Bulldozers hum busily in the background at Oran Park, on a stretch of land that will gradually be filled with homes, shops and people "” and on the hilltop, within five or six years, an Anglican church.
"This is the focal point of what will be the village," said Greg Ellem, head of Parish Property in Sydney Diocese. "It's the best site I've ever seen for a church building."
Standing on the site for the church surveying the land below, Wayne Perich "” whose family's pastoral holding will comprise the new suburb "” pointed north-eastwards across a field to where a K-12 Anglican school will stand, and east to a planned Anglicare retirement village. A few hundred metres away builders were hard at work on a home display village, the town centre with its clocktower, and "” amid the bulldozers "” sites for new homes.
"Those blocks will be in the first home release, and they'll be selling from the start of next year," Mr Perich said.
Landcom estimates that 35,000 people will move into Oran Park over the next 20 years. In buying into the development at the greenfields stage, the Diocese can create an Anglican sector in the heart of the suburb. To underscore this, on one side of the church site a road has been marked out called Marcus Loane Way, after the influential former Archbishop of Sydney.
Peter Kell, CEO of Anglicare, is delighted by the "potential to have a unique Anglican precinct in this community". Anglicare had been the first Anglican organisation to have contact with the developers at Oran Park, and "when we knew that a church and a church school were also possible things, we were very excited and introduced people to each other".
He said Anglicare's retirement village would accommodate 500 or more people, and include community facilities and Anglicare's Community Care Centre for south-western Sydney.
On the church site, the prerequisite for building to start includes the opening of an aged care facility and school, plus completion of the shopping centre and a minimum number of residential sites.
Mr Ellem said "our strong desire is to have a church on the site by 2014-2015", adding that buying land to build churches such as the one at Oran Park would not have been possible "if a grant hadn't been made from the [diocesan] endowment".
Stakeholders in the development met then NSW Minister for Planning and Infrastructure (and now NSW Premier), Kristina Keneally, at the site last month.
Bishop of Wollongong, Al Stewart, quipped that once Oran Park was fully developed the Anglican Church "can care for people from the cradle to the grave".
Ms Keneally responded that the idea of cradle-to-grave planning had never occurred to her. "Here's a planning opportunity we haven't explored yet: the kingdom of God on earth," she joked. "We haven't written that into any LEP [local area planning] standard."
Despite his lighthearted tone, Bishop Stewart was serious about the ministry opportunities that await. "The difference between endless rows of houses and a community is people who care for one another, and we're in the business of doing that," he said.
