“During mission I’ve learnt to trust God more. I’ve realised that it is His mission, that He is in control. Knowing this is a great relief!”

It was the final day of mission. The whole team, 40 in all, sat in a huge circle, with everyone sharing what they had learnt on mission, what they had been challenged by, what they had been encouraged by. It was clear that everyone had been profoundly affected.

Sometime during the process, the realisation struck me " *this* was what mission was also about. Not just God changing the world "out there', but God changing me as well. Mission is a time of great spiritual growth. We are not leaving the fruit of mission at Bathurst " we are bringing it back to Annandale with us.

I spoke to Dominic about this afterwards. He said he is convinced that these annual missions (this is the ninth one) have raised the "evangelistic temperature' of our church. It has helped develop a culture of outreach. Were we to stop doing mission, our church would lose its evangelistic edge.

And so mission came to a close. As I drove back to Sydney, I had a lot of time to reflect on what had happened in the past week. I’ve only really touched on it in this little series of blogs " we put on many more events, spoke to many more people, did many more things.

Including scripture kids, I estimate that we presented the gospel to over a thousand people all up in Bathurst. And we had evangelistic contact of some sort with nearly 500 more. There are many people for the local church to follow-up, but from response cards it appears that between 30 and 40 people wish to do the Introducing God course starting in Bathurst in February. Not too bad!

But another benefit has been the opportunity to "road test' a whole lot of new ideas. Some have worked, some haven’t, some need tweaking. But overall the "Ultimate Relationship Week' theme has worked well and most of the events we ran seemed to hit the target.

Our current thinking is that we will polish some of the material up, then run the mission locally in early 2008. Actually, it would be great if some other churches got on board too, and we could run it as a "mega-mission'. Give some thought to it " is this something your church could do too?

Many thanks to those of you who have been reading this blog. I pray that God will bless you over the holiday season.