Here is a photo of the first time we gathered as a church on June 29, 2009. This small community had been part of LateChurch – a congregation of Mitchelton Presbyterian Church (northside of Brisbane). As Late Church grew, its pastor Derek Hanna, with his wife Jacqui, longed to see a church plant in the inner city of Brisbane. Through prayer and exploration around Brisbane, the decision to plant a night service in Kelvin Grove began to take shape.
About thirty of us came over from Late Church, tried a few locations around the area, and finally settled on a lecture theatre in QUT Kelvin Grove. Over time the church began to grow and morphed into two congregations in Kelvin Grove in 2016, under the leadership of our current pastor Sam McGeown.
In 2020 we moved into our current venue in F Block QUT and also moved our evening service to St Pauls in Spring Hill. We are two congregations in two locations seeking to love God and love others from the end of our toes to the ends of the earth. We want to see communities of faith emerge, grow, and multiply in all parts of our world and city, but especially in the corridor from Kelvin Grove to the river via Spring Hill, Fortitude Valley, New Farm and Newstead/Tenerife.
Get to know how this plays out in the lives of some Villagers
We gather together around God’s word on Sunday mornings and evenings, we eat and socialise together as much as we can, we play sport, cook and hike together, we sing together, we pray and open God’s word together in community groups. We are committed to community because we believe that ultimately through Christ we share the same spiritual blood. We may be from many different backgrounds but we are one family.
We believe that lots of people in our culture have lost their trust in the church. For many people, their view of the Christian faith has been shaped – often unhelpfully – by negative experiences or by what they pick up in the media or online. We can sometimes give the impression that we are only doing something because we want something from people. We talk about grace, the spontaneous, unmerited free gift of kindness and love of God, but often we don’t illustrate it to our neighbours. We can act like we are only doing what we do because we want something in return. We want to change that by being a people of grace. We want people to see the relevance of the gospel to their own lives and explore the possibility that the gospel can bring lasting and real change to every life. We want to share the good news and live lives of integrity, vulnerability and genuine honesty that cause people to ask us about the hope that we have in Christ.,
We want our lives transformed increasingly into the image of Christ. The more we grow in Christ the more truly human we become. We become the person God designed us to be. We believe that the Word of God is not only the seed of regeneration in a person’s life but also the means in which the Holy Spirit grows us. That’s why we are passionate about faithful preaching and teaching, regular Bible reading and prayer as individuals and with one another, discipleship, training, mentoring and equipping. We want to raise up and mature disciples who turn around and make disciples. Passing the gospel on from one generation to another.
These passionate commitments are only possible because we are passionately committed to seeing the church built up through prayer, giving, planning and organizing. We acknowledge that it is God who builds His church and we are reliant on Him, on His love, mercy, grace and power. He is the one who does the heavy lifting and so that is why we pray. He is the one who gave His only son for us, and so that is why we give sacrificially. He is the one who creates us and gives us gifts, and so that is why we serve wholeheartedly.