CHAPTER 31

Building a church at Melba

By 1985 our congregation at Melba had grown considerably. Several members began to express their wish for a church building. Our sister congregation in Central Belconnen were in the process of building at Kippax. There were pros and cons on the matter of having a church building. I personally favoured no church building, as the arrangements with the Melba Primary School were quite adequate, using the large hall for the services on Sundays, and several class rooms for sunday school. Our Parish Centre at Chinner Crescent was used for weekday activities, which until then was sufficient. However, I must admit that for some activities we were running out of space fairly rapidly.

By not having a church building, the congregation was spared an enormous financial burden, not only of servicing an initial capital loan, but also maintenance. Overall I thought it was good stewardship to share the school building, which was not being used on Sundays. But the probuilding voices became louder and more numerous. Over the years the rent for the school had been increased quite considerably, and after our congregation had been locked out a couple of times, as the caretaker hadn't come to open the building, and we had to have our services in the car park, I became more inclined towards a building. I said, however, in our quarterly magazine LINK, in Winter 1986:

"É that we could not simply assess the situation according to commercial values, viabilities and funding. We needed to measure what we intended doing according to the task that God had given to the Melba congregation and its need to serve the community. What will ultimately determine the size, shape and location of the building is not the budget, but how much faith we have in God to provide the needs of His work in our area É Do we look upon this as our task given to us by God, or is it simply a matter of 'it would be nice to own our own building'? What is God actually asking us to do here at Melba? É If God wants us to go ahead with it, then let us walk in faith, together with God."

When the decision was taken to build at the beginning of 1987, I heard from my Indonesian friends in Sydney, that their congregation was asked

458