Brisbane needs more churches

A thing I wrote for the Bible Society about the impending arrival of City On A Hill went online last night. It’s in the print copy of this month’s Eternity newspaper. Eternity has just started a local Queensland section in print editions distributed up here that I’m excited to be writing for occasionally.

Here’s the last paragraph.

City On A Hill will change the church ecosystem in Brisbane. It’ll make life uncomfortable for existing churches. Any new animal introduced to an ecosystem causes disruption. I learned that in grade nine science. City On A Hill is a new animal. But if we want our city disrupted by the Gospel of Jesus, we need to keep welcoming new animals into the ecosystem. We want the ecosystem we live in to change – that’s why we’re part of God’s church.

It would be really easy to be anxious about City On A Hill coming into Brisbane’s CBD. Planting a church and reaching Brisbane is pretty hard and “competition” can be a scary thing. I had a recent experience on Facebook where someone moving to Brisbane was looking for church recommendations and heaps of interstate people who love and know Dave Miers were keen to recommend City On A Hill, and it could be disheartening for me, for other ministers, and other church planters in particular, to have a sense that people outside of Brisbane don’t know much about Brisbane’s church scene, but know City On A Hill and know Dave. It could be disheartening if our church strategies were built on securing transfer growth, not on telling people who live in our city about Jesus.

Here’s the stark reality facing the church in Brisbane.

Brisbane’s population is steadily growing. In the 5 year period from 2008 to 2013, the South East Queensland region’s population grew by 2%. If our churches aren’t growing at that rate, they’re actually shrinking. Between now and 2020, Brisbane’s population is projected to grow from 2.1 million people (2013) to 3 million people (2020) — there are some issues with population statistics in this document having different breakdowns between local government areas, and the area treated as “South East Queensland” which includes the Gold Coast, and the Sunshine Coast… but the stats all tell the same story. Our local governments — like the Brisbane City Council — are trying to figure out what infrastructure is required to facilitate this growth, and even just keep pace with it. The church in Queensland needs to do this too.

Queensland is growing faster than most churches in Queensland are growing. Brisbane is growing faster than most churches in Brisbane are growing. Which means we’re actually shrinking.

This new growth means higher density living in some parts of Brisbane, and upgrades to existing infrastructure and networks to keep pace with the growth — a shift in the make up of existing parts of Brisbane. But it also means new suburbs, new roads, new connectivity — new things being built to cater for growth.

Our existing churches should be keeping pace with growth, but we also need more churches to keep pace with this growth. Both more density in high density areas, and more churches in these green field developments.

It’s not rocket science.

Our church infrastructure — which is really a question of human resources, not building resources —needs to be constantly reinvented in order to meet the needs of our growing city and state. The status quo isn’t going to be sufficient if we want to keep pace with growth, or better yet, outpace growth.

That’s why we need City On A Hill, and many more workers for the harvest up here. There are plenty of great churches looking for staff — and the output of our colleges up here isn’t enough to supply the demand (yet). Check out, for example, this job that’s currently going at another inner city church plant. Village Church.