Written by Peter Blanch
Many of you will already know that our church is part of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC). It is great for us to be a part of this fellowship – influencing it and being influenced by it.
It is important to know that the FIEC is a fellowship of churches and pastors across Australia who are passionate about seeing Australia presented with the message of Jesus in our generation. It a fellowship of churches that we are a part of – who have the clarity to see that it is not loving to wait to the last minute or to leave it to someone else to take the gospel to the lost. This clarity gives ambition to those within the FIEC to use the few short years God gives them here on earth to making disciples. The fellowship understands that God is a saving God and his desire is that people might be saved. The fellowship acknowledges that God takes no pleasure in the death of a sinner and so neither should we. Therefore we want to live in these last days with clarity – urgently pursuing evangelism together.
There is a sense where the churches in the fellowship could just pursue these ends completely independently of each other in our own local area. But fellowshipping together helps keep the vision larger. On their own, a church might impact a few thousand people in one area – or a larger church might impact a whole region, but the work of the gospel is so much bigger than one region! We long to see the impact of the gospel reach all 23 million Australians and more in the future. On our own we will never fulfil the great commission and so as a fellowship of churches keeping the vision bigger is crucial – it helps to keep all church families within the FIEC from becoming parochial or small minded. When the vision is larger, the reality becomes clear – that it is foolish to try and do it all on our own when there are like-minded people willing to gather and spur each other on to do as much as we can together to reach the country and the world.
With all this in mind, I hope you can see that the intention of the FIEC fellowship is to be very active in the cause of the gospel. The FIEC does not exist simply to provide resources or a ministry platform or a formal tie for independent evangelical churches but rather it exists to be a means of grace to stir each member church and its leadership towards a continued and greater faithfulness in the Biblical gospel as well as to stir each other up in the pursuit of gospel growth – spiritual and numerical.
To productively work towards these goals, under God’s hand the FIEC is aiming to see 100 independent evangelical churches planted, and for those churches to be theologically grounded and growing churches across Australia by 2020. The vision is also that through those churches we would see a revitalisation of expository preaching in Christ centred, Bible based churches across the country. The aim of the FIEC is not to draw a crowd – but to see people deeply grounded in the Word of God and humbly captured by the gospel and the ministry of God’s Word.
In short, the FIEC exists to see all the churches within the fellowship better able to reach our nation with the saving news of Jesus. Our church family voluntarily decided together to apply to be a member church of the FIEC on 6th December 2007 and we have remained a member church since that time. Like our brother and sister churches in the FIEC, we have been caught by the vision to reach the country of Australia for Christ and to do that in the only way given to us by God – by bringing the word of Jesus to bear on people’s lives.
Because of all of this, as a church we support the FIEC with our time and energy (WWEC Staff benefit greatly from attending the annual conference each year and I play a part on the FIEC executive) and also financially. You can find the details of our financial giving in the 2015 Annual Report.
Please continue to pray for the FIEC churches that we have supported with encouragement, finances and prayer as they have been planted: Singleton Evangelical Church and Coast Evangelical church (in Forster).
Keep praying also not just for these 2 churches but for the growth of the gospel throughout the FIEC across Australia and out into the world.
If you would like to know more about the FIEC, visit the website: www.fiec.org.au
Peter Blanch
