At The Gathering in May, we welcomed Calderwood Valley Baptist into affiliation into the Baptist Association of NSW & ACT.
Since 2012, church planting momentum has been growing in the Illawarra and South Coast region. Wollongong Baptist felt they had the capacity, resources and support of the South Coast regional network to send a church plant. So in 2017 they began thinking seriously about their next steps. With a pause over COVID, in 2022 they started interviewing people to lead the church plant. But they weren’t finding someone who was quite the right fit.
The eldership suggested that one of the three fulltime pastors at Wollongong should consider the role. Rod Bayley was Senior Pastor at Wollongong Baptist at the time, and had been in ministry for 23 years and at Wollongong Baptist for 18 years.
“I felt convicted about it,” reflects Rod, “I’d been driving this process for seven years and was the most passionate about it. My wife and I were up for a new chapter, and I felt that we could take this on and hand over Wollongong to one of the other pastors.”
They spent six months handing over the leadership of Wollongong Baptist to the other members of the team and building a launch team for the new church. They had chosen to plant a church in the booming growth corridor about 20-25 minutes southwest of Wollongong. In August 2024 Calderwood Valley Baptist Church launched with a team of 60, consisting of 35 adults and 25 kids.
They meet the in library of the local Christian School, which is very casual with lots of room and play areas. And they’ve been getting to know their local community. Three men from the church have been door knocking the suburb, letting people know that there’s a church that meets in the local school, and offering free Bibles and a chat. At one house it was hard to get to the front door, with a basketball hoop fallen across the path, so they nearly didn’t knock. And the lady who answered nearly didn’t answer, because, with a husband that works as a cop and as an ex-cop herself, she “never answers the door”.
But Jane* did answer the door, and she said that she had two sons, aged 8 and 6, that went to the school that the church was meeting in. Jane explained that her sons had been coming home with all these questions about Jesus and the Bible. She said that they didn’t need a Bible, because her older son had been asking for a Bible, so they’d just gone out to buy him one. But he didn’t know how to navigate it, and it wasn’t very kid friendly. So, the visitors offered to come back with a kid’s Bible for them.
When they returned with the kid’s Bible, Jane said that her son had been hassling them to go to the church that meets in the school. Taking the fact that the men had returned with the Bible as a sign that they should come to the church, Jane took them up on their invitation to church.
“They came to a couple of Sunday services then signed up for our evangelistic course,” remembers Rod, “they came to all four weeks of the course, and at the end of the final session, Jane* wanted to make the decision to follow Jesus, but her husband was less sure. I suggested they go away and think about it together. Three days later, she emailed me to say that they both wanted to become Christians and wanted to pray the prayer after church the next week.”
On Easter Sunday Rod baptised Jane, her husband and their oldest son in Lake Illawarra. And now the family is passionate about sharing their faith. “They have contact with lots of non-Christians and are passionate about sharing what they’ve heard,” says Rod, “through them more locals are hearing about our church.”
As a new suburb, Calderwood Valley has been designed for young families and many of the people that live there commute to Wollongong or Sydney for work. Monday to Friday it can be hard to catch people, but the one group that is around is young mums and their kids.
“We knew from day one that we needed a kids church and things to reach young families,” explains Rod, “there’s a tiny square of community space between a café and the sales office that we use for Mainly Music on Tuesday mornings. We’ve had 40 non-Christian families come through Mainly Music. It’s a great way to connect with young families. We’ve even had staff from the sales office come over and see what we’re doing and highlight the Mainly Music group as an example of community experiences to prospective buyers.”
Calderwood Valley Baptist will be two years old in August and has already doubled in size. “In a church plant you get to see God’s hand at work up close in a way that you don’t always see at established churches,” reflects Rod.
Going forward, the team hopes to have more and more connection and roots in the community and is hoping to get some land in the next lot of land releases. And the story doesn’t stop there. “When Wollongong was first planting this church, we were thinking this would be the first of several,” explains Rod, who is also the Church Planting and Multiplication Representative for the region, “we’ve made a commitment to plant another church, and the aspiration timeline for that is 2030.”
Join us in praying for Calderwood Valley Baptist and the other church plants in our movement, as they seek to reach new communities with the Gospel.
