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Our history
Our history
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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, with links to publishers and churches around the world.
St Matthias Press (UK), now known as The Good Book Company, not only publishes 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 a strong distribution point in South Africa, and a co-publishing arrangement in the USA with Crossway Books, the latter focusing mainly on the Interactive Bible Studies series.
As a result, over the past 12 months, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Matthias Media resources were 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 150 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.
If it is God's will, there is reason to be excited about the potential for growth arising from the fact that we are living in this era of great leaps forward in technology.
Specifically, the internet is a great boon for a small publisher of distinctive Christian resources stuck in our neck of the woods. The internet is already allowing us to build networks of like-minded evangelicals who are keen to make use of the resources we are able to offer them. Sites like Two Ways to Live, not only provide access to the gospel online, but have helped us form links with evangelicals around the world who are keen to promote the gospel.
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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