The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele

The loneliest person in church may be the one standing at the pulpit.
Pastors spend their lives surrounded by people, but ministry can make real friendship strangely difficult.
Confidentiality, responsibility, expectations, perceived favouritism and the pressure to “have answers but not needs” can leave church leaders profoundly alone.
Sheridan Voysey says pastors don’t just need supervision, systems or resilience strategies. They need real friends: people they can talk to, depend on, grow with and enjoy. People who know the weight they are carrying. People they can call at 2am when everything has gone wrong.
Sheridan helps us think pastorally and practically about the lonely pastor, the friendship Jesus modelled and how churches can give leaders permission to be human. 

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The Reach Australia movement has matured into something broader: from a corrective voice into one of the most significant culture-shaping forces in Australian evangelicalism.
Reach Australia has often been heard as a corrective: a push for clearer pathways, better systems, output thinking and more intentional leadership in local churches.
Richard Coekin says that, as an outsider, last week’s conference felt less like the corrective it may have seemed in the past and more like a mature, holistic vision for church leadership: with preaching, spiritual transformation, gospel culture, prayerful dependence and pastoral warmth much more clearly front and centre, while still committed to principled pragmatism and organising churches to reach the lost.
Richard Coekin, former senior pastor of Dundonald Church in London and now leader of Reach UK, reflects on his fortnight at both the Reach UK conference in London and the Reach Australia conference, attended by 1450 leaders on the NSW Central Coast.
We discuss the maturing of Reach Australia and what UK evangelical churches might learn from Australia at this moment.
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Richard Leadbeater is the senior pastor of the influential Dundonald Church in London. He came to Australia for the Reach Australia Conference — 1450 pastors and leaders from across Australia, the UK, the US, South Africa and New Zealand — and left deeply moved.
Richard says he found himself in tears four times during the week. 
In a The Pastor’s Heart Friday special, Dominic Steele presses into Richard’s pastor’s heart, exploring each of those moments. 
We also talk about the joy and privileges of ministry — and why Richard is concerned that we can talk so much about how hard ministry is that we forget to commend the deep joy of being spent in the service of Christ.
#ReachAustralia
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We preach Christ’s victory as pastors. But we battle discouragement, criticism, exhaustion, disappointment and sin.
What does the victory of Christ actually mean for pastors whose ministries feel painfully ordinary? What does it mean for leaders carrying the slow weight of imperfect churches, spiritual warfare, unanswered prayers and years of costly ministry?
We speak with Phil Colgan and Adam Ch’ng how suffering shapes faithful ministry, and why Christ’s victory does not remove weakness — but gives hope, endurance and courage.
We explore sanctification, spiritual battle, pastoral perseverance and the future glory.
Phil Colgan is senior minister of St George North Anglican on the Central Coast; Adam Ch’ng is senior minister of Cross and Crown Melbourne. 
They are speaking to around 1300 pastors and leaders at the Reach Australia National Conference on the Central Coast of New South Wales.
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Church music is one of the most formative and contested parts of local church life.
People join churches because of music. People leave churches because of music. But music is not a filler between the sermon and the prayers. The songs we sing put theology into people’s mouths and memories.
So how should we choose the songs we sing in church?
Mal York, the dean of students at Sydney’s Moore Theological College, joins us to talk about principles and pragmatics in choosing songs for church.
We discuss theological depth, singability, musical excellence, doctrinal drift, performance culture and what to do with songs from movements like Hillsong, Bethel and Elevation.
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