Effective Community Engagement

The Community Engagement Stream reached capacity before conference. This shows that there is great hunger and passion to learn how to engage with their communities more effectively. National Director, Paul Bartlett, began by speaking on Six Practices of Successful Community Engaging Churches. These principles work regardless of the size of your church, and they work in any context.

The Community Engagement team presented the following four topics:

• Good to God: Community Programs that are transformational rather than transactional

• Engaging in the Grey Areas

• The Church your community can’t do without

• You are in a Community Disaster – What next?

Engaging with your local mayor

The highlight was, having the Gold Coast Mayor, Tom Tate, join us to talk on how pastors and local churches can assist their local government in building healthy communities.

We also had the opportunity to ask Mayor Tate, what is the kind of stance or attitude that every pastor needs to have when they go to visit their local mayor. He said some interesting things. Firstly, the value of respecting each other's time. e.g. don’t spend an hour talking about things that aren’t important; then just as it is time to finish up, talk about what you really came there for. He also said that it is better to come with an attitude of how can the church serve its community, rather than just how the local government can serve the community. It is the spirit or the attitude of how we work together that results in great outcomes.

The Community Stream was a great success, and our team are looking forward to connecting with those pastors and leaders who attended who are interested in hosting a Roundtable, a Building Strong Communities workshop, or enrolling in the Diploma of Community Services through Alphacrucis.

For more information on any of these next steps visit: acccommunityengagement.org.au