Wollongong's new bishop Al Stewart admits he made key errors at St Matthias', Centennial Park, and tells Jeremy Halcrow what Berkeley's Adopt-a-Block initiative has taught him.

How should Connect 09 change our thinking about ministry?

I don't have all the answers but Connect 09 is making me ask some hard questions. We certainly have a problem - there is no point arguing the toss as to whether its 98 per cent or 96 per cent of the population that is unreached. Clearly we have a problem " we are isolated from our communities.

For a start we need to be asking hard questions about time allocation: how much time are we ministers, including bishops, involved in direct evangelism? Are we filling congregation members' time with good commitments " like rosters and meetings " but not the best commitments? How many of our congregation members have significant non-Christian friendships and are involved in their communities?

If we are spending too much time maintaining "church', should we be looking at new models of church life?

Yes. What would it look like if we went to the unreached, rather than asking them to come to us? The answer may be that the church needs to leave the building. Our model of evangelism has been that we invite the unchurched to us, at our times, and in ways that suit us.

When I was ministering in the Eastern Suburbs I used to get very frustrated by the parents who would turn up late to Sunday School because they had taken their kids to nippers. I was annoyed that nippers was taking kids away from church.

However, I now realise we need to think outside the box. Here we had all these church parents who had wonderful contacts with non-Christian families from nippers. Rather than expecting the nippers kids to come to Sunday School, could we have been taking Sunday School to nippers?

Apart from prayer, the task of parishes in this first phase is to identify what the "nippers' are in their local context: what points of contact do your church members have with the local community?

We featured the Adopt-a-Block initiative at Berkeley in the last edition. This is obviously about taking "church' out of the building and literally into the streets. But it is also a strongly relational model that works well in a working-class area. Are there any other models in your region that parishes should have a look at?

There are two or three similar initiatives on the drawing board that I hope to announce soon.

You are right. In some places the needs are obvious. In other places we will need to look harder, to identify the needs.

Any thoughts on where people might start?

We need to be genuinely concerned about the needs of people in our local community. In Isaiah 58, God says he wants us his people to be concerned for the needs of those around us. So we need to deliberately engage with the people around us, understand their needs, love them, care for them, and in that context speak to them about Jesus.

I realise that in the Eastern Suburbs where I lived for 16 years I did this very poorly, even in my own street. But I now have a fresh start in Wollongong.

My observation is that some people are feeling a little overwhelmed by the prospect of not merely distributing literature to every person in their parish but making a genuine "connection' with them as well.

However, under God, as they saw locals converted, their team was able to grow and they are now able to cover a very significant proportion of the suburb. Is it helpful to think in terms of a phased model - approaching your suburb in bite-size chunks over a period of time?

Yes, certainly. The important thing is to make a start. The aim of Connect 09 is to help to draw us all into the Mission as partners rather than spectators.