Kingdom Advance: Kate Green

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

Welcome to the City Lights Church Podcast. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing today, we hope this message inspires you to follow Jesus. You can find out more about City Lights Church at city-lights.church.

SPEAKER_2 (0:23)

But right now, I want to invite to the stage someone who is our guest for the day. And I want to invite Josh from Mobile Mission Maintenance to come up on the stage. He's been a huge welcome. Yeah, grab that. Switch that one on.

So, Josh, tell us a little bit about what you do at Mobile Mission Maintenance. All right.

Josh (0:51)

Well, thanks firstly for the opportunity to share. So I am Josh. Me and my wife Trish, we serve with Mobile Mission Maintenance. Ends up if you've heard of that before coming, or before we came and served here.

Yeah, good.

SPEAKER_2 (1:09)

Quite a few.

Josh (1:09)

Yeah, that's good.

So Mobile Mission Maintenance, or MMM, is a ministry that offers volunteer trade labour to churches and other Christian ministries. So this is a service that's offered to churches, charities, missionaries, retired missionaries. Basically, anyone with facilities that are used to serve in sharing the gospel, we want to know about it and we want to serve them.

So we're a national ministry. We operate all across Australia. We also operate overseas. We've been around for 50 years, and we've served in over 30 countries over that time, helping ministries with their facilities and getting them set up for ministry. So me and my wife, as I said, we serve in Queensland, so we take care of all of the Queensland projects that come across our path. We put a team together for those projects, and then we go and serve these ministries that need it. So basically, most of our work falls into three categories.

We refresh ministries facilities, we equip them, and we encourage. So an example of refreshing a church, a lot of the applications that we have come in for churches that are getting old, they might have flaky paint, or they might have rotting timber, or you name it, buildings just get old. And MMM is able to put a team together, they're able to go out for a couple of weeks and serve these churches. A lot of work is done remotely. There's a lot of needs out in remote communities. It can be quite hard to get tradies, not only to do the work, but to do it at a reasonable cost as well. So MMM being able to come and help with a team of volunteers, offer that free labour, can really meet some big needs and be a huge encouragement to other churches. I don't have a fancy acronym for these three things, so you would just have to remember. So Refresh, Equip. So example of equipping a church for ministry. I can think of one example where a church had to relocate from a small dance studio to a much larger dance studio.

SPEAKER_2 (3:29)

Much larger dance studio.

Josh (3:32)

I might ring the bell.

SPEAKER_2 (3:33)

Can we see? We've actually got one of the photos, I think here was one of the rooms that we used for our dance. Yeah, so I made sure the construction there, the storage, and not only did they do it practically, but they did it beautifully to really enhance this space that we're in as well.

Josh (3:51)

Yeah. Yeah. And so that's a big heart. We honestly love equipping church facilities for ministry. That's at the heart of what we do is we want to see the gospel spread in the communities.

And so we're able to help, just get some things set up. Like in your example, you needed some things set up before you could operate freely. And so we were able to put a team together again and help set up some adequate facilities for that ministry. Last thing is sometimes a project is just a source of encouragement.

Couple of examples of this. Just recently, we were able to serve a missionary couple. They're in full time missions for power to change. They just recently moved overseas from New Zealand and bought a house, but the en suite was in pretty bad nick.

So we were able to go in and just demolish the old one, renovate a new one.

It's nearly finished. But that's one example where we're just able to encourage them. They're able to see that they're seen, their needs are noticed. Another example is a widowed missionary lady. She lost her husband. They used to work for Open Doors. She's in her 80s now. She had a rusted out gutter out the front of her place. The water was coming in, rotting her front door. We were able to just do a couple of repairs. Not a massive job for us, but the impact that it had on her, just being able to serve her in that way. It was just being able to encourage them and see that it's neat. So that's so good.