Julie-Anne Laird
Julie-anne has a passion for people to know Jesus but she also has a passion for every Christian to be able to integrate their faith into every part of their lives as well as feel confident and comfortable to live it out and talk it out.
While she was working for AFES at Melbourne Uni, she developed a discipleship training course on evangelism which is called Ripple Effect. With help from others, they’ve now produced a course to encourage people to meet regularly to pray for the people who don’t know Christ around them, as well as share conversations that they’ve had PLUS to do some training together.
She has grown up in a Uniting Church in Keith, became a Baptist Youth Pastor in Adelaide, then became a Chaplain at Marryatville High School as well as the Youth and Young Adult Pastor at St Matthew’s Anglican Church, Kensington. After that she was the University Chaplain at Ridley College, then Playgroup Coordinator for 1 Playgroup, which grew to 4 in 2 years for their local Church. She has also worked for AFES for 20 years as an evangelist and more recently worked for CTCA as a Specialist in Evangelism and Outreach and is also Canon for Church Planting for the Diocese of Melbourne.
But she really learnt her evangelism skills by practice (one of her friends became a Christian in Year 11 and this has spurred her on), as well as working for a Mission Organisation (SSEM, now Pioneers) and studying missiology at BCSA and Ridley College where she realised evangelism in Australia was really a cross-cultural exercise and so she applied all she’d learnt into helping students at Uni become Christians, as well as her own friends.
She has been involved in Arrow for 19 years and is their main personal evangelism presenter as well as State Coordinator, Regional Director for Lausanne Oceania and currently on the Selection Committee for CMS. She regularly speaks at Training days run by local Churches as well as Organisations and Conferences.
She is married to Andrew and they have 4 young adult children.