| Inspire Church | |
|---|---|
 Service in 2011 | |
 | |
| Country | Australia |
| Associations | Australian Christian Churches |
| Weekly attendance | online |
| Website | inspirechurch |
| History | |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Clergy | |
| Senior pastor(s) | N/A |
 | |
Inspire Church, founded as Liverpool Christian Life Centre, is a Pentecostal Christian church affiliated with Australian Christian Churches, the Assemblies of God in Australia. It is located in Hoxton Park, in the City of Liverpool, in the Greater Western Sydney region, Australia.
The church was founded in 1982, with Pastors John and Carol McMartin as Liverpool Christian Life Centre (one of several Christian Life Centres). [1] [2]
In 2007, the attendance was 4,500 people. [3]
On 31 August 2008 Liverpool Christian Life Centre changed its name to Inspire Church.[ citation needed ] The church was registered as Inspire Church in January 2010. [4]
In 2012, the attendance was 5,000 people, making Inspire Church one of the largest ACC Churches in Australia at the time. [5]
In late 2020, John McMartin stepped aside from his role after being charged with sexual assault. His son, Brendan McMartin, is the pastor of the church's Wagga Wagga campus with his wife Melissa. [6]
The church is located in Hoxton Park, in the City of Liverpool, in the Greater Western Sydney region, Australia. The main building consists of an auditorium which can seat approximately 1,000 people. The senior pastors, chairperson and joint CEOs are Brendan and Melissa McMartin, [7] who were appointed after the NSW Police charged Senior Pastor John McMartin with Assault with an Act of Indecency in November 2020. [8] [9]
It is linked to other churches of the same name in Ingleburn, and Wollongong, [10] and is a member of Australian Christian Churches. [11]
Inspire College, (formerly Sydney Training Institute) is an initiative of Inspire Church, located 40 minutes from Sydney CBD. [12] The aim of the institute is to equip leaders for service in the church through an intern program. [13] [14] The college is registered with VETAB and its courses are nationally accredited. The colleges longstanding principal is Adam Boyse. [15] [16]
On 26 November 2020, police from the Liverpool Area Command of the NSW Police arrested former pastor John McMartin, and charged him with indecent assault. [17] It was alleged that McMartin sexually assaulted a then 19-year old parishioner at his Pleasure Point home in January 2013. McMartin appeared before Liverpool Local Court on 16 December. [18] McMartin faced court again on 27 January 2021 and the case was rescheduled for October 2021. He has pleaded "Not Guilty". [19] In 2014, McMartin had given a deposition [20] and testimony to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse [21] in his role as the NSW State President of the Australian Christian Churches, in relation to the denomination's responses to the paedophilia of ministers. [22]
The Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) was founded on 22 June 1977, when most congregations of the Methodist Church of Australasia, about two-thirds of the Presbyterian Church of Australia and almost all the churches of the Congregational Union of Australia united under the Basis of Union. According to the church, it had 243,000 members in 2018. In the 2016 census, 870,183 Australians identified with the church, but that figure fell to 673,260 in the 2021 census. In the 2011 census, that figure was 1,065,796. The UCA is Australia's third-largest Christian denomination, behind the Catholic and the Anglican Churches. There are around 2,000 UCA congregations, and 2001 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) research indicated that average weekly attendance was about 10 per cent of census figures. The UCA is one of Australia's largest non-government providers of community and health services. Its service network consists of over 400 agencies, institutions, and parish missions, with its areas of service including aged care, hospitals, children, youth and family, disability, employment, emergency relief, drug and alcohol abuse, youth homelessness and suicide. Affiliated agencies include UCA's community and health-service provider network, affiliated schools, the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, Frontier Services and UnitingWorld.
Craig Dougall McLachlan is an Australian actor, musician, singer and composer. He has been involved in film, television, the music industry and music theatre for over 30 years. He is best known for appearing in the soap operas Neighbours and Home and Away and the BBC One spy drama Bugs. He has portrayed the title character in The Doctor Blake Mysteries, for which he was nominated for the Logie Award for Most Popular Actor; he has previously won the award in this category three times.
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Tabor College is an Australian Christian tertiary college offering a range of liberal arts courses from certificate to post-graduate studies in the areas of counselling, education, ministry, performing arts, mission, youth studies and humanities. The college is based in Adelaide, South Australia with a campus in Perth, Western Australia. The Adelaide campus, formerly including the national headquarters, is housed in heritage listed buildings in Millswood, which were formerly the Goodwood Orphanage and more recently an education centre. The Tabor Institute of Music (TIM) established in 2022 provides short courses, professional development and specialist music facilities.
William Francis "Frank" Houston was a Pentecostal Christian pastor in the Assemblies of God in New Zealand and Australia. Frank Houston founded Sydney Christian Life Centre, which would eventually come under the leadership of his son Pastor Brian Houston before merging into Hillsong Church. In the last years of his life, Frank Houston’s conduct of child sexual abuse was exposed.
Gareth James Ward is an Australian politician who was the New South Wales Minister for Families, Communities and Disability Services in the second Berejiklian ministry from 2019 to 2021. Ward is a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly and has represented the seat of Kiama since 2011. He was suspended from NSW parliament in March 2022 until the end of that term in March 2023, after being charged with sexual intercourse without consent, and indecent assault.
Hoxton Park is a suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Hoxton Park is located 38 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the City of Liverpool and is part of the Greater Western Sydney region.
William Kamm, also known as "The Little Pebble", is the founder and leader of a religious group in Australia called the "Order of St Charbel" named after the Maronite saint Charbel Makhlouf. The Order of St Charbel is considered as a Christian sect and a fringe religious grouping. His religious order claims to be part of the Roman Catholic Church, but the Maronite Church and the Holy See do not regard the group as being part of Roman Catholicism. He was released from prison after serving 9 years of a 10-year prison sentence/term for the rape and assault of a teenager.
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Hillsong Church, commonly known as Hillsong, is a charismatic Christian megachurch and a Christian association of churches based in Australia. The original church was established in Baulkham Hills, New South Wales, as Hills Christian Life Centre by Brian Houston and his wife, Bobbie Houston, in 1983. Hillsong was a member of the Australian Christian Churches – the Australian branch of the US-based Assemblies of God – until 2018, when it separated to form a new denomination. The church is known for its contemporary worship music, with groups such as Hillsong Worship, Hillsong United and Hillsong Young & Free with many musical credits and hits and a series of scandals and criticisms.
Christian Life Centre is or was a name given to a number of Pentecostal churches in Australia, many of them affiliated with the Australian Christian Churches network. Hills Christian Life Centre, which has since changed its name to Hillsong Church, was one of these, and spawned other churches in Australia and around the globe.
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Roberta Lee Houston, better known as Bobbie Houston, is a New Zealand-born Australian of Tongan descent and a Pentecostal pastor in the Australian Christian Churches. Houston and her husband, Brian were the Senior Pastors of the Hillsong Church in Baulkham Hills, Sydney, Australia prior to the latter's departure in 2022.
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