Be part of a real church family and see your
head, heart and life
tuned to eternal realities
Christmas Plans
5:30pm 12 December
Sojourn's Christmas Picnic
Dutton Park State School Oval
Food, Friends & Carols
5pm 24 December
Christmas Eve Carols
Backbone Youth Arts Centre
38 Lytton Rd, East Brisbane
10:30am Sunday
Backbone Youth Arts Centre
38 Lytton Rd, East Brisbane
It's best to park at
34 Park Avenue Parking
and walk up through Mowbray Park
[map]
Up the stairs past Mow & Co
(come early if you'd like to grab a coffee on your way in)
There's an online option
if symptoms or vulnerability are keeping you away.
Register your email and we'll send you a link.
Everyone is immortal
Christians shouldn’t live as if there's nothing more.
No one should live as if there is nothing more.
Without God’s work to tune your head, heart and life to eternal realities,
you’ll be out of step with how things really are,
you’ll invest most heavily in things that can’t last,
and you’ll look back later at opportunities missed.
You don’t have to drift.
God works by his Spirit through his word,
so we build Bible‑centred relationships and community
in which to grow personally
and actively partner in promoting Christ's gospel.
Come and be part of us
Visit this Sunday
There’s more to church family than Sunday, but our Sunday gatherings are a great way into the community. We’d love to meet you!
Hear God speak the Bible
Sundays and weekdays, we won’t just tell you what God says, we’ll show you—Bible’s open—so you’ll be confident you’re hearing what he says.
See God work in you and us
Every week we all come as we are and every week we leave a little different. In response to our prayers, God works by his Spirit through his word.
We all have a story to tell
We'd love you to be part of the community. We believe the best context to get clear about the Christian message is reading the Bible with people who believe and trust what God speaks in it.
Imagine exploring and asking questions about what Christians believe with people who don’t expect you to already know it and accept you as you are.
Imagine opening the Bible and encountering the God who speaks it and invites you to come as you are and find rescue and forgiveness in his Son.
We think that would be a good thing because we’re convinced eternal realities are… real. But we also think you need to think, so we’re keen to be a context where you have room to explore.
You'll find a family in Sojourn. Brothers and sisters you can grow, thrive and serve with. Gospel friends to walk with you in the struggles of this life.
When God tunes your head and heart to eternal realities, everything changes.
Imagine being so captivated by our Father’s love in Christ that you are eager to please him in everything; so committed to his family that you devote yourself to seeing them keep in step with the Spirit and not lose heart; and so concerned for the people of Brisbane and the nations that you order your life around seeing them meet Christ Jesus.
Only God could do that!
We’re eager to be part of him doing that work in you and for you to be part of him doing that work in us. Together we can share Christ's gospel while we wait for him to bring us home.
Wherever you're at in your journey,
come as you are
Join us for our current series of Bible Talks
Philippians
Join us as we read 2 Peter and look to God to work in us by his Spirit as we hear his word.
...grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
2 Peter 3:18 (ESV)
We'll read the the bit of the Bible the talk is based on when we meet. You'll be able to engage whether you have time to read the passage before you come or not.
But it will probably be a little easier to see how what's being said emerges from the text if you've already had a look.
Current series:
Hear Jesus more clearly
23 May Mark 9:33-50
on greatness and living with the end in mind
30 May Mark 10:1-12
on marriage and divorce
6 June Mark 10:13-31
on entering the kingdom of God
13 June Mark 12:13-34
on authorities civil and religious
20 June Mark 12:28-34
on the greatest commandment
You'll also find it helps if you can see the passage during the talk.
An easy way to do that is to google the passage or install a Bible app like YouVersion.
There are a number of good English translations. We use the ESV in our meetings.
OUR SIMPLE SHAPE
How We Grow Together
Sunday Church
Our public gathering where everyone is welcome and we engage with God and one another.
Discipleship Groups
Small groups focused on the gospel in Monday to Sunday life and building gospel friendships with each other.
Intentional Communities
Ordinary life shared with one another and friends who don't know Jesus. We deliberately avoid life in Christian bubbles.
Sunday Church
We meet at 10:30 every Sunday
You can expect us to be glad you came. Here are a few other things you can expect:
CHRIST-CENTRED CONTENT
We hear from God as the Bible is read and explained.
We are lead in speaking to God in prayer.
And we rejoice in our Father's rescue through Christ with the help of a strong lead from our musos.
INFORMAL STYLE
The meetings are pretty informal. There's no dress code.
We miss sharing morning tea with each other but don't really need the excuse to hang out for ages after the structured part of the gathering.
COMMUNITY VIBE
We value relationships as the context in which the gospel grows. During the service and as we stay around together afterwards, the community grows in love and includes new folk who visit.
Relationships don't end when we leave the carpark.
ALL AGE INCLUSION
We love having kids in the meeting and including them as active participants in the community.
There's no creche for the time being (COVID), but don't let that stop you coming if you have a very little one.
10:30am Sunday
Backbone Youth Arts Centre
38 Lytton Rd, East Brisbane
It's best to park at
34 Park Avenue Parking
and walk up through Mowbray Park
[map]
Up the stairs past Mow & Co
(come early if you'd like to grab a coffee on your way in)
There's an online option
if symptoms or vulnerability are keeping you away.
Register your email and we'll send you a link.
Discipleship Groups
It's all too easy to be educated beyond our confidence and our obedience.
The joy of forgiveness experienced on Sunday can feel distant by Monday. A clear and compelling Bible talk with real implications for life can be forgotten by Wednesday.
We can help each other.
Our discipleship groups are a wonderful context for gospel friendship. You can meet with two to four others to clarify your understanding of the passage preached on Sunday, and to think through the details of tuning our heads and hearts to God's truth.
You'll find it really helpful to identify one focus of the implications for you, so that you and the others can be asking God to work it. You'll be a big help to others as they do the same.
The groups are deliberately small so everyone can participate in the conversation and know how to be praying for one another and those God has brought into our lives. When the need arises and life is busy, a lot can be packed into 45 minutes or so!
If you're a follower of Jesus, we're keen for you to give and receive gospel encouragement in life and mission. We'd love you to be part of God's work among us
Tune Our Lives
Tune Our Lives is a weekly post in our community website to help you revisit the Bible passage preached on the previous Sunday with brothers and sisters.
It includes a link to our Bible talk podcast and a few questions and comments to help focus the conversation.
We Love The City God Has Placed Us In
Intentional Community
We’re a regional church which means we don’t all see each other during the week outside the bank or in the line at the grocer’s. Opportunities for relationship don't happen by default.
We aren’t about to resign ourselves to relationships which only go as deep as seeing each other once a week allows. So we're intentional about including each other in our lives.
Christian community is wonderful but it can be unintentionally exclusive. If it's not planned, life can become closed into a Christian bubble which limits our relationships and restricts our opportunities to be a blessing.
So we encourage an intentionally inclusive culture.
Community and good relationships tend to form in the context of regular activities. Intentional community is our reminder to be inclusive in our social lives. Sport. Hobbies. Hang outs. The simple and unstructured aim is to include sojourners and others in weekly activities.
Whether you're already following Jesus, curious or actively disinterested, we want to share life with you. That's because we enjoy friendship and are convinced relationships are part of God's goodness towards us. And because relationships are the soil in which mission and fellowship and discipleship grow.
A lot of opportunities to disciple one another occur in ordinary life. Most of our opportunities to share the gospel with those who don’t yet believe begin in ordinary life. Our aim with being intentional about community is to maximise those and other opportunities to do good. Within the Sojourn community and beyond.
As each of us is deliberate about being with one another and including friends who don’t yet know Jesus, our ordinary life opportunities to love one another and everyone else increase. That love takes many forms and, in view of eternity, certainly includes pointing to Jesus who saves.
Believer, doubter, skeptic, cynic. You're welcome on Sundays and you're welcome in our lives. Come as you are.
God Speaks The Bible
Bible Teaching
It can be hard to know what to believe.
It can be hard to know what beliefs are Christian. People who take the name Christian speak from radically different perspectives and push towards opposite conclusions.
Jesus teaches us to recognise the Bible as words God speaks to us. So our simple approach is to read and explore the Bible together. We're eager to help you hear and understand it.
Our regular pattern of teaching is expository. We want the point of a talk or study to be the point of the passage. Each week, we read sequential sections of a Bible book and hear a talk designed to help you hear the point of the passage.
When you hear what the Bible says with it open in front of you, you can see what tuning your head and heart to his word involves. You can believe what he teaches, trust what he promises and obey what he commands.
What We Believe
You don't need to believe what we believe to be part of the community, but it will help you understand us to hear a bit about what we believe.
We recognise the Bible as God’s word to us. He speaks it, so we are determined in our commitment to reading it, understanding it and taking it to heart.
The approach we take when we read the Bible together is expository. We want the point of the Bible talk or study to be the point of the passage. Our usual approach is to read a Bible book section by section. That sets you up to see how what the preacher says comes out of what God says in the passage.
We all intuitively put the bits and pieces together to form and re-form our view of particular topics and themes. From time to time we pull the threads together, looking at how an idea develops and unfolds throughout the 66 books. The goal is to grasp what God says to us on the issue in the light of all of Scripture. That's what doctrine is.
The statements we develop always need to be considered in terms of how they are to shape not only our thinking, but also our confidence and our obedience. Doctrine is for discipleship.
Sojourn is a Bible based church. Our Statement of Beliefs summarises what we have come to believe (and, therefore, what you should expect to hear from those who teach). It has significant implications for our life together as a body.
In all of this, Jesus is Lord of our doctrine.
Leadership
Leadership in the church which the Lord Jesus rules by his word is exercised in humble submission to him and in faithful and prayerful teaching of his word.
While we all speak the truth in love to one another, the pastor and elders have particular responsibility for prayerful teaching in the congregation. The leaders of our discipleship groups have pastoral responsibility in their sphere.
Pastor/elder: Wez Coffey Elders: Jason Hess, Grant Kennedy and Andrew Knox
Wider Gospel Partnership
We partner in the gospel with one another and with many brothers and sisters around Brisbane and the world. We're committed to Christ, his gospel and his people everywhere. That commitment spans denominations and structures and has some particular expressions.
Queensland & Australia
As part of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, we're working together to reach Australia for Christ.
You'll find more about our shared goals and culture on the FIEC website.
All Nations
We partner in prayer, finance and concern with a number of local and global ministries and have a particular association with CMS QLD & NNSW and link with missionaries through them. It's a joy to start each year at CMS Summer School--we've made it our church camp.
Administration
Our desire is to have administration which meets our obligations and has a high degree of transparency.
We administer our affairs under a registered incorporated association, Sojourn Bible Church Incorporated. The Sojourn Bible Church Incorporated Constitution is available for download.
Our administration committee are elected to serve by managing the affairs of the congregation. They communicate regularly with those who attend and report formally to the members of the association each year at the AGM.
Current members of the admin committee are: Wez Coffey (pastor), Michael Gearing (secretary), Ben Keller (treasurer) and Jason Hess.
Financial Partnership
Yes, we made you scroll to find it.
We love to have friends with us at church! When guests attend our public gathering we want them to be our guests and don't ask them for money.
Our expenses are met through the gospel-hearted generosity of those who are part of Sojourn. All income and expenditure is managed by the admin committee who give regular reports to the congregation, have accounts audited and submit information to the ATO etc.
If you're a follower of Jesus and Sojourn is your church, you have a responsibility to support the work. One aspect of that is giving regularly via direct deposit. If you’d like help in thinking through your giving to Sojourn and beyond, the Time, Talents and Treasure document will provide some pointers.
You've probably worked it out,
we'd love you to
Sojourn Bible Church
Brisbane
Contact us
admin@sojourn.org.au
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