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So we promised you some stories today, so I'd like to invite up David if you can just give him a warm welcome. David's at Wenty Anglican and we're inviting him up here to speak and share with us what's been happening there.

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So before we get into that, David, maybe could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your family? Yes, so I'm married to Christy and we have two children, Joshua who's six and Eliana who's one and she doesn't sleep.

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But she makes up for that in cuteness, so that's okay. I'm now sorry, I made you play that game, so you have low energy. And can you tell us a little bit more about your church, Wenty Anglican? Yes, so I'm at Wenty Anglican, we've been there for seven years and we have two congregations,

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we have a 10am church in English and we have an 1145 church in Tamil. The 10am church is 177 years old, I think, in its existence and the Tamil church is two and a half years old. Yeah, wow.

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And so what made you, you've been in a bit of South Asian outreach? What made you think this is a priority for us? Well, the suburb that we live in is 43% Hindu and a similar amount of South Asians and a lot of those people who are coming new arrivals and so we found that new arrivals are very

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open to change and hence open to the gospel and so and where and the church is located in the marketplace so it's lots of hustle and bustle, it's very busy where we are and so we feel as though where we are, we're uniquely placed to reach people who are unreached with the good news of Jesus.

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Yeah, that's very exciting and so what are some of the ways that you have been trying to reach those people, building bridges? Yeah, so we have three community facing ministries, we have English classes, we have playtime which attracts a lot of Hindu moms and we have knitting which attracts a lot of Indian

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grandmothers and we also have my my colleagues Steve runs our youth group but he also runs a karate dojo that meets in our church hall and and so we have lots of people coming onto our property and from that we also run a games night about three times a year and so we invite everyone from karate and our community facing ministries to come to a games

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night and from that from that we're able to invite people to come along to you know an international dinner or a holiday kids club or one of the festivals that we run around Christmas and Easter. Yeah, sounds like you're trying a wide variety of things to reach, not just a wide variety

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of cultures but also interests and things like that. What have been some of the joys and challenges that you've seen in as you try these different things? Yeah, so some of the joys, one of the joys has been around our Tamil church and what we've

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found is that people, we've got Hindus coming to church and I think that's because there's not as much of a cultural barrier to cross and so the service is conducted in Tamil, there's you know a few curries for lunch afterwards and Hindus are coming along and they're coming to church and they're hearing about Jesus and so that's fantastic, I love that.

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We had some people coming to Tamil church, they came on their very first Sunday of arriving in Australia, they were invited to come and these students from India arrived with their suitcases and their luggage on their very first Sunday they came to church and so and one of them, I heard that one of them texted their friend, he's a Hindu guy and he texted

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his friend to invite him and he said I think it's time for me now to start taking communion which I think is a step towards Jesus and so yeah that's fantastic to see that happen. Some of the challenges we ran an international dinner recently and our Archbishop came and shared his testimony coming from a Buddhist background how he came to Christ and he

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you know, belted it out of the park and we had lots and lots of our church people inviting their friends to come along, that was fantastic, they invited work colleagues and friends and family members to come along, one of our best in invitational events that we've run and but the follow up for that was so we asked people to respond you know, do you want

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to take a next step and we had hardly any response, maybe one person responded and I called her and she didn't answer the phone so that was a challenge, another challenge is we had a Hindu guy who came to us from our playtime minute, sorry our holiday kids club and his whole family came and did our meet Jesus course, we read through Mark's Gospel together

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and from what it looks like, he understood the Gospel, he said he'd never understood forgiveness before, he prayed the prayer to accept Jesus at the end so it looked like he became a Christian but then his dad died in India and he went back to India and where he participated in you know Hindu rituals around you know ceremonies for the dead and he

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came back and he said to me he didn't want anything more to do with the church, so yeah things like that just show the hold that South Asian families often have on people when they come to Christ. Thank you for sharing that, I feel as you're sharing I think I don't know if you can feel like the joy and that you've felt and seeing people come along and

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connect team but also the sadness and the difficulties around it and I think we can really feel your heart for the people around you for the South Asian ministry, what are some lessons that you've learned as you've done this? Yeah so one of the lessons we've learned is so after you run the big event, after the big event make the next step a small step.

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So instead of asking someone to sign up for a course where you know what we're asking them to do when it's sign up for a course to learn about Jesus, tick this box and you know you're also ticking the box to potentially be cut off from your family to be ignored by your community and be ousted by people so we've reflected and thought that might be

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a two bigger step for a Hindu person to commit to and so we've tried to make the next step after the big event a small step and so you know we ran a Jesus for India day and we had lots of people from our ministries come along to that and we had ten responses and afterwards and I think it's because we made the next step a small step, steps like would you like

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to hear a story about Jesus? Would you like to come to church next week? Would you like to someone to read the Bible with you? Would you like to have a try with Pastor David? You know, things like that and we had some good response for that so we learnt from that. Another thing that we've learnt is that often people need to belong before they believe.

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So we've got a Hindu woman who comes along to our church and she said to me once, David I just when I pray to Jesus, I just feel like I'm betraying my other gods. So there's a devotion that she feels an attachment that she feels to her gods but she also keeps coming to church and I think it's because she wants to belong and she's you know sitting

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through sermons and listening, talking to people but she I think she needs to belong before she'll believe and probably the third thing we're learning there's so many things we're learning but one other thing is that in our evangelism training we're learning to train people to be conversational and relational rather than to give people a download a presentation

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of the gospel. So we're training people to when we're sharing the gospel with people to be more conversational and relational exchange ideas with people, listen, ask questions engage before we launch in and share the gospel but do it in a way which is more relational and and having conversations with people. Yeah, great, really helpful tips and so before

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I let you go can I ask or I'm about to pray for you but can I ask how can we be praying for you and when Tiang looking? Yeah, thank you so much. You can pray for wisdom as we reach our South Asian neighbours and you can also pray that yeah God would be at work and that through our efforts that God would see fit to use us to help the nations that

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are coming to our suburb to find our savior. Thank you. Can we thank David please?