Right it's genuinely great to be back in Poland.

And Poland is one of my favorite places to visit.

I know speakers say that. as an Australian I genuinely mean it

and yeah bridge down also has been a place that every time I visited Paul

and I've spoken at and last time I was here is in 2019.

So it's really good to be back and be back in this building.

I actually was in this building just before I got renovated so it's also really

cool to come here and to see this place done beautifully but also to see what is the

effects of when there is a spiritual renovation?

I think that when, you know, connected with Bridgetown,

connected with John Mark, we and some other friends

in other churches were really interested in the question of what if you begin to look at church very differently in a in a context like ours

Melbourne's a very progressive city, Portland's a progressive city.

Australia's a very secular country.

Portland has that secularity thing going

for the United States, which is a much more religious country

for a Western country, but Portland's a bit of an outlier, but also perhaps a bit of a

harbinger of where the spiritual direction of some of the country may indeed be

going. But really what connected us was an interest of what if you did church differently? A lot of their received wisdom of the time was that

church needed to grow by making things easier, better car parking, nicer patterns on carpets, more programs, more options, shorter services.

So I don't know, mom and dad can get to kids hockey practice quickly. And there was a sense that this was running adrift in cities like ours because the consumer Christian thing doesn't work very well if you don't have many cultural Christians in your city and there's a sense where there's an antipathy

antipathy towards faith. So going back now you know right back to I think my first visits, you know, Bridgetown entered into a process which also we did a red church where you begin to look at practices and formation and how do you actually grow people deeper versus just growing bums on seats?

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