Dr Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, joint recipients of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

I was deeply stirred by the lives of two of the people who were awarded the Nobel peace prize for 2018. Dr Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad received their awards for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Nadia Murad was captured by terrorists in her small Iraqi village in August 2014 and sold into sexual slavery; targeted because her family belonged to the minority Yazidi religion. At the age of 21, she watched her mother and 6 brothers being marched away by terrorists to be killed. In her …

Dear Jon Mark,
I have been thinking about our conversation regarding your desire to take your church to the next level and the matter of developing a leadership culture in your church. You are right in connecting these two issues, a fact that is usually overlooked, but is now more and more proving to be a matter of vital concern. I happen to agree with John Maxwell who said “that it all rises and falls on leadership.”

Some years ago Rick Warren studied a large number of successful churches from a variety of denominations and found one consistent characteristic that was common to them all; it was leadership. Sam Chand …

Rod and Sue (slightly pregnant) with Mr Sanders in 1983 on one of the occasions he                                                   visited our home in Melbourne.

My first appointment in full time ministry in 1980 was at Blackburn Baptist Church in Melbourne.  It was the largest Baptist Church in Australia and I was given charge over the children’s, youth and young adult ministry, quite a challenge.

Even at this stage of my life, I had begun to develop the philosophy, ‘to grow the ministry, focus on growing leaders’.  Consequently I searched for two key books on leadership and on making disciples that each leader would be required to study.  My two books were ‘The Master …