Hello Brothers and Sisters in the Lord

A good number of you told me back in June that compliance is the part of your role that weighs the most. This issue is a direct answer to that.

Also, this issue we are introducing our first newsletter sponsor, Deepen.

Jackson

Deepen is an Australian-made app that lets your congregation follow the sermon on their phone, whether they're in the room or watching the livestream. No login or account needed. They search for your church and tap in.

During the message, people can scroll back to a slide they missed, jot a note they'll actually find again, and tap a reaction that shows up on the screen at the front. None of it disappears when the service ends. The sermon, the slides and their notes stay in the app for future reference.

If your church runs PowerPoint or Keynote, you can import those slides straight into Deepen Studio. A ProPresenter integration is coming too. It's in testing now, so if that's your setup, it's worth keeping an eye on.

Church Support Australia readers get 50% off their first year, plus free assisted onboarding (valued at $500).

On the first Tuesday of July, whoever holds admin for your church sat down and decided to actually find out where things stood.

Nothing forced it. No board meeting asked for it, no auditor came knocking. Just the ordinary discipline of good admin: check things on purpose, before you ever need to.

Digging into it took longer than expected. A Working With Children Check list nobody had updated in over a year, a few names on it belonging to volunteers who'd quietly stopped serving long ago. An insurance certificate renewed automatically every year, nobody quite sure any more what it actually covers. An email from the ACNC, sitting unread since March.

That's rarer than it sounds. Most churches only check where they stand after something's gone wrong, or after someone's asked a question nobody could answer with confidence. Almost nobody checks on a rhythm of their own choosing.

Whatever your church's legal structure already is, unincorporated, incorporated, or sitting inside a diocese's trust with no separate legal existence of its own, that status carries real consequences most people have never had spelled out plainly. If your church isn't incorporated, whoever signs the next hall hire or the next casual contract is personally on the hook for it, not the church. If it is incorporated and registered as a charity, you've likely taken on a fuller set of governance obligations than an equivalent unincorporated church carries, whether anyone's been keeping up with them or not.

That's the actual gap. Almost nobody has ever laid out, in one place, what's genuinely required regardless of any of this, and what depends entirely on which one your church already is.

A small number of things are required of every Australian church, full stop, regardless of size, structure, or paperwork: Working With Children Checks for anyone in direct contact with kids, and the child safety standards that now apply in most states. Everything else, insurance, incorporation, full governance obligations, depends on choices your church has made or thresholds it's crossed, like taking on a first paid worker or hiring a venue.

None of that needs solving this week. It needs writing down, once, on one page, so next July takes twenty minutes instead of a day spent digging it all up again.

If your church has a diocese or a denominational office behind it, some of this sits with them rather than you. Worth a call before you assume it's entirely on your plate.

One thing to do this week, if you do nothing else. Ask your church administrator one question: given our legal structure, who's actually on the hook if something goes wrong?

The Toolbox resource this issue is called What Actually Fits on One Page. It's a short guide plus three one-page tools you can use to write down exactly where your church stands, and check it again next July.

What Actually Fits on One Page: A guide to building your church's actual compliance position: what's genuinely required, what depends on choices you've made, and who to call about each part of it. Includes 3 :