Alphacrucis College in partnership with ACC Community Engagement are pleased to announce the full Diploma of Community Services will be available in early 2019. This is the first time Alphacrucis has had this available to offer and it is a unique program designed to equipp the church to think and act differently when engaging with…

The Port Macquarie Women’s Shed (PMWS) has continued to grow – reaching over 100 members now, who continue to learn from each other and build genuine friendships through this great community initiative. The Committee has decided that all proceeds from the workshops they hold will be donated to support the children of Theresa Bradford. Theresa…

Over the years churches have engaged with and tried to transform their local communities in various ways. Many have run programs that serve different segments of the community, like job programs, food programs, day care programs, and so on. Churches have also tried to build relationships with people in the community by running events like…

We made some changes not long after Annette and I became the leaders at Lighthouse. One of the key things we did to change our church culture from one of revival to one of community engagement was we brought about a change to what we all considered to be “spiritual”. We spent the next five…

If you’re a pastor or leader in a church, you too may have tended to make use of this “law of the few.” For instance, for so many years we have allowed ourselves to believe that all we need are two, three, or four prominent people within our church who we can support and enable…

One of the questions I get asked often from pastors is how can my church get involved in my community? It is something all of us know that we ought to do and want to do better. Even at South West where God has graced us with some level of community impact we carry the…

At Lighthouse we have three campuses. You may think this is weird, but our Northern campus was planted deliberately on the thought that our people may probably attend a Wednesday night church service or a Thursday night church service or possibly a Sunday night church service, but they may never attend a church service on…

I want to talk about a revolution we’ve had at Lighthouse in recent years. Essentially it’s revolved around a shift in our community engagement from simply finding a need and meeting it to discovering the strengths and assets of our community and working with them. I think we should never get to the point of…

I have learned that God is the one who produces the fruit and it’s my job to simply keep going for as long as it takes… without an agenda. We often treat those who don’t yet follow Christ as though they are idiots. But they are sharp and finely tuned to Christians’ agendas. We do…

I remember meeting with Pastor Matthew Barnett at the Dream Center in Los Angeles not that long ago. As I was standing on the roof of his church building looking out around the area, I was startled at how much the surrounding community had changed since I last saw it back in 2004. As I…