Kingdom Advance: Tim & Zoe Sefton Interview

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.

Andrew Scott (0:22)

Awesome, thank you so much, Steph. Just also want to let you know, we do have a parents area that's available if you have young kids. It's just out and to my left, down the corridor there, we've got live stream in a toddler play area as well. Well, good morning again. We are continuing a series which we are calling Kingdom Advance, Kingdom Advance. And Kingdom Advance is about lifting our vision and partnering with God to be remarkably generous with our financial resources and our time in order to share the message of Jesus.

One of the key scriptures and one of my hope and our hope for you as a church is that together, we would continue to capture the heart of Jesus for our city, the people of our city, and also for the people of the nations of the world. Who thinks that's a wonderful pursuit?

Here's what we know from Matthew chapter 9 And here's what Jesus says. Jesus traveled through all the towns and villages of that area, teaching in the synagogues and announcing the good news about the kingdom. And he healed every kind of disease and illness. And when he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were confused and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. And he said to his disciples, the harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest and ask him to send more workers in to his fields. This is the heart of God for us and that he invites us to share. So as part of Kingdom Advance, we're focusing on four key areas and they're coming up here on the screen. These key areas are church planting, Southeast Asia with a focus on Thailand and Myanmar, but there are other parts of Southeast Asia. Who enjoyed hearing from Kate, those that were here? What an inspirational story about the ministry that she's leading on the Thai Myanmar border. This is an incredibly volatile place in the world with the civil war. If you don't know, they also have a lot of modern day slavery with what they call scam camps where they're actually kidnapping people and forcing them to work as scammers, as slaves. This is a terrible thing to be happening at the time. So you can actually see from the Thai border, you can see these fortified cities that are run by the Chinese mafia that are actually enslaving people, making them work 16 hours a day to scam. Apparently, it's a $75 billion industry. It's one of the fastest growing illegal industries in the world. Kate is part of that as well as helping many refugees who are fleeing from the Civil War.

We also have a bunch of things around local mission and community and next gen with kids, youth and young adults. Our team has created this brilliant online magazine. You may have received an email with it, with a link to it, but it's coming up here. And there's also a QR code as well. The Kingdom Advance e-magazine. So if you want to take a scan of that or look at your email, if we don't have your email, you can give that to us at Next Steps. And today we are focusing on church planting. Here's a good question. Why plant churches? Well, new churches best reach the un-church, people who haven't encountered Jesus and also revitalise people who have maybe had an encounter in the past, but have stopped going to church and being involved in local church community. New churches reach new people groups and new generations. New churches have new ideas to reach more people and new churches raise new leaders. And that's definitely been our experience as a church plant.

We've just had Advance 2026, and I want to wind back the clock a little bit to Advance 2024 This was Advance 2024

This was us. And at Advance 2024, I think we had drums for the first time. We had a very young drummer.

We believe in the next generation, very skillful. You should see how far she's come.

SPEAKER_3 (5:20)

That's little L.

Andrew Scott (5:22)

And at Advance 2024, we shared our 10-year vision. Some of you were there for that. And our 10-year vision was audacious. Our 10-year vision included things that we had no mechanism of achieving with our current resources. And that's how vision works. Vision is what, not how. Vision are things that God has placed on our heart. Do you know if you don't have a vision that's bigger than yourself, why do you need God anyway? But actually the fact that you partner with God in vision means that you have to rely on Him and you have to rely on His provision.