Such as big changes happen in the dynamics of a Christian’s life when it comes to things like marriage and childrearing, which means that the expression of our faith can change, and physical and mental exhaustion means that you experience God in the dependency and deep rest you seek. An attempt was made in the past to create a separate space through creating a second congregation to meet in the morning, but this also results in a culture where separation from others becomes the norm: our church members don’t experience the reality of having families and children in their midst, and cannot provide them with help and selfless care (which removes the opportunity for grace on their part) and our families don’t get the opportunity to invite other members into their family lives, to experience the joys and pains of Christian living in that space.

We don’t want for New Life to be a place where there’s a time of life stage limit— it’s a place for all people, and so we want to build a culture where families can thrive. This doesn’t exclude those who are unmarried, those who are younger, those who are older and single, or those who don’t have children— It’s instead creating space for all of us to live and worship Jesus together, and in this we become a fuller family of faith. I would love for New Life to be a place where all people are invited in, that whether young or old, married or unmarried, with or without children, we all welcome one another and seek to encourage one another to greater love and faith in God all as members of the same family.

Moving towards that goal, God led Jae and Hana, and their children Herock and Zion, back to New Life, where they helped to launch Family Ministry: and they’ve been pivotal in starting up a Family Life Group, and being in constant dialogue with different Ministry Directors to look for ways to get our events to be more family and child-friendly, along with creating new events. There’s been some work put into building culture through premarital and marital counselling to younger engaged and married couples, with the hope of setting the culture of discipleship through couples ministering to other couples; And we’ve seen many of our newly married couples and families with young children and newborns commit to staying at New Life.

Discipleship

About Discipleship: The walking alongside another person to help them grow as a follower of Jesus through teaching and disciplining our hearts towards loving Him— yet quite often we default to what work we put in, obligations we have, and struggle with the love part of things. At times we’ve faced a lot of burnout on the parts of those who were in positions of mentorship or leadership— When we had Sunday Groups, there was a fairly low rate of facilitators wanting to return (this may have been a knock-on effect from COVID too). We want for ways for our people to grow in their love for God and to provide pathways for this to happen— We want for people to find that their love for God and His people grows through serving in whatever capacity whether that means taking responsibility upon themselves to walk in mentorship and discipleship, or in leading a Bible study, or whatever it may be.

From what I’m doing with the MDs: All of the Ministry Directors have been given a lot of freedom to lead their

ministries, to try out new ideas they might have, new initiatives, to change up the way the ministry works— And so some ministries have changed their structure entirely, some ministries have completely rebooted, and some ministries have quietly recruited to expand the vision of the ministry itself. As an example, within Discipleship Ministry: we began with two long-time MDs in Simon and Minju, who faithfully served for years and years- and Kevin and Richard came to fill some very big shoes. God is faithful and has brought many new members into Discipleship to help spread the load. Within this one ministry’s umbrella, there’s Women’s Discipleship -> which has become a women’s ministry called The Well, Men’s Discipleship, Life Groups, taking on more commitment while taking some of the best parts of Sunday Groups and within Life Groups, all of the Life Group leaders are taking turns in writing up the Bible study questions and there’s something special happening within Life Groups as the leaders have grown in loving God and one another and have a deep desire to continue to serve God’s people. We want for this to continue and to become a self-perpetuating and growing thing— as discipleship to love Jesus more becomes ingrained with the culture of New Life, there is a renewal of grace as we love Jesus more.

Church planting

As the population of NSW grows, if we are attempting to evangelise to everyone across NSW and we’re really

successful in our evangelism, we would still need 29,500 more churches of our size to fit everyone and this is not including the average population growth of NSW every year either. We’ve identified that we need more churches, because the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Strategically, church planting is one of the most effective forms of evangelism in the modern age since a new church in an area gains most of its new members from those not currently attending any church; it will also result in the renewal of the mother church, as we seek to grow in the culture that enables church planting, evangelism, missions, and prayer as a lifestyle, discipleship and loving Jesus, and a selfless focus on others that enables us to send off a future church plant with love and prayers.

When this happens is still an unknown, but as mentioned in the Kairos series, “we’ll get there when we get there”—in the meantime, we build into the culture God is creating here at New Life, so that we’re well-placed to go and to send off when the time comes.

New Life and Saesoon

This has already received the backing of the wider Saesoon itself and so it’s important for us to move with our Elders and the Saesoon Senior Pastor. I believe that we’re in a good place right now— we’ve spent a lot of time meeting together to talk through where we’re at to rebuild bridges and work towards reconciliation between the Korean and English sides.

There has been teething of course, like any relationship— times of misunderstandings, frustrations when things don’t go the way either side expects or desires. But this is all part of the growing process, and as much as we challenge the Korean side of Saesoon to look at who we are and how we are growing and changing, we also need to recognise that we are a part of Saesoon Church that we have to think of all of the other parts of Saesoon as we think about ourselves too.

With this in mind, some real tangible changes are happening: deputy deacons have been nominated and elected from New Life into the wider Saesoon structure for the first time, a hope to hire an associate pastor within the next two years, and recognition about the changing state of New Life and the need for new or different church governance.

Ministry Directing

The MDs meet monthly to eat together, pray and worship together, and to plan together. We talk about some of what’s going on at church and in the wider church of Saesoon and discuss our direction. And as we talk things through, we also plan for the ministries and the direction of New Life. As mentioned before, the MDs are afforded a great deal of freedom about what they do, new ideas they may have but these do all come under discussion with everyone together, and of course through me too. We seek as much transparency and accountability as possible and I think we also genuinely like each other and want the best for each other; as we seek to love God and one another and to encourage one another to love God and love His church.

New Life and Saesoon: For New Life, our interaction with Saesoon can be divided into three parts: first with Adult KM side, where our elder board, head pastor, and governance lie. Secondly, we have KM Vision and Heart - whose demographics are much more similar to New Life, a community that also receives high school graduates from PG. Lastly, our second generation ministries for all kids and students up to Year 12 in high school - where our support of serving as Sunday school teachers is desperately needed.

In the main adult KM side, we have recently had two new elected elders join Elder Park in the elder board of the church, governing the church administrations together with the head pastor of Saesoon. In previous years, EM and KM had a great divide due to differences in language, culture, and generation. Currently, we continue to have those differences and clashes; however, the most significant difference from previous years is that we have more frequent communication and alignment in building a new church vision that applies to all ministries in Saesoon. As Pastor Young has shared in New Life and Saesoon relationship, we are to continue to have a deeper relationship with the elder board and with other ministry team leaders. This is; for us - to have not only what is important to New Life in our vision but for the whole church of Saesoon and the transition of new or different church governance with the blessing of our mother church. For the adult KM side - to acknowledge and action on the changes that are needed, supporting and planning for the changing demographics of the church with the compassion of Jesus.

The second part that we are close to is KM Vision and KM Heart. KM Heart is a ministry that holds a service in Sydney CBD and is for international students or working holiday visa workers. KM Vision is a ministry of people that holds the service here in this building at 2:30 pm where we share similar concerns and are in the phase of changing demographics. Similar concerns such as catering for the growing demographics of newlywed couples and new families and the need for leaders in life groups and ministries are shared between the two ministries. Since last year, through having leaders’ dinner meetings and joint mission trips, we are continuing to understand each other's ministries better and seek after what we can learn from each other. We hope to deepen our relationship furthermore to create a bridge between the two, tightening the gaps of being two separate ministries who live in the same country, studying and working in the same universities and industries as brothers and sisters of Christ.

Lastly, our relationship with second-generation ministries such as FG and PG. Through Pastor Charlie and a number of second-generation teachers who have been faithfully serving, we are able to maintain the relationship in between. One thing that New Life could improve on is serving in second-generation ministries as teachers and recognizing them as our first mission field - like in the book of Matthew 9:37-38: “The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest.” It is the place where I have built a relationship with the wider KM congregation, allowing me to really see the wider part of my church and have a heart for the second-generation ministry where some of us are from. Our PG mentoring program, joint mission teams with PG students have deepened our relationship with the future generations and growing of the future leaders. However, they are currently in more need of teachers and support, where I believe it is the relationship we do not slow down or let go - but focus on more and more as we move with Vision 2025.

Closing words: As this marks the first In-House meeting in three years, during which significant events and changes have unfolded, we trust that this meeting has offered you a broader understanding of New Life and the trajectory our church is embarking upon. Please continue to pray for New Life and also for our mother church Saesoon, considering all the matters we have deliberated on today.