The Ugly Duckling Company

       This is it: our last day in Adelaide for the trip! Our time here flew by (sometimes literally, if you consider the winds rolling off of the ocean this week). Because we needed to prepare for Sydney, Paul, Sharon and Sarah spent the morning ironing out details for our final stop and continuing to tweak Resolve.  Who knew the standard 52-card deck could tell you so much about the Bible?        We changed gears to speak with Geoff, who works with Church of Christ's CareWorks as a community-builder in several settings. We told Geoff about Puzzling Questions, Table Talk and The Happiness Lab and, in return, he told us the story of the prodigal son using a standard 52-card deck. It was a productive meeting for all of us.         After lunch, we met with another set of Church of Christ leaders to get an even broader sense of Australian contemporary church context.  Mark (left) and Paul say goodbye ...

Paul discusses potential uses for Table Talk in ministry context with a group of Sydney area Church of Christ pastors.        Thanks to the invitation of our Church of Christ friend Mark Riessen, we spent the morning at Adelaide's Tabor College, a Christian college whose offered degrees include various ministry-related ones. Our first session involved a discussion with current Church of Christ ministers surrounding the challenges and joys of their ministry contexts and how evangelism operates both in and out of these contexts.        For the afternoon, Paul led another discussion on the role of evangelism in today's culture, this time with ministry students currently attending Tabor College. Both groups were sharp-minded and engaged as we worked together toward a new understanding of evangelism and evangelism resources.        We then used our afternoon to review new Resolve videos our producer sent over. Ea...

From left: Paul, Frank and Sharon take in St. Peter's Cathedral in Adelaide. Today is in the running for our busiest day yet in Australia. We caught a tram into the city for a morning meeting with St. Peter's cathedral Dean Frank Nelson and spent our time discussing the role cathedrals play in the Adelaide community.  Paul and Sharon share a laugh during a radio interview at LifeFM.  Our next stop was radio station LifeFM! Thanks to an interview with Lyn Arnolds, Sharon and Paul were able to share information about UDC and our hopes regarding Australia with a larger audience. We look forward to hearing the finished product! From left: Sharon, Paul and Andrew meet on a sunny day to discuss UDC resources. The day continued still with Church Development Facilitator at Baptist Churches of SA Andrew Turner and his insights on further connections within Australia's Baptist community. Finally, we were joined for dinner by Greg, Mark an...

       Our team split this morning to spread UDC across as much of Adelaide as we could. Sharon shared a sermon on dwelling at St. Oswald’s Anglican Church while Paul spoke on evangelism at St. John’s in Salisbury, a nearby community. Sarah and Paul were treated to the company (and later the coffee!) of assistant minister Ben, and the UDC three regrouped for a lunch and afternoon with Stephen Bloor, which featured a stormy seafront view, a lively discussion on the future of UDC Australia and, among other things, an educational introduction to the inner workings of the Australian parliamentary system. Bloor will be leading the Big Conversation in Salisbury. Ben (right) interviews Sharon before her talk at the All Nations service Sunday evening        In the evening, our party of four returned to St. John’s for Sharon’s second talk of the day. The evening service, titled All Nations, featured an intimate and relaxed service with a focus on mu...

       Today, Paul and Sharon returned to the Churches of Christ conference. The theme for the Churches of Christ conference was Living Hopefully. Paul was interviewed about the various resources we have created and then asked to take a session outlining how we see the world.

       For our first official day in Adelaide, we spent the day outside of Adelaide. Australia was kind enough to give Sharon permission to drive during our time here, and we had to take advantage of the chance to meet even more people!  Meeting members in Gladstone We drove through what a local described as South Australia’s serious farmland to a town called Gladstone. There, we met John Stead, bishop of the huge geographical district of Willochra (it’s approximately 90 percent of South Australia, to be exact). This diocese serves several rural communities in South Australia and heads up the coast from Gladstone in the general direction of the mammoth state that is Western Australia.  We returned to Adelaide in time for the opening of Churches of Christ annual conference. Paul and Sharon were interviewed as part of the general program of the evening, and all three spent the remainder of the evening making connections with local church leaders a...

       We were on the road again today, this time by bus. After a conversation with the Horsham Church of Christ leadership team, Simon saw us off at the bus station for our five hour trip through the golden countryside. Sharon and Sarah were also pleased to see their first wild kangaroo through the bus window as we crossed the border between the states of Victoria and South Australia. Tomorrow starts our first official day in Adelaide, and we’ll be busier still this week!  Sharon and Paul walk through the Glenelg neighbourhood.