Like every other church in Melbourne, St Albans Croatian also faced difficulties with the new situation caused by the Covid19.
Although we managed to meet the spiritual needs of our church members everywhere and organized various workshops and seminars for them on a daily basis, for both the young and old, our mission board felt that we were not giving enough to the people around us.
The negative impact on mental health caused by this crisis was crying out to us from all sides. We began planning to run some health programs and had speakers lined up, but the new lockdown surprised us.
God impressed my wife and myself that we could still continue with our plans, not to put a stop to this new ministry, but rather than hosting it from our church, to use the internet, and so began our journey into the unknown.
What platform do we use? How do we set it up? How much money will we need for promotion? What is our ultimate goal? How do we put together a team? These were some of the challenges we faced.
All we knew was that we had a professional speaker, and everything else was unknown.
Now I see that God knew what He was doing and He was bringing something new every day; people willing to help… new and improved ideas… We felt strongly that this was not from us… it was from God. Especially since what has been achieved in no way resembles what we initally had in mind! God has shown us what He wants.
And that’s why I want to encourage you that even though sometimes you don’t have a clear plan but do have a fire in your heart to help people, take the first step, pray and allow God to guide you through that journey.
God somehow becomes even more real in those moments.
So let me share something about what we have done.
West Community Care is a Facebook page that promotes mental, physical and spiritual health as a key component for a human well-being. In each of these areas we are trying to share useful and educational posts to connect with our west Melbourne community, and to offer workshops.
For physical health we are offering free Pilates for women, exercise and plant-based diet programs with experts in this field. For mental health we have wacky posts but also offer a mental well-being workshop every Monday. So far, we’ve covered topics such as stress, anxiety, anger, fear. We have nice group of people who register through our page and have become very friendly with them. Even our workshop, initially planned as a four part series, has grown to six parts, because our guests wanted to spend more time together.
For spiritual areas we have also a Bible worker and pastors who are willing to study with and counsel people who are messaging us about their struggles in life, like drugs, alcohol and cigarette addiction, fear from future, depression, new moms without support and help, lonely elderly and so on.
We are planning to open a soup kitchen, promoting it through our page, in order for more people to be familiar with it and where they can find the help that they need.
We have been able to touch the lives of many people through West Community Care, and we thank God for His leadership and for using us to reach His people in the community.
Manuel Tikulin
St Albans was recently featured on the SPD program #WeRtheChurch and you can view it here