What’s happening at Hills Baptist Church
The last few years have been a season of constant change and growth in our church which has been both exciting and challenging at the same time. In November 2015 we planted a new congregation that began meeting in the Littlehampton Primary School gym. The group of 70 who pioneered this new community have seen God bless and grow this church to be a congregation now of more than 400 people, just over 3 years later. They recently moved to a larger facility at the Hills Christian Community School in Verdun. In 2018 we changed our name from Aldgate Baptist Church to Hills Baptist Church to represent our current model as one church in two locations.
One of our main ministries as a church is to care for and disciple the children, youth and young adults in our church. We have approximately 200 children in our children’s ministry and run youth groups at both Aldgate and Verdun. Our Sunday night service at Aldgate includes more than 150 young adults. We see this therefore as a huge responsibility that God has entrusted to us and we are blessed to have large teams of leaders serving our young people.
Last year we launched Alpha in the Hills as a key mission activity and over the past few years we have run ‘Hope In The Neighbourhood’ seminars as a way of engaging with and blessing people in our local community. These seminars have addressed issues such as parenting, mental health, and disability. For our young adults, serving in the Green Team as part of the Encounter Schoolies Festival is a highlight of each year and many young adults have also explored oversees mission through short and medium term cross-cultural mission experiences.
Our main challenge presently relates to buildings and facilities for both our Aldgate and Verdun based congregations. We have a vision to see our Verdun congregation established in its own facility and are also planning to improve the facilities at Aldgate that are limited in many ways. We have recently begun exploring with Mount Barker Baptist a proposal to merge our Verdun congregation with Mount Barker Baptist Church, and to unite both in mission and in building a new church and community facility in Mount Barker, in partnership with the proposed Kings Baptist Grammar School – Mount Barker. This is a major decision to wrestle with, especially for a young congregation with many new people in it. We would therefore greatly value the prayers of our wider Baptist family. Our great desire is that we would be a light to the Hills region, and that all we are and all we do would be for the glory of God and the extension of his Kingdom.
