Hi everyone, my name's Clint Coombs and this is my testimony. I was born in Renmark, the younger of two brothers. My mother was a homemaker and a domiciliary care worker and my father was a third generation fisherman and builder. You might say that Christ was not welcome in our household as my father held the view that religion was the cause of the world's troubles. That said, there was an emphasis on hard work, good character, and being an upright person, though this didn't always work out, with arguments and the like being commonplace. Of my relatively large extended family, including aunties and uncles of my grandparents' age, I don't recall any of them being openly Christian. I do, however, recall going to many funerals at local churches, which perhaps contributed to my ill-formed view of how salvation worked. Life between my mother and father was challenging and I recall many heated disagreements over the years, with them eventually divorcing around 2004. In the early 1980s we lived quite close to the Salvation Army, with the officers and their two kids about my age living across the road, the church being about 200 metres away. They were able to share the gospel with my mum and help her to come to know Christ. I had become quite good friends with the kids and would tag along with mum. When I was about six years old, the family moved on and my interest in going along waned. As for my reluctance to attend, I recall my father saying something to the effect of, they can decide, I mean my brother and I, they can decide if they wanted to go, which of course was what I wanted to hear. That was the last time I'd attended services for some years. Christine and I met at university in 1998 and we began dating in 2001, travelled overseas together to London to work about 2005, were engaged in 2007 and finally were married in 2013 at 33 years old. We focused on work and brought into the story that anyone could start a family later in life after they'd made it and so we put it off. Very occasionally we attended a Christmas or Easter service while in London, usually at Christina's suggestion. One of her friends invited, once some friends invited us to a Hillsong church service at Dominion Theatre. It was a one and done affair for me with much of the sermon being focused around the needs for funds for a construction project. I left this as an impression of what churches were and was not something I wanted to be part of. By then I'd largely accepted the standard worldly narratives of how the world worked. I believe that science had the answer for almost everything, that news agencies reported fairly and that actions taken by governments were for the collective good, mainstream right political position. However, around 2016 my views started to change. I recall a phone conversation with a friend from England one evening where he mentioned that his brother was raising his child genderless. I found this odd and pushed back during the call but realised I wasn't informed enough to do so logically. It seemed wrong but at the same time I thought, aren't we supposed to accept people for who they are? This bothered me and in an effort to be informed I started digging and came across Jordan Peterson. At the time, he was addressing issues with compelled speech related to the trans movement. A little more digging, and it's fair to say I was in awe of just how crazy things have become in the world and how little I knew about it. For some time, I was intrigued by Peterson's work. God was a familiar theme with a level of theoretical reverence that I had not come across previously. The concept of objective morality, so this non-subjective rights and wrongs in the context of Christianity was new to me, but appealed immensely, particularly when compared to the post-modernist alternatives adopted by much of society. I decided that even if I did not believe in Jesus, Christianity was responsible for the positive development of society through the ages and so should be respected, learned from and ideally followed. So I started putting a little more time into the Bible with the perspective that it's a set of moral lessons and fables that can produce good, upright people and societies. The dates are a little fuzzy, but I think it was sometime in early 2017 when Christina and I started attending St George's Anglican Church in Singapore. At this point, I didn't consider myself a Christian, though I had some respect for Christians while still considering myself and my approach somewhat more enlightened. The messages were pleasant, although I would spend much of the time mentally critiquing what was being said using worldly wisdom while simultaneously attempting to understand it. I suspect I didn't make it very easy for Christina as I would continue to critique the sermons on the way home. The pomp and pageantry were appealing as I ticked my box of old is good. After a few months of attendance, the pastor preached a sermon on Matthew 1230. He that is not with me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad. I left with the recollection of the message being focused on the first part, he that is not with me is against me, and that being applied generally to society in relation to Christians. I considered myself someone who was not a Christian but was supportive of Christians. versus the left and most other faith. As such, this message upset me a lot and I didn't attend church again for some years. In retrospect, there was a good chance I simply didn't hear anything else other than the first few comments towards this point, but that is in the past now. For a period at least, my interest in learning the Bible and Christianity dwindled somewhat, but I had more than enough to keep my spare time occupied with right versus left politics, investigating fallacious science and prominent conspiracies. Circa 2017, my view of religion could best be described as a distorted view of Judaism without Christ and with emphasis on works. or the idea that your good deeds needed to outweigh the bad. I put this down to forgetting what I was taught at Sunday school, undue influence from Hollywood and Jewish conservative commentators, and selective overemphasis on James. To put it another way, I was uninformed and making it up as I went along. When Yvonne and Cyril tried to share the gospel with me around Christmas time that year, I rejected it quite coldly. In fact, I left mid-meal. This upset me for quite some time afterwards, as I thought I could go to heaven through my works and by attempting to live a good life. I certainly wasn't thankful at the time, but I am now, as it led me to start considering and understanding salvation by grace and through Jesus. I should add at this point that Christina had previously explained the correct interpretation of James to me, that we should act out good works in honour of Jesus and the grace provided, but I was dismissive of this. The area of fake science also kept bringing me back to seeing glimpses of God, items such as evolutions, failings, and the mathematical absurdity of the creation of life via random events, or how only intelligent design could result in viable DNA. Importantly at least, at least in terms of how my brain worked, they helped me to see that there were major failings in my understanding and that many arguments used to disprove or ridicule the Bible were not necessarily valid. In general, I enjoyed apologetics and ended up reading quite a lot of both C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton's work. They were helpful in adapting my worldview, particularly in being accepting of the rationality of Christianity. One of the most fundamental points was simply being able to accept that miracles can occur. A child can see them, many adults, myself included at the time, are willfully blind. Where I previously scoffed at the story of Jonah and the whale or dismissed it as simply being a message, I became more open to its true meaning, though not fully then. Sometime around 2018-19, Christina started attending St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Singapore. After a while, I joined her and began to enjoy going to the early morning services. At this point, though, I was still trying to reconcile my worldview with the Bible. I was much more open to what was being taught. There was still an element of embarrassment at being considered a Christian, and I and I had the pride in trusting in anything but my own abilities. So I held back. I can recall frequently weeping during sermons and similarly when listening to certain hymns. During one service, the minister made an altar call, asking if we wanted to accept Jesus into our lives. I felt convicted to do so and raised my hand. Together we recited a small prayer asking Jesus to be part of our lives. I no longer wanted to keep the doors closed to Jesus. I wanted to recognise who he was and let him into my life. After that, we all shuffled out the church and Christina and I went home. I didn't know what it meant to be a Christian exactly or what I was meant to do differently. This said, raising my hand was a big deal for me and I'd always considered myself as self-sufficient. There was a strong matter of pride that the Lord helped me to overcome to take this step. We continued to go to church until COVID started, then followed online services until we returned to Adelaide in September 2020. During this time, we found what we thought to be reasonable online expository services of the Bible, Bible teaching, and often managed to listen to five to ten sermons per week. In retrospect, they were Calvinistic, though I hadn't really caught on to that, perhaps because I held the view that we had free will. When we arrived back, I attended St Andrew's Anglican Church in Walkerville. Communion was weekly, which I would skip or ask for a blessing as I was not baptised. After some time, the minister enquired about this and offered baptism and confirmation. He shared some reading material that helped me understand the importance of baptism as a public sign of faith for a Christian. On 8 November 2020, I affirmed my faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ in front of the congregation and my family and was sprinkled rather than biblically baptised. It's only since attending Northside Baptist Church that I have truly started to understand what it means to trust in Jesus and to not be a carnal Christian. I know that I have repented of my sins and I have received Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour. I now understand that biblical baptism must be by immersion and not sprinkling, hence why I am being baptised today. I thank the Lord for bringing us here.