Our Stories

COACH (Creating Opportunities and Casting Hope) is a community-strengthening program that aims to empower individuals and families through one-to-one mentoring, breaking generational cycles of poverty and family breakdown.

This week’s hard lockdown of the Kensington and Flemington public housing estates has not stopped the Essendon Baptist Community Church’s Nwemarket campus project – People’s Pantry, from their long term mission.  Nor has it deterred the work of The West Melbourne Baptist Church who partner with Hotham Mission to provide food and meals for the towers each week.  These ministries are in for the long haul and will remain long after the immediate crisis.

“The church wanted to do more in hospitality and developed the idea of making community meals for the vulnerable in our local area” says Anne Wilkinson-Hayes, member of Westgate Baptist Church.

Here at the Baptist Union Support Hub we believe that together, in prayer and listening to His voice, we can be the voice others need to hear through these unprecedented times. We’d love you to join us in daily prayers, especially for our churches, leaders and communities, in the lockdown suburbs in Victoria.

One of the foci for the BUV is Empowering Leaders for Mission. As an expression of this commitment, EMERGE was launched in February 2020. EMERGE describes 2 experimental pathways for Developing Missional Emerging Leaders. One is an apprenticeship pathway and the other is called ‘Next Steps’, a series of evenings helping local churches to encourage their emerging leaders to take a next step in the development of their character or a leadership skill.

The Rev W G Gillings was a great Bible Scholar and preacher. He was the first minister of the church in St Kilda that became the Pakington St church. (Not the earlier Baptist church in Crimea St.) By the time he left in 1887 to take up missionary service in Bangalore his church had a congregation of 117 and a Sunday school of 250 scholars.

He was an interesting man for it is clear that he liked smart women.

Pastor Sam Farbod is a compassionate, patient, measured and thoughtful leader, pioneering a vital work in Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs. He and his wife Nicky and their daughter Negin arrived in Australia 14 years ago. At the time, Nicky was accepted as a PhD student at Melbourne University, while Sam was working in Engineering. Over the last fourteen years they have distributed Bibles and Christian materials and led Bible study groups for people of Muslim background. One such small group, with five people, was at NewHope Baptist Church. Later in 2013, Sam and his family felt a strong call to serve the Lord in an extended way and it was accompanied by an invitation from NewHope’s leadership to serve the growing Persian community. Today the congregation is mainly comprised of new migrants, refugees and asylum seekers – many of whom are suffering greatly in the current COVID-19 crisis and Australia’s subsequent economic climate.

It all started with a friendship—with a Syrian woman I met in Shepparton in December 2017. When I asked her how I could help her and other Syrians who recently arrived in Shepparton, she said they needed help practicing conversational English.

Events around the world over the past couple of weeks have brought back memories to many of us.  Some very good memories about how we treasure our heritage, our sense of belonging to a community that values taking care of each other and standing up for each other.  However, it has also brought back some very difficult and painful ones.

I was born in 1958 to a middle class family.  When I was 8 years old a series of incidences led me to start questioning the meaning of life…