It was way back in May 2003 that I began this blog… seems a lifetime ago now…

It was started around the time I had finished up as leader of Lesmurdie Baptist church in the hills of Perth and was moving to the northern suburbs to lead an experimental missional community. I had hoped the blog would help our friends in the hills keep in touch with what we were doing in our new adventure, but funnily enough I don’t think anyone ever read it…

Oddly enough others did and along the way I found myself really enjoying the whole experience of writing and connecting with others on a similar journey. Over the last 6 years the blog has gone thru several incarnations and at one point I shut it down thinking it was time to give it all away.

The title of this blog is quite deliberate although it happened by accident. I needed a blog title and the idea of being missionaries in our own backyard described precisely what I feel we are on about – helping Australian people get a better picture of a God who loves them. Of course anything that is ‘backyard’ is rough and ready, made up on the go and more concerned with practicality than with theory – which pretty much describes how we do things

These days I don’t write as much as I used to, partly because I’ve thought thru many of the questions that were once so critical, but also because I just don’t have the same time to sit and pontificate like I used to. (I think that’s a good thing) However I do still like to have a place to dump my reflections, think out loud and sometimes just have some laughs.

The missional community (Upstream) that catalysed this whole blogging journey came to an end in 2008 and now we are taking our learning and using it in the Quinns Community Baptist Church, where Danelle and I are leaders. As well as leading a church community I run my own business in irrigation/reticulation and enjoy the challenges of being a small business owner.

We now live in Yanchep – what was once a holiday village, but has now become a suburb in the very north of Perth. We have a quirky house just 200m from the beach, a labrador called Lucy and a life that we love.

So welcome to my world and my thought processes. Feel free to leave a comment, start an argument or just say ‘g’day’.

Andrew (Hamo) Hamilton

December 2016