Our history
Our mission | Our history | Our people | Our theology | Our pricing
In 1987, Tony Payne, a communications graduate, was working for St Matthias Church (in Sydney) as the Church Administrator. Tony had spent two years previously training in the Ministry Training Strategy.
Phillip Jensen was pastor of the church and the Chaplain to the University of New South Wales. One of Phillip's great abilities was to assess the strengths of the young men and women who passed through the campus and church contexts, and to help them develop a vision for ministry and establish a platform which would suit their God-given abilities. And it was a vision for providing useful, written ministry resources that Phillip shared with Tony.
So, in 1988, Tony became the editor of a new venture called ‘St Matthias Press and Tapes’. Its aims were:
- the publishing of a fortnightly publication for evangelical discussion and promotion of evangelical ministry, which would come to be known as The Briefing; and
- publishing quality ‘ministry tools’—some of which Phillip had already developed (such as the Two Ways to Live personal evangelism training course, and Just for Starters).
The new venture would also aim to expand the St Matthias tape ministry which had begun several years before.
By the end of 1988, St Matthias Press had managed not only to meet the demanding schedule for The Briefing and published both Two Ways to Live and Just for Starters, but had also launched what is now known as The Blueprint, a series of discussion papers/studies on basic Christian doctrine).
Since then, St Matthias Press and Tapes has been incorporated as a non-profit company with a supervising Board of directors, has had a change of name to Matthias Media, and has grown from strength to strength (with just a few hiccups along the way).
The Present
Matthias Media now has a staff of 12 people in Australia and two in the USA, with links to publishers and churches around the world.
St Matthias Press (UK), now known as The Good Book Company, not only sells Matthias Media resources developed in Australia, including The Briefing, but is also actively developing and publishing a range of other helpful resources for the UK market.
In the last few years, Matthias Media has also established an office in Pennsylvania, USA, and this has helped us develop much stronger links with North American churches, and much more effective distribution in that region.
As a result of the way God has blessed us, every year hundreds of thousands of Matthias Media resources are sent out around the world—and hopefully used by God to grow many people's Christian lives.
The range of resources has also grown since 1988. We now have a portfolio of more than 250 resources to cater to many different areas and ages of ministry. From evangelistic Bible studies to evangelistic tracts, from foundational books to training CD-ROMs and DVDs, and much more, we're always looking to expand our range to help grow Christians around the world.
The Future
Whilst James warns us of the dangers of boasting or bragging about what will be achieved (“you do not even know what will happen tomorrow”), we pray that the Lord will continue to graciously use Matthias Media in the work of his kingdom.
But apart from changes in the method and geographic scope of the delivery of resources, in many ways we hope that it will be ‘more of the same’ from Matthias Media. More of what we have focused on since 1988: more proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, more growing of Christians until the day that our Lord returns, more resources that teach the truth—more resources for growing Christians.
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