From corrective to culture setting: leading Australian evangelicalism | with Richard Coekin

The Reach Australia movement has matured into something broader: from a corrective voice into one of the most significant culture-shaping forces in Australian evangelicalism.

Reach Australia has often been heard as a corrective: a push for clearer pathways, better systems, output thinking and more intentional leadership in local churches.

Richard Coekin says that, as an outsider, last week’s conference felt less like the corrective it may have seemed in the past and more like a mature, holistic vision for church leadership: with preaching, spiritual transformation, gospel culture, prayerful dependence and pastoral warmth much more clearly front and centre, while still committed to principled pragmatism and organising churches to reach the lost.

Richard Coekin, former senior pastor of Dundonald Church in London and now leader of Reach UK, reflects on his fortnight at both the Reach UK conference in London and the Reach Australia conference, attended by 1450 leaders on the NSW Central Coast.

We discuss the maturing of Reach Australia and what UK evangelical churches might learn from Australia at this moment.

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Transcript

Welcome And Conference Context

SPEAKER_00 0:08

It is the Pastor's Heart and Dominic Steele, and it's a week now since the big Reach Australia Conference. 1450 leaders on the central coast of New South Wales, and it's two weeks since the Reach UK Conference, with 300 plus senior leaders gathered from across the UK at Dundonald Church in London. Richard Coken has been here for Reach Australia with about 12 other Brits. And they were also part of the Reach UK conference the week before. He's the former senior pastor of Dundonald Church in Wimbledon and the former leader of Co Mission London and is now leading Reach UK. Richard, I'm imagining it's been an extraordinarily rich fortnight for you, and your pastor's heart is full.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

It's been a wonderful fortnight, actually. And uh yeah, I'm tired, but also uh yeah, full of thanksgiving to God. It's been a great week, great fortnight, as you say. Wonderful. Uh to take us through it. Yeah. Well, um the the Reach UK conference was um a wonderful time, significant growth. So it's the third um Reach Conference I had. The first was 150, the second 230, this year 330. So um significant growth in numbers, but also in the quality and clarity of what we're doing. We've got lots to work on. There's there's lots we haven't quite got right yet, and uh the feedback's been really helpful and things to to do better. And then we came to the REACH Australia conference, which was quite

Why Reach Australia Felt Different

SPEAKER_01 1:39

remarkable and to be honest, the best conference I've ever been to. I thought it was an extraordinary time and lovely to um to be part of, actually. For for lots of reasons.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Yeah. For a 62-year-old pastor to say the best conference I've ever been to is a very big statement. Um Yeah, in fact, I'm even older than that. I'm 65 now.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

So um uh details. Um it was a great conference. I thought it it was a wonderful mix of um the characteristic emphasis upon uh principal pragmatism and uh how best to organize your churches, lots on um you know clear pathways and output thinking and uh all those good things that we expect from from Reach. Uh but there's also um there was more front and center on uh preaching and uh spiritual transformation. And I actually thought the whole conference just seemed really mature. And look, I'm an outsider, so I don't know. I want to hear from an outsider. Sorry? Yeah, I think I want to hear from you. Yeah. Um I mean I came a couple of years ago and unfamiliar with all the terminology, found it quite alarming, to be honest. Um you know, all this sort of worship of the pentagram, which seemed to come from the pit to me, and uh, if people don't want that, just a way of thinking. Yeah, we've we've got it here on the screen. But now I know it's it's a lot healthier than I thought. But all the all the emphasis upon process and outputs, uh for a Brit raised in sort of you know prayerful preaching, um, it just seemed worrying. But um I think I know the people behind it, I've known them for many years, and they're all wonderfully godly people. I so I was confused by it. I think last year I came and I began to realize that lots of ordinary pastors are just um eager for help. And so um learning a way to organize church that is effective in seeing people become Christians, which it plainly is, um, is what most good pastors want. And so they're they're very happy. I mean, you know, God seems to have grown his church in previous centuries and in other cultures without using pentagrams and and um uh discipleship pathways. Um, but I think for our time in the Western culture, this is an extremely effective way of um organizing to reach people for Christ, um, which we want to do. We want to do in the UK as as you do here. Um but then this year, I I think two things happened. One, I've become more familiar with the terminology and realised that the substance behind the terminology is utterly godly and sensible and wise and really helpful. But I also thought the conference itself uh was less of a corrective and more of a vision for church leadership, just more uh holistic in its approach. That the preaching I thought was exceptional. Um, Phil Colgan in the evening and um Adam Chung uh in the mornings, a wonderful mix, uh, but serious with the text, brilliantly preached. And you know, in the in in Britain, to be honest, we think we're useless at many things, but we think preaching's okay. We come to the US uh to to the to Australia, and the preaching hasn't always been um wonderful, but I thought it was wonderful. As last year, actually. Um, but a lot a wonderful mix of of um preaching and teaching. There was plenty of of uh seminars and str sessions on leading your church and uh lots on implementation, so lots on helping pastors work through how would I do this in the realities of church. Uh, you know, Greg Lee and Hunter Church, their team just talking about lots of things sound great on a platform, of course, but in reality they're hard to enact. But just encouragement to to make a start and have a go, and then lots of spiritually uplifting um praise and song. The final session was so moving, you know, with a with a with a um hall full, I mean, you were there, a hall full of people. We were all kneeling uh as we had sung, you know, on Ben Didney. Um and it was nothing contrived, it wasn't manipulated, it was utterly appropriate given all that we'd sung and heard. And I just thought, praise God, and and you know, well done to all those leading it um for a wonderfully godly, uplifting, inspiring conference. And it's given me a shed load of ideas to go back to the UK with for how to do things better in the UK. Um just a very uplifting time. And you know, they always say, don't you people talk about the good old days, you need to recognise when you're living in them. Uh this was a high point, and I think uh everyone who's there will think, gosh, that was inspiring. And uh may it inspire more. You know, on the ground, hardcore ministry, planting churches, reaching the lost, preaching the word, discipling people, all the sort of normal, gritty stuff that pastors and their teams, church uh leaders across the country. Uh there was a wonderful emphasis on um uh wives and women in ministry, and that's sometimes lacking, and I think we've sometimes um neglected that in the UK. We're trying to put that right, but um it was it was very healthy in in lots of um ways. And I think the relationships between it's not it's interesting because we're seeing a conference now and a uh a ministry that is not just fifteen years old, though or however old it is, which it is, and uh thank God for Scotty Sanders, who's now uh finishing his role here, but he has been instrumental in the growth of this ministry here. Um But the just the warmth between the leaders, uh the the the the uncompetitive um collaboration uh we could see it in the way people responded, uh how they they re responded to to Sc for Scott, very tearful in in him leaving to go to America. Um and it's not just the the last few years, it's building on um you know MTS and the and the UNSW students' work years and years ago. Because I remember invite encountering it back in the 80s and 90s. Um and of course, previous to that, lots of good things in this part of the world have conspired to this point. But praise God for those who put together this ministry for Andrew Heard, you know, and and the brain's trust behind thinking it all through, and to just let's not get too, you know, he would want us too emotional about this, we'd go back and get on with reaching the lost. But just at this moment, just to to um thank God for a wonderful ministry. Uh you know, I'm not easily impressed. No, and uh I'm impressed. I'm just I thought it was it was a wonderful, wonderful conference, which is why I said I think it's the best I've been to. Out of the thousands of people.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Yeah, perhaps that's the key. I didn't have any role in this one. And Australia was wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Thank God for it. What immediate things do you take back to the UK?

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Well, I think um we've discovered in our own conference that um there is an appetite and a need for thinking about how to organize church. So um just to switch to talk about the UK, is that um Yeah, I I mean um there are lots of wonderful conferences and ministries in the UK, but um a lot of conferences are are general principles delivered for crowds

What The UK Needs Next

SPEAKER_01 8:55

of people. Um, and often you're sort of gold panning for nuggets as you listen to the pastor of a big church somewhere, you're trying to sort of um uh work out things to learn for your own ministry, and it's often quite hard. So you need those general principles, those kind of um defining meta-narrative view of ministry and uh and church. But there's often not much practical and there's not much help for skilling up. Um and there are there are then there are wonderful sort of counselling and coaching ministries which are open-ended, but in terms of content for how do I run church, how do I do my job, a lot of a lot of training in the UK um is front loaded. You know, you get it at college, you do a training, you might do an MTS training role or a training job, and then you're in it. But ten years into the job in a church, the questions and challenges are very different to what you thought they would be at college. And that's not to in any way to undermine the colleges, the colleges need to do their work. But 10-15 years in, pastors and their teams need help with how do we do our jobs.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

We're joking about things they never taught in New Testament III.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Well, exactly. Yeah, uh, and all the practical issues of how to organize church in order to reach the lost. And I think uh I've been persuaded of that myself. And um in the UK, we're all recognising that. So we do need all of those things.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Um Do you want me to talk more about the UK? Just um I want to I've got a slide here of um the uh showing some of the percentages of responses in the UK. And you put this slide up on the screen at the REACH UK conference last week. And now this is a survey of um churches that are kind of linked to your network.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Not quite, not as directly as that. So it was um uh a national ministry survey, uh it was nearly 400 churches across the UK. Um and we've organized that. We've we did one a few years ago, but on this so we're beginning to try and build up a pattern and

Measuring Growth And Green Shoots

SPEAKER_01 10:54

trends and so on. Uh and you'll see that the the the figures are modest, but there's also some encouragement here.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Well, I'm pretty encouraged actually. You say modest, but um uh we've uh the Gospel Coalition Australia pulled together a group of leaders here and uh and said, noting the unprecedented unity in the Australian church at the moment, and said, What if we aimed all of our congregations to grow by five percent conversion growth per year for the next 20 years, we would double the number of evangelicals in Australia. Yeah. And now I'm taking five percent to include returners and converts, you know. And I look here, and you've got two point seven percent uh returners and two point six percent converts, yeah. Well, that's five point three. Yeah. And so if you've got three hundred plus churches in the UK that are getting five percent conversion growth at the moment, well, that's awesome, I thought. Yeah, it's not it's not it's not am I reading it wrong? English response is not nothing, you know. Yeah. No, um I mean, this is what we're aiming for here, and you're getting it in this group of churches.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Yes, talk, you know, talk of quiet revival, all that sort of thing. Uh, I think most of the evangelical churches think there's some truth in it.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Um, you know, we don't want to be sort of um over things. Okay, we're happy to say that you go survey was wrong or somehow wrong, but there's something going on in the world, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 12:35

I think a lot of evangelical churches, including the one I go to and the churches I'm in contact with, are seeing young adults coming into church with no background. Atheism has failed them. Um they've learnt nothing of Christ real Christianity at school. They are interested. And and look, it's a it's a social reality. It doesn't mean they're born again yet, but it's wonderful that you've got young adults coming into church saying, Tell me about all this, because I don't know anything about it. And and of course, we do have the most wonderful thing to share in all the world, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And he he is aren't he is the answer to all those existential questions that uh younger generations have about identity and purpose and meaning and and uh you know, all those kind of longings for where do I look? And it's almost like you know, in the in the sea of self-creation, you know, we we now design ourselves, we even design our own gender now. You know, people we are lost as a culture. And um praise God that some are are coming to church to think, is there something here? And so you're right. Um, you know, compared with 35% in 21, 74% of the churches we've been now, these are evangelical churches, and they're evangelical churches sort of interested in what we're doing. I suppose linked to us is a bit strong, but uh they receive our they were happy to answer our survey. Um compared with 35%. So I think there is some growth. There are green shoots from a pretty bleak place. Yeah. Um so we're just saying, can we can we and look, talk is cheap. You can talk about aims and goals, you know, every everyone can do that. So what? But um it does help you focus on what we need to do to get there if we are going to see this kind of uh growth. And you know, I am particularly interested in the third one. We do want lats to people coming back to church, and of course it's sometimes difficult to know were they ever Christians in the first place or not. Um but it's just like a slightly different dynamic than people coming in with no knowledge of Christianity. But in both cases, we're saying, can we dial up? Can we can we go further by God's grace, uh, in all the normal, usual, ordinary ways, proclaiming God's word and and proclaiming the gospel in every way we can. But um, yeah, we're committed to trying to reach the lost. And I think it was important for our conference as it is here. We're not just trying to organize church, we're not just trying to try to sort of create smooth machines that work well. We want to reach more people for Jesus. That's why we're doing it. Um, I take it that's why God's extended the the world and hasn't ended it and nuke the place and started again. I take it that's what we're all he'll still here for. You know, I often say when God took flesh, uh when holiness became a man, um, he came as an evangelist. And Jesus was a relentless evangelist, and he called his disciples to learn how to do evangelism. Uh he was doing it in the uh in the synagogues and the and the and the the inns and the and the byways of of Galilee, and um he left us very, very clearly telling us what to do, go make disciples of all nations.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Um actually that was a lovely moment at the end of uh the Reach Australia conference when they invited the 1300, 1400 people in the room to stand and say, Go make disciples of all nations together. It is, it is.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

And um who would have thought Australians being emotional like that? Um but so I jest. Well no, no, but it's a it's a it was a wonderful moment. It is, it is. And it was also the keynote for our uh conference back back in the UK that um we're here to make disciples. So it's not about tidy church. Uh it's not even about some of the benefits of uh relieving hard-pressed pastors building teams to relieve the load so with less burnout. Um all of that's good, but the main thing is so we can reach more people with the good news of Jesus. That's what we want to do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Now we've got this log image. I'll put that up on the screen and get you to explain this to us. Because this is what you're thinking about in the UK.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Yeah, I mean a lot of this is it's very ordinary and familiar, but just trying to think about it. Um so so our reached UK distinctives would be we believe for churches to grow by making disciples of all nations, we need to do these things. We need to have biblical ministry convictions. That's the heart of it all. The Bible has to drive everything, it's God's word. Um, so that must shape uh and fuel everything. That then results in prayerful preaching.

Reach UK Distinctives For Healthy Churches

SPEAKER_01 16:47

We don't want to leave prayerful preaching aside, and we don't want to assume prayerful preaching. We want it front and centre and say we're all about prayerful preaching, as every uh church should be. It is the heart, it's not the whole, but it is the heart of a healthy church. And uh prayerful preaching, leading obviously many prayerful word ministries, um, you know, small groups, conversations, um uh singing, uh, lots of word ministries in a church. So we do want to say prayerful preaching is next. Uh that then leads to gospel culture, uh, because as they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast. If if the gospel is not shaping the way you do church, um, then you can have all the best strategies in the world, and uh you'll be neither glorifying God nor appealing to non-Christians. Um, young people are looking for integrity and gospel culture um ahead of everything else. And uh so we want to to uh think about gospel culture in our teams and in our churches. Uh and then of course we get onto some of the things that REACH have emphasized, uh clear vision uh and pathways to get there. Um because in one sense, vision um we just mean a picture of the future that we're praying and working towards. Because it helps you make good decisions and avoid making bad decisions. You know, a lot of church leadership teams, you know, go and employ somebody and then regret it later on because it doesn't actually help them reach the community they're trying to reach. If they'd only thought about who they're trying to reach, um, the kind of church they're trying to become, they might have employed that person part-time, so they can then employ somebody else part-time to actually help reach the community they really wanted to reach. So trying to think about intentionally, uh, intentionality is the big thing, isn't it? You know, um, by God's grace, who could we reach of the communities with you know within reach of this church, relationally, geographically, who could we reach? And and let's dream out loud. Let's think about what we'd what we could realistically be in five or ten years by God's kindness, and then think clearly about that, because that then determines uh some of the steps you take towards uh getting there. Always, of course, bringing disciples to maturity in Christ. Uh so that's um vision and pathways, effective teams and structures. I think in the UK that we we've inherited a kind of solely small church approach, uh assuming you've got one leader and one ministry. And actually the Bible requires many ministries of a church and talks about church body with you know the body is more than a mouth. Um so we talk about um we actually think about gingerbread assessments, um, which is where you've got uh ginger body.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

We've got a gingerbread man here. Oh, there you go. There you go. You were critical of the five sides of the pentagram from Australia. The deep in the word, in community, serving others on mission and loving God. Yes. And yet you've not gone for five sides of a pentagram.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

Well, we'll probably still use it at some point.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

You've gone for

The Gingerbread Assessment Explained

SPEAKER_00 19:44

five legs of a gingerbread. All right.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

Let's not overstate it. I mean, the the the pentag- the pentagram uh um is wonderful. I get it, it's perfectly good. I think um we're not quite so diagrammatized as a church culture in the UK. And so I wanted um a version that we could use that was just a little closer to the biblical body imagery, and this seems to work for us as a church assessment thing. Gingerbread man, yes. In the body of a church, Dominic. Don't you get it? So so here we But it also enables us to put uh for what us for us, which is slightly our defensive um and proper concern to keep prayer for preaching at the heart of everything. As it enables us to do that. So it's the same thing, and we'll still use ecosystem thinking for uh and pentagrams and so on, sorry, pentagons, to be thinking about um the collective pastoring of a church. But I we do think this does a lot of that for us. So if you think into you can map the interesting, the um the Great Commission onto the ministries required. You know, as all authority in heaven on earth has been given to me, says Jesus. So we exalt and magnify him in church, go and make disciples of all nations, so we evangelize and and um missionise um the world, um baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, so we engage people in membership of the church, teaching them to obey everything that I've commanded you, so we edify and bring people people to maturity. And the mother doesn't quite work strictly, but surely I'm with you always to the end of the age. That is an ongoing role. Um, you're gonna need to equip or train across the generations people to do ministry. But it's all driven by prayerful preaching, producing gospel culture. And what that does for us, we've turned it into an assessment tool, and church we find in church councils find it really helpful. Um, partly just because the body imagery is just a bit more familiar than pentagrams, um pentagons.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Um it's funny, isn't it? I get confused too much.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Yeah, it's and it's partly also I you know, I find it difficult just to off the cap and copy what other people have done, you know, it's a little bit hard. So uh I think it it's working well for us. That doesn't mean we won't use the Pentagon uh for other purposes, particularly in thinking how ministries work together. But the the benefit of this is that, as in your own body, you know, need A knee malfunction, knee pain, might result from a left foot problem. It's a way of thinking that look, if our evangelized heat is low in the church, it could be that we need some teaching on evangelism or heaven and hell. But it could be that the reason is because our membership ministry is poor. And people aren't feeling loved. People don't think that this is their church yet. Or it could be that the edify ministry is weak and so they don't want to bring their friends because they're frightened of what the preachers will say. Or it could be that the equipped ministry is poor, so the small group leaders don't remember that there's a guest service on Sunday, don't mention it, so nobody's praying in small groups because they're not working as a team for the church. And so Bible studies are just Bible study, and they're not thinking about the fact that it's guest Sunday and they're not praying for friends to come. Or it could be that um the exalt ministry is very weak, and church is so boring that people don't want to bring friends to church because they're embarrassed about the about the whole thing. So um we just need to think a bit more um less superficially superficially and think about what are the factors contributing to the low emission heat. And this as an assessment tool is a way of doing that. You know, as we discuss all the contributing factors to malfunctions in church, and this does this in the same way as the as the ecosystem. Uh we've made a start. Um, you know, we're so small and vulnerable compared with what's going on here, but we are inspired by what's going on here, and we've got our own context to work with. Um but I think the conference last week, I was thrilled about was that lots of um lots of churches came that we we don't have history with, but then there were a lot of able pastors of very effective churches across the country, both uh independent churches, FIC churches and the like, as well as Anglicans, um, you know, from London and from across the country, um all coming and really engaging with, I think, an enjoying input on how do we do our job. And uh in fact, Andrew Heard very kindly uh flew over uh to join us to give us some uh keynote speech uh talks. What was brilliant about those, and and the thing I think we want to keep doing is providing the biblical, the theological basis for practical things that we're uh uh learning. We we keep wanting to be principled pragmatists, you know, theologically driven uh church ministry. So keep going back to the scriptures and to derive principles uh for ministry from there and build on those principles. Um So that's that's what we're doing. And then going back to the log, I don't know whether you've got back to the log.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Let's push into the church assessments. As you've done these assessments, you've you've gone under the bonnet for different churches. Have you noticed any trends, kind of common patterns, that kind of thing?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

And what we're noticing, I think probably two or three things. Firstly, um there's a lack of ministry training within the churches. And I think that's one of the reasons why there's a shortage of people volunteering for full-time ministry across the UK, which everyone's very uh conscious of, and the

Common Church Patterns And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 25:07

the Yanton discussion discussion, which you may have heard of elsewhere, and you know, wonderful efforts being made to raise up more leaders. In fact, next year's conference will be on equipping for ministry. But I think sometimes the lack of ministry leaders for uh deployment across the country comes from a lack of ministry training within the churches. And um we certainly found at Dundonald An ethos of culture.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:31

An ethos of training in ministry within the churches. Yeah. So that's one thing that we want to drill into is the one thing that I did every week at um Dundonald, which got used, I think. Just to multiply a culture of training and of encouraging people to step up, take responsibility, learn how to do ministry. Um that's one I think secondly, a number of churches have begun to uh embrace a sort of purpose-driven structure to their ministries, but there's often a mismatch between the the structures and their team structures, and it'll take time to sort of resolve those. So there's a bit of confusion going on where people are trying to sort of install new structures uh and onto old realities, and that takes time. And I think we need to sort of encourage people to be patient. You know, it takes years uh to get those things aligned, and we'll always be tweaking things, we're never going to arrive at perfection. So um, but that there is that sort of slight mismatch. I think the other thing we're we're discovering is there's a lot of really good leaders and teams and churches out there. You know, you you can sometimes get depressed at how many people are not Christians in the country. I keep meeting wonderful pastors with their wives and families, you know, committed to ministry with great teams who really want to reach the lost. And I think we are dealing with good to great leaders in general, because if you're humble enough and you care enough to get in contact for help with how to organise your you're already a good leader, you know, by definition. You know, bad leaders either don't care or think think they've got it all sussed already. Um so I think we are re- but it's a really I mean I think it's a great joy. I'm loving it, it's such a privilege to come alongside pastors and their teams and help them do what they want to do. Um so I'm I'm realizing there are people I'd never heard of in places I'd never heard of doing great work. And I mean, seriously, it's seriously encouraging. Um and I think I hope that as a movement we can be encouraging to churches everywhere. Um, as they realise they're not alone and that people across the country are laboring to reach the lost.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Thanks so much for coming in. Richard Coken has been my guest. He leads Reach UK, uh former senior minister of Dundonald Church in London, and also uh lead of the former lead of the uh London Co Mission Network. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor Sart, and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.