Hello! My name’s Izzy, and together with my wife Simone and our two kids, Ezra and Norah, our church-planting journey began in 2023 on the North Coast of Perth with a prayer meeting.

We had a vision to plant a church that would impact the community and see many people saved. After a few months of prayer and small gatherings, we hosted an interest gathering that exceeded our expectations! Over 150 people attended, and 5 gave their hearts to the Lord! This was encouraging for our faith and gave us a sense of reassurance that God wanted to use our church to touch people’s lives.

We then set out to find a location where we could have weekly Sunday gatherings. This proved to be an extremely difficult task, as we faced many obstacles and encountered many facilities unwilling to allow us to hire their space. God provided once again, and we began our church gatherings in July 2023 at a karate dojo. This was far from perfect, but it was awesome to start us off.

We then had church in a primary school, and in 2025, we were able to lease a building right in the centre of our community. In November of 2025, the breakthrough continued as we planted Courageous Church in Yanchep, which is our first campus. The Yanchep team faced similar challenges in finding a venue and had to start their gatherings on Friday nights. At the start of this year, their venue became available on Sunday mornings! We jumped at that opportunity and have seen God bring strength and growth to the church.

Right now, 11 life groups, a youth ministry of about 50 young people, Alkimos Sundays average about 140-150 people, and Yanchep Sundays are between 40 – 50 people. We have also just launched a 6-month leadership development program with 25 students and a young adults ministry that will start gathering later in the month. We are grateful to God for all He has done to bring us to this point, but we are focused on strengthening what we have and believing God for even greater.

Our heart at Courageous Church has always been to multiply through planting churches. In fact, we don’t even see ourselves as a church; we see ourselves as a movement of churches united in vision, mission and values. We strongly believe that the most effective way to reach people with the gospel and bring lasting, positive change to a community is to have a local church present. A church that is full of the presence of God, relational and empowering.

Over the last 3 years of our church, we have discovered that multiplication requires a compelling vision, healthy structure and genuine care for leaders. Our vision at Courageous Church is to “Multiply courageous disciples of Jesus in every generation” This statement is slowly becoming the culture of our church.

We talk a lot about church planting and multiplication, but we realise we need to talk about it even more! Keeping vision central is vital in uniting a community and focusing resources and effort. We have found that when vision is not central, people either put forth their best efforts elsewhere or lose their fire and become passive.

Structure has also been key in getting us to this point. We often ask ourselves this question: Does the rhythm of our church (programs, groups, events, etc) reflect our vision, mission and values? If the answer is no, we change it and if the answer is yes, we think of ways to improve it. It is important to note that this is not a static one-time question, but rather an ongoing pursuit to hold to what Jesus is asking of us. One example is that all our church staff, including the senior and campus pastors, are bi-vocational. Our vision is to multiply – part of multiplication is evangelism – we believe in doing that relationally – so staff need the opportunity to create friendships and connect with people outside the church context – they can’t really do that working full time at church – therefore, structurally, our staff are bi-vocational. Structure also includes clear role descriptions and clear expectations.

This ties in well with genuine care for leaders. Being clear about what we are asking of our team and their scope of authority helps leaders lead with confidence and passion. This also means we need to disciple and pastorally care for our leaders. Often, as a church, we can care well for people in the congregation, but in my experience, we don’t always care well for the leaders. Caring for leaders well is vital because our example speaks louder than our words. We need to care for leaders the same way we want them to care for others in the church.

Jesus said in John 13:34, “A new command I give you: Love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

This shows us that discipleship is at the heart of multiplication. We are continuing to learn and are excited for what God will do next.