The power of SRE, a local church and LIT
“I started going to SRE in Year 7, pretty much because me and my mates just wanted to get out of class! Then I actually began listening and taking in the stuff Jaedon was teaching us.”
This sheepish admission comes from Aidan, a Year 9 student at Oak Flats High School in Shellharbour.
Through his role as Aidan’s SRE teacher and youth minister at Park Rail Anglican church, Jaedon and Aidan have become good mates.
Jaedon adds, “I met Aidan when I was checking out what SRE teaching would be like at Oak Flats High School. The following year, I started teaching his Year 8 SRE class.”
Once Jaedon got to know Aidan thanks to his weekly SRE class, he then invited him to go surfing with a small group of guys every Sunday morning. This developing friendship led to Jaedon inviting Aidan to youth group at Park Rail Anglican church. Aidan went along and discovered that he enjoyed hanging out with the people there and reading the gospel.
Aidan shares, “Even though I wasn't really Christian yet and wasn't going to church, it was good to get into the Bible.”
Jaedon says, “From my perspective, I saw you come to youth group via SRE, and you weren't a Christian, but you were keen to read the Bible. In that time God changed your heart from thinking, ‘This is a place where I just like the community’ to ‘This is a place where I've actually got to figure out who Jesus is.’"
Aidan joined the youth group at the 2024 KYCK (Katoomba Youth Convention), where he grasped God’s incredible goodness and, on the event’s final last night, he committed his life to following Jesus.
Now Aidan has decided to attend the LIT Summer Conference in January 2026, as he wants to learn to teach people God’s word, just like Jaedon does, and to invite others to church. In term 4 he’s taken on a leadership role by teaching kids church.
Jaedon shares, “Aidan’s story is a really clear progression - go to SRE, then come to youth group, then join this group at KYCK, which was where it all clicked for him.”
For a while now, Aidan and Jaedon have been hanging out at youth group and at church as well as surfing on Sunday mornings. Recently, they’ve been meeting on a Thursday night with two other guys to read the Bible. Jaedon says, “We’re going through ‘God's Big Picture’ at the moment, looking at how the whole Bible fits together as one unified story. We have a lot of fun, and Aidan in particular asks some really helpful questions for our group.”
Matt Bartlett, Youthworks’ Youth Ministry & High School SRE Advisor for the Wollongong Region, was involved in the behind-the-scenes ministries that enable this exact kind of discipleship pathway. Matt provides ongoing ministry support to Jaedon in his role as a youth minister and is on the SRE board that employs Jaedon to teach high school SRE.
Matt says, “It’s really exciting to see God at work through Jaedon’s roles in SRE and the local church, and to be able to run LIT so that more young people learn to become Godly leaders.”