The NSW Coast, north of Forster to the Queensland border, will see a new wave of church planting, as plans from a cluster of churches from Australia’s youngest and fastest growing denomination, the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC), take shape. The new wave of planting aims to have a church in every one of the 16 or so towns with more than 10,000 people, up from the six existing churches in their local cluster of FIEC congregations. There are approximately 600,000 people living in the region.
“I’m gripped by the plight of lost people,” Chris Ekins, pastor of the Coast Evangelical Church in Forster, tells The Other Cheek, expressing why churches need to be planted. “They’re just spinning their wheels, looking for love, looking for hope, looking for life, looking for joy, just looking in all the wrong places. And there’s treasure to be had in the gospel. So yeah, I don’t know. I love the Lord. I love the lost and I think he’s given me, I think he’s wired me as an evangelist so that I just, I don’t know. I just want to do it.”
After 16 years of planting and growing his church, Ekins knows planting is hard. “Back in 2020, we planted a church up in Taree, and that was so hard. It was so hard to plant a church by ourselves. And we thought there’s got to be a way we can plant churches together.”
“A mother-daughter church plant, which was what we did from Foster to Taree, where you send off a bunch of people from an existing church, teaming up with locals in the new area. You basically chop off your leg, you send a whole bunch of people and some money. And we’d taken on a staff member to train for three years for that role. And so we sent up a staff member. So it was just very costly, staffing-wise, relationally, financially. It was just costly to plan. And then we wanted to try and work out if there’s a way we can plan together and share that cost and that resource so that we can plant more churches quicker if we can do it together.”
The pastors of the existing FIEC churches from Forster to Queensland are putting their heads together. Some, like Chris Ekins, have well-established churches, with the Point Community Church in Port Macquarie being another example. However, others, such as Anchor at Coffs Harbour and Manning Bible Church in Taree, are only a few years old. They range from 70 to 500 attendees.
The NSW North Coast is a microcosm of Australians’ propensity to live close to the coast but generally in towns of 10,00 or more. So, the next wave for FIEC is a plan to establish churches in each of these towns. Then, there’s the third wave, where these churches act as regional hubs, helping to set up ministries in the villages that cluster around those towns.
Geography makes a big difference in regional church plants. It’s not just sending a group of people a few suburbs away. A church plant is starting in Ballina, and the planter will be preaching at Ekins’ Coast Evangelical Church.
That’s 459 km away along the coastal road.
“So you might be in the position of a pastor one day, standing up at your church and urging your congregation to leave town?” The Other Cheek asked Ekins.
” I do it all the time, I do,” Ekins responded. “And I say, mate, if you’ve got to go somewhere strategic for the gospel, there’s a new church plant starting at the end of this year up in Ballina. So I’ve encouraged our people to think about moving to Ballina. The planting pastor is going to be preaching at our church in a few weeks. And I’ll say to him, Mate, feel free to put the call out. Feel free to encourage people to move and go with it if you want.”
Testing out the truism that ‘new churches attract new people,’ The Other Cheek asked Ekins who goes to the Coast church. He had the spreadsheet handy. Thirty-five per cent of attendees were converted there, 40 per cent are sea change Christians, and 17 per cent are local Christians who have transferred churches.
Ekins is not pretending that there are no churches in the towns between the Coolongolook River (at Forster) and the Tweed River at the Queensland border, in the towns FIEC has yet to reach. “It’s not that there aren’t evangelical churches in our region, it’s just that the need is so great,” he tells The Other Cheek. We need more, more churches everywhere. “
“We’re not in competition with other churches in the district. We see ourselves working in partnership with them. We are partners in the same gospel, wanting to reach people in towns and different-flavoured churches, reaching different types of people. And FIEC has got its own little flavour, and the Lord will use that to reach a segment of the community that other churches perhaps aren’t able to connect with for whatever reason. So yeah, I think we just need more. We need more.”
There are jobs for ministry workers in many FIEC churches, Ekins explains, urging The Other Cheek to emphasise that need. Churches can search for years.
“It seems challenging for people to leave cities to go serve in regional areas. And so, we need more church planters and staff teams for our growing churches. So we need more soldiers, send more soldiers. And also, resourcing is hard in regional towns because there are not as many people of significant means who live here. There are not as many highly paid individuals. So resourcing regional ministries is way harder because, like I said, staffing and finances.”
But for all the difficulties, Ekins comes across as keen about his ministry, and with his pastor colleagues, they are seeing people becoming Christians.
“It’s all hard. But we’re seeing gospel fruit. We’re all seeing people converted through our ministries. God seems to be drawing many young adults, really young adults, young men to church in the last couple of years. So we’re just seeing a bit of a wave of people who have never come to church but have tried everything the world’s suggested. They try to find happiness, but they find it very empty. And they’re seeking something profound and genuine. And yeah, they’re coming to church looking for answers. And we pointed to Jesus, and then he’s grabbing hold of a bunch of ’em, which is beautiful.”
Image from the linked YouTube Video from the Coast Church