Steve and Bec Deal were three years into working as Worship Pastors at a 30,000-member church in California when God started to stir in their hearts to come home to Australia and plant a church. They connected with Bec’s brother, Benj Gould, who had just planted Greenhouse Church in Long Jetty on the Central Coast. Not wanting to step on his toes, Steve and Bec were encouraged that Benj had been feeling the call for Greenhouse to plant another church and would be willing to send them.
Steve and Bec moved back to the Central Coast in 2023. Originally their plan had been to pant in Terrigal, but God kept drawing them back to Ettalong and when they walked past the old uniting church building with a “For Lease” sign on the front, Steve and Bec knew that was where God was calling them to plant.
In September 2024 they started throwing weekly dinner parties every Friday night in the church hall. “We were starting from scratch,” explains Steve, “so we just made it all just about building relationships.”
They would have 10-20 people at each dinner party, which grew into officially launch Bloom Co in September 2024. The word ‘Bloom’ represents their desire to see people come into the full beauty of the spotless Bride of Christ, a beauty only attainable by being rooted in God’s love. The “Co” signifies the immersive, authentic community they are seeking to build.
Bec and Steve continue to focus on building relational trust with people within and beyond the church. “Our heart is to see people come back to the heart of God,” explains Steve, “people are coming who haven’t been in church 3, 5, 7 or 20 years. We can see a gathering of people who’ve lost their love for the Body or the Bride. God is repairing this part of the Body.”
The main driver behind Bloom Co is Matthew 22:37, which call us to love God “with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds.” “We want people to come, gather, pour out love upon the Lord,” explains Steve, “from this love for God, our love for one another and our broader community naturally flows”.
Worship is the main event for us,” explains Bec, “we’re about loving God first. Bloom Co’s Sunday services are crafted with deep worship, which flows into communion, into preaching the Word, back into worship, and then into informal fellowship.”
Bloom Co prioritises not weighing people down. Leadership is unforced, and they don’t put pressure on people to step into new roles. “Instead, we invite people into something that’s already an extension of who they are,” explains Bec. “We want people to see us as focused on building God in them, not on building our church.”
For example, Bloom Co has a thriving hospitality team, led by Karen. Karen had a tumultuous relationship with church, having fled a controlling marriage and her daughter being killed in a hit-and-run. She hadn’t been to church for a while but felt prompted to come to Bloom Co. Now Karen is full of joy and life and testifies to 2025 being her “year of jubilee”.
James, another member of the core team at Bloom Co, has a dramatic salvation story, after spending years of his life in the grips of drugs and abuse. He joined Bloom Co when he found out through a mutual friend that Steve and Bec were planting a church in Ettalong. Now, he walks the streets of Ettalong at 3am each morning, praying for the community. James prays for every member of the church by name, and he is at the front door welcoming people to church every Sunday.
In other churches we’ve been in, the motto has been: ‘if it’s not happening, then we’ll make it happen,’ but at Bloom Co we’re not striving to do anything spectacular,” explains Bec, “we’re just coming in, worshiping God, having communion, gathering around the Word and baptising people. We’re loving it. We love going to church. We love our community.”
Eight months in, ninety people call Bloom Co home, and five people have been baptised. Bec and Steve are thinking about how to multiply their small groups as Bloom Co continues to grow. And continuing in the tradition of church planting on the central Coast, Bloom Co is already thinking about how they may be able to send their own church planters in the near future.
