A Snapshot of Southern Illawarra Church of Christ

17 Aug 2017

PURPOSEOur purpose is to be a Christ-centred community, offering love and compassion that encourages and enables us to be growing closer to God, so that we can reveal Christ to all.

HISTORYSouthern Illawarra Church of Christ celebrates 20 years of life in August 2023. In 2015, we purchased a house in the main street of Albion Park to be our mission and ministry centre. From that we birthed Southern Life Care which proved to be an enormous asset to our ministry.

We presently have several initiatives from Southern Life Care and there are some new enterprises coming as we determine the shape of mission to reach our community.

Southern Life Care is a ministry of Southern Illawarra Church of Christ. Southern Life Care combines:

the name of our church – Southern
our goal to bring life through our social welfare projects and relationships
the aim to care and reveal the love of Christ.

PROJECT SNAPSHOTLiving Creatively with Janice

Living Creatively is an innovative approach to spirituality through different forms of art to explore relationships with one another and God. This artistic approach includes guided direction, space to allow ourselves to sense what is happening within us, time to explore what God is saying to us, creativity, sharing with others and the unexpected revelation.

Janice facilitates the group and has studied Fine Arts and is completing at Diploma in Ministry at ACOM. Through the last couple of years Janice has sensed God stirring her to blend her artistic and spiritual life in an art therapy type of experience. This led Janice in 2016 in reducing her work to 3 days per week. One of those days is facilitating two groups of Living Creatively on Monday morning and evening, and one day a week doing the Church Administration in a volunteer role.

During the year, Janice has felt lead to conclude full-time work, despite the incoming bills, paying a mortgage and her husband working part-time. Janice has been obedient to God’s calling in her life and now leads Living Creatively, continues with church administration as well as undertaking mentoring. In September, we are curating our first art exhibition to:

reach people who may never walk into a church in our community through art
encourage and validate people who do art in our local community
encourage our church community to engage with people in the community over the commonality of art
let people know that we are here in the Southern Illawarra but are not just a church for Sundays

We are so excited to have Janice and her husband Peter as models and examples of stepping out in faith despite the cost. We are honoured by their willingness to pay the price of obedience to God.

WANT TO GET INVOLVED?

Prayer:

Pray for Living Creatively and for Janice and Peter in their ongoing faith walk.
Pray for the participants of Living Creatively to be touched by God and have insight to their own personalities.