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Candid conversations for the church. Host is Ardin Beech of Windsor District Baptist Church, Sydney, Australia. Co-hosted by Jonathan Hoffman.
Well, here I am back again this week at Windsor. My name is Jonathan Hoffman, and I'm actually sitting in the driver's seat because I'm flying solo at the moment. Arden Beach will be joining us soon enough, but we're very excited this week to have on the show This Week At Windsor a very special guest, Sue Tompsett. So let's get straight into it. Well, I am so excited to welcome onto our podcast This Week At Windsor, Sue Tompsett.
Jonathan:Welcome, Sue.
Sue:Hello. The cheese. I love it.
Jonathan:I'm just playing with buttons. Arndt's not here, so I can do that. Well, welcome. So so great to have you here. I've kind of you're one of those people in my life I've like known about for some time, and then I finally got to meet you.
Jonathan:I've been in Australia fifteen years. I first heard about you when I was living in Burke through a mutual connection. Yeah. Mutual friend. And to think that here I am, I don't know, thirteen years later, and we're sitting down having this conversation is is pretty awesome.
Jonathan:Tell us a bit about who you are, where you're at in life, and, yeah, where do you live? Where do go to church?
Sue:Well, my name's Sue. I live in Cherrybrook, which is in the Hills District. I go to a little church called Community Life Church, which is a Baptist church in Cherrybrook. We meet in the high school there, and I my family have been going there for twenty six years or something. So quite a long time.
Sue:Lot of history there. My husband has just retired. So he's retired. I'm still sort of very involved in ministry, but loving that we can just take off and go on holidays when it comes up. So that's been a really good thing.
Sue:So I'm sort of leaning into that phase of my life, which is very nice. But, yeah, I mean, I'm a church girl at heart. I love the local church. I believe that it is God's plan a, and there is no plan b. So I invest I'm very happy to invest my time there.
Jonathan:Tell us about your entrance into the church. You said you intimated you kinda grew up there, but when did faith Mhmm. Become real for you? When did Jesus become personal to you?
Sue:Now I can say this. I feel very blessed that I grew up in a Christian family, in a Christian home. My parents were very active in the church that we grew up in. And so we sort of, as a consequence of that, I guess, just sort of fell into faith and fell into service. I first came to know Jesus probably as a seven or eight year old, but then I guess I had my first encounter with him when I was probably about 20, and I perhaps encountered the holy spirit then.
Sue:And I've for many, many years, I always felt that I I felt a little bit ripped off because I didn't feel like I had a wonderful testimony story.
Jonathan:Okay.
Sue:And I guess it wasn't until my own kids grew up and I watched them come into their faith and that sort of thing that I realized what a blessing it was, the story that I did have. And my story is significant even though it's not one of those, you know, about face type testimony. So I feel very differently now. I'm very blessed.
Jonathan:What was that like encountering the holy spirit? What do you what do you mean by that, and how would you describe that to somebody who
Sue:it was it was a still small voice, and he said to me, I am you. I actually think I was on a youth camp, but I just remember him saying to me in this situation, I must have been praying, and he said, I am in you. And I went, what? Don't you mean you are with me, God? And he said, no.
Sue:I am in you. And then from that moment, I started to explore what that meant, and that led me to the holy spirit. So, yeah, so that's when my, I guess, my relationship with the Trinity Mhmm. Started to blossom.
Jonathan:It's really encouraging to hear somebody say that they kinda came to appreciate that upbringing. I think a lot of times when you hear people share their stories, we get wowed, and sometimes we're like, oh, I don't feel wow about Yeah. My about my journey with the Lord. But it is it is amazing how you look back. I know for me, my parents dragged me to church.
Jonathan:We went religiously every Sunday and listened to the listened to the preacher, listened to a lot of boring well, for me, they were really boring sermons. But, yeah, once I surrendered my heart to the Lord and then encountered the the Holy Spirit, it was amazing what changed and how all that backfilling that had been done earlier. It was like someone had been stuck in the cupboard, but the door was locked. And then when the spirit came in, it's like, let's unlock the cupboard. And Yeah.
Jonathan:Wow. All these things start coming back. So it's so it's good to hear another person kind of, yeah, reiterate that.
Sue:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
Jonathan:Now we knew each other through the context of a mutual friend, Ashley Hughes, was Ashley Frost, which is a context of worship. And I I know that's something that you are passionate about, specifically musical worship. Tell us about your journey into that side of ministry and what that means for you.
Sue:I've always loved to sing. I actually grew up in the Salvation Army. So singing is one of those things in the salvos that you do a lot of. But, I honestly couldn't tell you when that shifted from just singing to worship for me. I can't I can't tell you when that was, but it there was a shift in me.
Sue:And God started to grow in me this desire to communicate with him through the songs that became a just an incredible blessing to me and a and a way of just speaking to him and communicating with him through worship. And then I started to explore it. And I guess when we sort of moved from the salvos into the Baptist church, I was given a platform to do this more. And so it was just like, god just, bam, filled me with all of this desire to find out more, this just hunger for what worship really was. And then in that context, leading the worship ministry in that church all those years ago, the next question was for me, how do I then impart this or give this to a congregation?
Sue:How do I put these songs into their mouths so that it's not just a song, it's actually a heartfelt expression of their faith or a prayer or whatever, you know, their worship? So that became a journey for me too. And, you know, for our dear friend Ash was on that journey with me. You know, we've probably journeyed a lot of that in those earlier days together. I think for me, though, I must say, corporate worship is one of the most beautiful expressions of worship for me.
Sue:I love listening to the church sing. You know, I love it for on those days when I'm not leading and I'm standing in the congregation, I love to stand there and just listen and, you know, hear the voices around me singing out their own prayers to God. I love that. If I love that, I think, gosh, how much more must God love that when we do it, when we worship him in that way? So, yeah, I I love that corporate sound of worship.
Jonathan:I love that perspective of, you know, what might this be like for Lord. But what would you say to someone who maybe is a bit cynical or a little bit skeptical who says it's music. You know, what's the difference between if I go to, you know, my favorite pop star or or rock concert and, know, they get the lighting right and they get the music right. And, you know, I feel moved in that. Isn't that what's happening for you Christians?
Jonathan:Isn't it the same thing? What would you say to somebody who might equate what goes on in a in a Christian worship service with just sort of another expression of people who enjoy music.
Sue:Music does do something to us emotionally regardless of what type of music it is. You know? Music can conjure up memories, good and bad. It can, yeah, make you feel emotional about something. All music can do that, and you add God into that mix, into that equation, and it's incredibly powerful.
Sue:You know? Yeah. I guess there are always people that are gonna say, oh, it's no different, or you're trying to just create something that's the main the the world has. You know? But, you know, I remember Larry Norman many years singing, why should the devil have all the good music?
Sue:And and I've gotta say, I think he was a little bit before my time, but I do remember that song. And and I always think that. Why shouldn't we, in our church context or in our faith context, be singing songs to God? You know, I think for many people, and I include myself in this, one thing that I think over the journey of my life, I have found difficult perhaps is to speak out prayer. I don't necessarily now, but many times, I've gone to God and gone, I just do not know what to say right now.
Sue:I don't know how to pray for this or what I need to say to you. I I don't know. And invariably, there will be a song that will sing a lyric that the holy spirit will use to touch my heart and open it up afresh to God. You know, prayer and worship are hand in hand. They're really one and the same in many ways, and I I find it my way of praying.
Sue:I think that's why when you add the holy spirit to the sound, it changes things.
Jonathan:Mhmm.
Sue:It does. You know, its spiritual sound breaks through atmospheres. It can cut through atmospheres. It can touch the hardest heart. I'm so sure of that, and that's the holy spirit in the music, in the song.
Sue:So just never doubt that God uses these beautiful worship songs that as prayers for people.
Jonathan:Like how you spoke of openness there. I think for a lot of people, that's what music does. It kinda has this way of sort of bypassing the head Yeah. Yeah. You know, which is always sort of standing watch at the gate, you know, and you're constantly filtering and monitoring and sort of processing what's coming through.
Jonathan:But music seems to have a, you know, a key to the backdoor. Just Yeah. Absolutely. It goes right
Ardin:It does.
Jonathan:Goes right to your heart. And so if your heart is open, then you add to that singing and declaring these amazing truths. And, you know, God says he inhabits the praises of his people, presence of God in that space. You can really see how when we come to God open, it's it's quite an amazing encounter. Maybe sort of changing tacks a little bit.
Jonathan:You said you're kind of at a at a season in life where, you know, you're starting to get to sounds like kids are grown. Sounds like there's a little bit of freedom right now. We're focusing on hope this year as a church. That's our theme. Our theme for the year is hope.
Jonathan:And I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about how hope for you has changed or shifted or grown or developed as you've gone through various seasons of life.
Sue:Well, I've gotta say, I could probably go back a couple of years. I went through a season where I didn't have a lot of hope. Well, I didn't think I did, and a couple of things had hit me. My dad had just died. I was tired.
Sue:I was really tired, and I just couldn't see hope. I didn't feel any hope. And faith is my top spiritual gift. It every time I do a spiritual gift questionnaire thing, that always comes up, and I know that. And I've never struggled with that.
Sue:But all of a sudden, I was in this place where I just thought, I don't know about this anymore. You know? What is going on? And it really frightened me. And I felt God say to me one day, I want you to just write down a list of all the things that you think are hopeless right now in your life, and I did.
Sue:And then he said, okay. Whenever you're feeling this way, I want you to take a really deep breath in and sense my holy spirit filling you. And then as you exhale, I want you to exhale every single one of those things. And I did that often, and I got to a point where I found I had to do it less and less and less. Because as I breathed in the holy spirit, I really felt a sense of these things became less important to me, and it restored my hope.
Sue:But it was doing a simple exercise like that that I just needed to do to break whatever it was that had really taken me into that place of dryness and, yeah, not just feeling hopeless. So I guess that's probably the one thing that's in the forefront of my mind because it's still fairly fresh. And from there, I went on this journey of abiding the John 15 abiding in the vine thing in my life group, my bible study group. I lead a bible study group of women. And so they did this journey with me of this John 15.
Sue:We did it for nearly a year looking at this. I needed to draw myself back to the vine to find my hope again. And I did. And he was very good to me, very generous, and very gracious, and very patient. And I think that's the thing with God, isn't he?
Sue:He's so patient all the time, and he waits for us to work our way through whatever it is to get to where he needs us.
Jonathan:Very well said. Very well said. And speaking of patience Yes. Gonna perform a miracle. You ready?
Jonathan:Here it is.
Ardin:Yeah.
Jonathan:Ladies and gentlemen, look who we have.
Ardin:I didn't even know we could do that. It's basic.
Jonathan:Necessity is the mother of invention. Right? Here I am. Here you are.
Ardin:You made it without me so far.
Jonathan:I know, but we need you to bring it home. Arden, know I music's been a part of kind of your life. You've Arden's been a missionary and, with a missionary family.
Ardin:A missionary kid. Well Yeah. I didn't do anything.
Jonathan:Oh, you were there, which yeah.
Ardin:I was there.
Jonathan:You you were there. Yeah. My fault. But I know you've shared with me privately in the past how certain things that seem to transcend. You've been in a lot of different cultures, a lot of different, environments, different types of churches.
Jonathan:I wonder, you know, as we've been thinking about the way that musical worship kind of opens us up to the Lord, I wonder, have you found that to be true? Like, when you cross into different cultures, if you'd you know, they're singing in a different language or, you know, using different different instruments, how would you say that you've experienced that space of corporate worship in despite various traditions?
Ardin:Yeah. I think it is the same around the world when the shift from music to worship happens. As a leader up the front or even in the congregation, you might just start out with a couple of lively songs or whatever, just singing songs, trying to get people into it. And at some point, hopefully, every time, but at some point, there's like a shift, and you just feel the congregation shift from, oh, I'm just here for another Sunday to actually worshiping the Lord, and something just kinda moves in the spirit. And I was thinking about it the other day.
Ardin:You'd like, I've been to big concerts, like a lot of big concerts like U2, the Foo Fighters, Taylor Swift, 70,000 people.
Jonathan:Wow.
Ardin:And it's not
Jonathan:the same.
Ardin:No. You're you're still having a great time. It's a big party. It's very loud, but it's not the same. No.
Jonathan:It's hard to put into words, but I think you've done a great job great job there. That's interesting you say that because I before you magically appeared.
Ardin:Before Out of the box. Out
Jonathan:of the box. Before you magically appeared, I just asked Sue how she would respond to someone who maybe a bit cynical would say, oh, you know, Christians, you know, it's just a bit of play the right chords, play the right notes with the right lighting. It's you know, we all get a bit of you feel a bit of something, but I think it's a very interesting testimony that you've that you've shared there.
Ardin:And the inverse is true too, I would say. Like, I've been to services before with all the lights and the smoke and everything else, but it's empty, just spiritually empty.
Jonathan:Yeah. Yeah. You're you're
Ardin:try you're trying to create something or recreate something that you didn't create to begin with. Yeah. It's like trying to catch a cloud with a net. It's not gonna happen. You you can't build a structure around what the spirit wants to arrive at.
Jonathan:Beautiful. Well said. Sue, you're in a church that you've spent a lot of time in. How many years did you say you've been in this church?
Sue:Twenty six.
Jonathan:Twenty six years. So you would have seen a lot in in in in that time. It's a lot. Twenty six years in a church is you know, you get a few scars. You get a few trophies along the way.
Jonathan:I wonder, were there particular seasons in that church? I wonder, could you describe a season of joy and perhaps a season of struggle? Because I think a lot of people might be in one or the other. And sometimes it's hard to talk about the things if we're struggling in church. But I wonder if you could just describe what it was like to be in a place, what it is like to be in a place that's changed over twenty six years.
Jonathan:And you've seen the highs and the lows and Yeah. You know, the profound and the mundane.
Sue:Yeah. I think it's interesting. We definitely have seen a lot of highs and a lot of lows. But one thing that I know for sure is that God has never taken his hand off our church. And even in those times where you think, what on earth is going what the heck is this about?
Sue:You know? You can still sense the presence of God and the hand of God on us, the fingerprints of God, I guess, over things that are happening, there's always something good to celebrate, I think, even in those really strange times in church. And even when I look back at some of the seasons that we have gone through, now I can see good things that came out the fruit that came out of those seasons. Even when they were awful seasons or hard seasons or dry seasons or confusing seasons, there was always fruit in there. And that's because God loves his church, and he loves his people.
Sue:And I would say, though, right now, I think our church is in a really fresh season, perhaps a season of transition, and it's probably the smallest in number that I have experienced in this church. But the faithfulness and the faith filledness of the congregation of the people of all the generations is just really beautiful. And the presence of God when we gather together is just really beautiful. Beautiful. Sometimes I come away and I just go, oh, that was just so nice today.
Sue:You know? And I love that. I love being part of God's church and building his house.
Jonathan:Last question for me. You spoke about the privilege of having the songs and being able to put the songs in people's mouths and letting them hear and sing. Can you take us into your role for a moment? What's one thing that you wish that the person who showed up on a Sunday to come to worship and to come to church, what's something you wish they knew? Or if you could say, look, can I just can I just ask one little thing of you?
Jonathan:What would you what would you want the average church attender who's showing up on a Sunday? What would help you as a worship leader if they took this to heart?
Sue:I think that we all come into church with stuff, don't we? We all bring it in. Even I'm a worshiper, and sometimes I come in and I go, jeez, this is tough today. Because we just life's life. Right?
Sue:But I think it's just remembering that God was present in that room before we arrived waiting for us to come and worship him. You know? Just that picture of the presence of God just waiting for his people to come so that he could inhabit their praises, so that he could minister to them as they gathered together. I guess that's what I would wanna remind people of. I do say to our team often, don't ever forget or don't ever lose sight of the privilege that you have as a member of this team standing this side facing church because they are trusting you, trusting us to visually see them engage with God.
Sue:And sometimes that is just such a beautiful thing when you, you know, you look around the congregation and you see just people lost in that moment of adoration or and praise. And, you know, that's never lost on me the supreme privilege that that is that I have for them to trust me with that.
Jonathan:Beautiful. Anything for you? I think
Ardin:she summed it up pretty well.
Jonathan:I think she did too.
Ardin:When you said faithful church, I think, yeah, we are really faithful church. It's perhaps not as charismatic the service as I might be used to, but you see this stuff within the body and without kind of thing, like outside, and people just keep coming. Yeah. Oh, we saw the sign and we're coming. Oh, we ran into someone and we're coming, and and spirit just draws people in.
Ardin:We're blessed.
Jonathan:Well, speaking of blessing, it's such a great blessing to talk with Sue. Thank you so much. Thanks for all you've done. Many people might not know, but Sue's actually helped us when we've had interns who were trying to learn, you know, the musical worship side of things. She's been a mentor to them, and so thank you, Sue, for, just being a blessing to us all.
Sue:Oh, my pleasure.
Jonathan:What a great interview.
Ardin:Yeah. It's always lovely to hear people's stories. We all serve the same God, but we we see different aspects of him. He talks to each of us differently. Yeah.
Jonathan:And I really appreciated Sue's just the breadth of her experience and just how just clear she was about, yeah, when God was actually ministering to her and what that's like and and developing that perspective of, you know, he's present and he's faithful, but he's also there's some times where he's just, you know, he's just waiting. He's just quiet. He's waiting, and we're called to wait on him. But other times, he's very present, very you know, not that he's not present, but he's very, very, much engaged with us. So, yeah, I I just find her a refreshing person.
Ardin:Yeah. And you can't discount the wonder that is corporate worship. Yeah. Dad told me once, when I was younger, God loves to hear about himself, and he and he loves to hear how good he is. And he does.
Ardin:You get a bunch of people together praising God, and he he joins him. He shows up.
Jonathan:And it would be self serving if it wasn't true. Reminds me of, you know, Piper. It's like, how can God's greatest concern be his glory? Well, if his glory is the greatest good, then, you know, it's it's actually right and fitting. And I love the fact that there's something about us, you know.
Jonathan:Of all the things that God made, we are unique in that we as human beings bear his image. So when men and women and children are choosing to use their voices, to use their minds and with their spirit that's made alive in Christ and declaring the praises of God, I think there's something that's something really unique. You can look at the mountains and say, wow, God's powerful, but the mountains don't talk. We can choose to do that. So I I'm right with you on that one, Arden.
Ardin:Now before I got here, did you do any of the new stuff?
Jonathan:I didn't. I was saving it for you.
Ardin:Bam. Alright. What's happening?
Jonathan:Well, the first bit of news is you let me behind the desk, which is pretty exciting. Yeah. And I've I mean,
Ardin:you keep trying to push buttons and stuff. Well, I found I'm feeling a little nervous.
Jonathan:I found all these sorts of sound effects. Oops. That's half of a sound effect. You said you're feeling a bit scared?
Ardin:Hard to believe we've never used any of these.
Jonathan:No. You're not gonna let me back in again, are you? No. No. Guess how I'm feeling right about now?
Jonathan:We know you're laughing along with us at home.
Ardin:That is terrible. You are you're banned.
Jonathan:I'm banned.
Ardin:You're officially banned.
Jonathan:No. Yeah. I I had the training wheels on behind the desk, so hopefully it gets recorded. And then if not, none of this will ever be heard. But, yeah, news.
Jonathan:What's happening?
Ardin:We're in mission month now.
Jonathan:Thank you. Glad somebody knows what's going on around here. Yeah. Yeah. We're in, it's May, which means it's mission month.
Jonathan:I got to go to the Open Doors launching of the World Watchlist last week, which was just a really powerful time. We got to hear about the places that it's toughest to be a Christian in this world. Heard a story about a pastor in Somalia who I don't think he was a pastor. He's a pastor now. At the time, he became a Christian in Somalia.
Jonathan:Took him seven years before he actually found another Christian. Wow. And then he happened to have come across someone and and then they the two of them started praying and their fellowship grew to, like, 14 people, which was really, really amazing. Until one day, he showed up and 12 of them had been killed.
Ardin:Oh, wow.
Jonathan:And so now he's since made his way out of the country. And so it's it's a real like, we hear stories like that, and we're like, seven years without seeing a Christian. And we wake up on a Sunday morning, we're like, oh, do I feel like going? And, you know, someone like that, like, seven years without seeing another believer. So it really puts a lot of things in perspective.
Jonathan:That's why we share the gospel, is because God is in the business of reconciling people to himself. And we're really excited to focus this month on people who've been called into cross cultural mission work, missionaries that we support. So please come along. Every week, we're gonna be spotlighting a different missionary or mission organization that we partner with, and lots of lots of exciting things coming coming this month. Well, so much for all the hijinks today, Arnd.
Jonathan:Thanks for letting me drive.
Ardin:That's alright. I mean, I will not let you do it again. No. And I apologize for coming late.
Jonathan:That's okay. We'll take it out of your paycheck.
Ardin:Yeah. Zero from
Jonathan:zero. Thanks for listening everybody. See you next time.