I quote from their official brochure...
This list is not exhaustive, but is a summary of the disciplines which have emerged in our life, and which have also been important in guaranteeing and developing the life that we have as a church.
Christ
The Grace of God
The Priesthood of All Believers
Speech
Sound Judgement
Law
Creedal Foundation
The Communion of Saints
Evangelising boldness
The Scriptures attest that Christ is the "First and the Last", the "Alpha and Omega", the "Amen". We receive Biblical testimony to the Deity of Christ. The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds attest the bliblical teaching of the person of Christ. We, His church, are part of the Communion of Saints which exists and is called in every generation. It is joined through the generations and is in heaven and on earth. The person of Christ defines everything for us and gives to us all that we need to know. He is the inexhaustible object of our study and affections. We love Him.
This means that the organisation of a church is different from all other clubs, societies, associations,, or whatever, in that the response to its laws, and its Head, is a response of the heart evoked by the love of God. The actions of the people in the church are a voluntary response to this grace. This means that we must wait for God to work in His people, and to refuse to be quarrelsome, complaining, or impatient.
Each person has a role and ministry to be used for the upbuilding of the church in truth and love. There are some things that God cannot do, and will not do, for a person, except through the service and grace of another believer.
The Bible speaks very clearly and strongly about speech as an instrument that can bless, or curse. We seek to practice a discipline that excludes gossip, or any comment which would bring down the dignity of another in the eyes of those with whom we are talking. We accept this as a high discipline which must be pursued. We also accept the discipline of not using the Name of God to strengthen or endorse what we say, even when we think we are speaking in harmony with His will and His Word; we will leave such judgements to be made by our hearers instead.
We will seek to practice the discipline of not jumping to conclusions and thus rejecting, pre-judging, or prejudice. This means that we will be critical of our own intuitions and hunches and will accept the labour of assessing evidence before we allow our minds to form definite conclusions about people, events, and happenings in the church. And given this discipline, we will seek also to think with mercy.
This we believe is to be exampled and to be patiently and purposefully worked into the lives of our people, through earnest prayer. Unexampled and prayerless declarations of law quickly produce a legalistic style. We value inter-dependability and seek to grow deeper in such blessings to each other.
We hold to unity in primaries and liberty in secondaries. Many schisms have occurred through the centuries in mixing these distinctions. The creeds disregard such things as baptisms, church governments, and style of church meetings, from primary doctrine. We will seek to make applications into our daily lives and culture from the primary doctrines of Scripture and respect the varying traditions expressed in our church, which show differences in understanding and interpretation of secondary matters.
This means that we deliberately reject distinctions based on worldly status, encouraging in our young people a resistance to being awed by those positions, presenting false values of of humanhood. The Communion of Saints, based in the call of Christ, is the high status of human worth.
By praying for each other and honouring Christ in our daily lives and personal contacts.
May I perhaps add a small thought at this point.
I would answer those who would say that we should always seperate ourselves from those who subscribe to heretical teachings, quite simply, by asking if they are familiar with the parable of the "wheat and the tares" - or "wheat and weeds" in modern-day language. A parable by Jesus Christ Himself, and set to music by that great hymnwriter who gave us "Amazing Grace" - John Newton. Here are some of the words from that hymn...
But soon the reaping time will come
Though in the outward church below
Both wheat and tares together grow.
Ere long will Jesus weed the crop
And pluck the tares in anger up.
And angels shout the harvest home
And angels shout the harvest home.
Are we not, each of us, slightly tainted with wrong thoughts, wrong behaviour... ?
Are we not, each of us, imperfect sinners, who are on the road, on the journey, that as the author of Hebrews so succinctly stated "(therefore) going on unto perfection"?
Unto implies we have not yet reached that goal. And Jesus cautioned us against being elite in thinking the tiny speck of dust in our own eye is less vile (in God's sight) than the beam in our erring brother's.
<big cheesy grin>
Perhaps that is saying to us that as long as we recognise the issues that others are stumbling over, we can encourage our brother or sister who does not yet see them, in order to avoid them? I believe that any fellowship that genuinely seeks Christ is part of the Body - that group of people who He will claim as His at His return :)
So, what, then, is a church?
A church is not a building, although they have one. A church is a group of people, and the word derives from the Greek "ekklesia" which can be loosely translated as "an assembly of called-out people" (my paraphrase).
"The Branches" rent what is a "log cabin" style public hall built for the Modbury West Scouts. Indeed it was still officially the Scout Hall when my friend Ann and I presented songs of worship in duet at "The Branches", in 1993, and again in 1994.
We both left where we were worshipping at that time, Ann shortly afterwards, to join "The Branches" and I a month or so later, to go to "Citywide Christian Assembly".
Several years later the other lady with whom Ann and I sang, Maureen, changed churches to attend "The Branches". While I had moved to the North East Christian and Missionary Alliance in the interim, I attended The Branches from time to time to maintain contact with both Maureen and Ann, and also with Ian Clarkson (under whose pastorate I had attended Tea Tree Gully some years before), and to maintain friendship (Body links) with others who had moved to the Branches when his time at Tea Tree Gully came to an end.
Ann went to be with the Lord in May 2004, after a lengthy and cruel (by the world's standards) fight with cancer. We have an almost complete recorded repertoire of her and Maureen and me singing highlights from Murray Wylie's oratorio The Jerusalem Passion set down on multi-track at a special recording session in mid 2001.
This is a project which needs to be completed. Her encouragement over the proposed formation of a group of singers at The Branches - which never came to fruition during her lifetime - was quite wonderful. We have a sort of memorial page here, and the trio's story can be found here.
Interestingly, it was singing that brought me back to The Branches. I had been sounded out by Ian who had felt God's hand leaning on him to get a choir to present the gospel in song in the wider community. How this all came about can be found on the choir's unofficial webpage.
I have a page on my own website showing where I worship, and I have felt some external impetus in the middle of 2007 to update that section - which led to the taking of a number of photographs which are linked below to thumbnail images... right click on the thumbnails and they will open in another tab (only if you are using a real web browser); it will be in another window if you are using Microsoft's notorious Internet Exploder.
Notorious? I use that word advisedly. Few computer applications are publicly warned against their use by the American FBI... go search in Google and you will find links attesting to the likelihood of your computer being compromised if you use MSIE. That's why Mozilla's Firefox has a substantial market share now.
The church - the people, not the building
These were all snapped early in January 2006, when Australians take off for time away with familes. Normally there are about 50 people on a Sunday morning.
The Jesus Files
The Jesus Files are a quite unique teaching concept developed by Associate Pastor Jamie Mattner for young (and small) people where they can get the feel of the New Testament stories and messages in the context of the actual time, with "visitors" from that period of time presenting what they experienced, whether it be what they saw, or what they felt, or what they were told by a contemporary. These are portrayed in a way that makes them palatable - nay, enjoyable! - to larger, older people too, and we have a link here to go to a page where this is presented in detail.
In the triple image montage above we see (on the left) an introduction by Jamie's wife, Julie, reading the scriptures opening the Jesus Files that day, followed by two visitors from 2000 years ago, Perez and Jimopoulos.
Perez is the "anchor" for them all. This character is a composite from research by Jamie, and is cast as "Perez, the Pita-bread Man", an itinerant baker from the other end of the Great Sea (Mediterranean) somewhere, who settled, like the Phoenicians, at the eastern end. Various other characters have appeared, for example, a couple of ladies (who never stop talking!) and even the now aged and retired centurion who oversaw Jesus' crucifixion. The cast is being continually added to...
Blokes' Brekkies
A solid breakfast in a creekside setting,
(at which the theme is mutual encouragement, in Christ).
Midweek gatherings - "The Shed", and elsewhere
Bible studies, Meeting for prayers, in a number of different places.
Choir
This had its own page which has now been absorbed into this Branches website at a page called choir.html. Because of Ian's vision for this singing group (which brought me occasionally to The Branches in late 2004 to help establish it), I then stayed through the Almighty making it perfectly obvious to even me that this was His will for me and for the group. We are proceding slowly with the taking of "raw talent" - without formal musical training - and encouraging their latent abilities to harmonise by ear.
This was just a handful of people, and while Ian's vision was for the wider community participation, the way it developed into a potential public outreach is interesting. The surpising thing is that the group was predominately male, which is extremely unusual for a "church choir". Most of the people involved had exposure to singing in public at two old-peoples' facilities around Christmas 2004, presenting real carols linked to the gospel story. The trio of Ann, Maureen, and I had developed these two carols venues over a number of years.
the last picture... from the left... Rose, me, Andrew, John, and Ian
Brief history
Ian Clarkson planted this fellowship back in about 1991 when his ten-year tenure at Tea Tree Gully Uniting Church came to an end. Ian is an evangelist who went from South Australia to Victoria to work with John Smith and his associates in the world-famous God Squad early in the 1970s, returning to a congregation in his home state when they called him.
Perhaps his 10-year "lapse" into congregational pastoring was just a God-appointed interlude for him to suss out what God really wanted him to do back in South Australia, having returned from Melbourne to Adelaide to take up the appointment to Tea Tree Gully.
This automatic leadership removal would ensure that "denominational thinking" would always be injected. Please pardon my disillusionment, but maybe their hope was that any minister and flock who managed to step outside denominationalism wouldn't last, because with an enforced change of oversight, the particular church would eventually return to the believe-what-you-like theological position with which the UCA has become synonymous over the years.
You may be interested in reading a page about the advance concerns (in the mid 1970s) of some of the people when they were faced with the formation of the Uniting church here, and what they should do about it when it became set in concrete.
While at Tea Tree Gully, Ian had led numerous meetings in unusual circumstances and locations (for a solid middle-class congregation) during that period, and he actually instituted the monthly fellowship at the Lifeplan retirement facility nearby the Modbury Hospital and Tea Tree Plaza - which was kept going by "The Gully" when he moved on.
Supported by his wife Rosemary - who worked full time in the education system - Ian was able to develop the church plant (perhaps using the format of the once a month scout-hall evening meeting where the now defunct Ardtornish Scouts met on Smart Road), and to evangelise (without the restrictions of needing to earn a living as well), to where it has become an autonomous assembly of the saints, that functions in the unique way of the Body ministering to itself.
This can be seen as New Testament Christianity functioning properly. And it was to this embryonic "Body" that my singing companion Ann felt so attracted to remain when she left Hope Valley in early 1994. God had other plans for me.
A nucleus of faithful families and individuals moved with Ian and Rosemary to found The Branches in late 1990. Most have stayed, but some have moved on, and many more have come since. There is still a turn-over, as is often the case when humans interface with humans. We are all fallible.
Praise God for the ability He gives to us, to recognise our own fallibility, and with help from each other, to do something about it, that will be of eternal value :)
Sermon, Bodybuilding and Jesus Files recordings
We've been working on the Jesus Files recording recently, and have just a few that were loud enough to hear. If you are a Jesus Files presenter, please consider using the extra microphone Rob has for this purpose, or speak a bit louder, or both <grin>
We have a download page where you can click on the appropriate file listed against the date in a table. You can find that download page here.
These files are also stored on the church's own website - which is now up and running.
Ian and Rosemary chose to buy and live in their own home rather than to use the Tea Tree Gully manse, and during their time there, they converted the big shed out the back into a large study and a larger meeting room where bible studies could be held. This has paid off for The Branches because instead of having no established base for secretarial and admin stuff, and mid-week gatherings, it was already set up.
You may like to listen to some of the preaching, and other material presented to the congregation, wherever possible on a weekly basis. These have been provided from the weekly service recordings, and where they were on cassette, they have first been digitised and placed here for your benefit, at Ian's request.
BECAUSE THE SITE IS NOT SET UP FOR "STREAMING".
RICHT CLICK ON THE FILE NAME, AND SAVE IT TO YOUR OWN DESKTOP
(EVEN IF YOU ARE ON A BROADBAND CONNECTION).
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