Rob Abboud’s journey to ministry started with a seemingly simple question from his minister, ‘Will you join a strategic planning committee?’ and his answer, ‘No!’. Many years later God has continued to use and grow Rob. Now he is an MTS Trainer and the Campus Pastor of MBM Blacktown, a new church plant in the area he grew up in.
A zealous heart guided by wisdom
After becoming a Christian it took a couple of years before Rob really picked up a Bible and started reading, but after he did, his knowledge grew and so did his heart for mission. So when David Mears, Rob’s minister at Minchinbury Anglican Church, asked him to join a 5-year committee Rob said, ‘I can’t commit to 5 years, I’m going to be a missionary!’
Rob explains, “I told him – I’m planning to go overseas and be like a missionary on my own, just travelling around and telling people about the gospel. And he said ‘What? How do you think you’re going to do that by yourself?’
David appreciated Rob’s passion but counselled him against his plan, explaining that he had no training or system to support him. There were better ways to do ministry and mission, starting with MTS.
Rob shares, “We had a long chat after Bible study one night and he challenged and encouraged me to think about MTS and being trained to see if I’m cut out for ministry. I decided that sounds like a good thing to do.”
In 2010-2011 he did an apprenticeship under Senior Minister David Mears and alongside Assistant Minister Paul Hallam.
Reflecting on his two years of MTS, Rob shares, “I was really thankful David guided me into MTS so I could be trained and shaped and grow more and more. The three of us would start every day with the Bible open. We’d read God’s word, and then we’d think about how it applies to the rest of church life and our lives. It was just such a privilege and I grew so much in understanding God through these super wise guys.”
Unique local mission
After finishing up the apprenticeship Rob went back into work as a coffee machine repairer. Originally the plan was to go to Bible College straight away, but Rob was engaged and his fiance was struggling with an illness, so it didn’t feel like the wise choice. Especially given it would be a very new and potentially challenging experience for Rob, who hadn’t done any university training before.
So for two years, Rob repaired coffee machines and he and his now-wife continued to plan and pray for the right time to go to college. God in his gracious timing however had another stop along the way planned!
Rob was introduced to a job advertised at Pitt Town Anglican Community Church. The church had opened a cafe as a mission opportunity for the community and it needed a manager. Rob didn’t have any idea about managing a cafe, but he did know coffee, coffee machines and had experience in ministry. So he jumped in with the plan to do 6 months in the job before going to college.
After a rough initial few months, they started to build momentum with reaching the community. Rob and Sally decided to stay another year. Up until that point he had been part-time at Pitt Town in the cafe and still repairing machines part-time, but he was told his repair job needed to be full-time or nothing. And God provided!
Rob shares, “I said to the minister, Greg Peisley. ‘Is there other ministries for me to do here?’ By that point, I’d been meeting up with a bunch of young guys, reading the Bible, investing in men’s ministry, and leading various church groups. And so he said, well, let’s put you on as an Assistant Minister. So I ended up on staff there full-time, running this cafe, preaching, leading services, overseeing the evening service, and doing a bunch of outreach. It was a super exciting time.”
After two years on staff, however, it was time to go to college to do the training he’d been waiting for. Rob went to Moore College and he and his family lived on-site at Newtown Erskineville Anglican where they did student ministry.
A need revealed in Western Sydney
Throughout their time at college, Rob and his wife were still keen to do mission work. However, his wife’s health issues were a concern, and eventually, they decided that going to hard-to-reach places without the medical care she may need wasn’t the right path.
Rob shares, “So we just started to consider if we didn’t go overseas, where might we go? And as I was looking around at our year in college and asking people where they were going, they were going to the Eastern suburbs, the South, the North, overseas. No one was really talking about where we grew up, which was Mount Druitt, Blacktown and Western Sydney. So we started to feel challenged that maybe God wants us to go back to where we came from. Over that time, we also reflected that God was actually bringing the nations from all over the world into that area.”
This conviction led Rob to MBM Church, who were supporting church plants in that area. In 2020 Rob took up a role at MBM while finishing college, and learnt a lot through their other campuses, before just recently in August 2024 launching an MBM Campus in Blacktown!
Developing a philosophy as a trainer
When he first began ministry at MBM, Rob didn’t directly train any apprentices but was involved in ministry alongside them and supporting them in his particular ministry areas. He took on his first ‘official’ MTS apprentices, Sam Wilson and Kwabena Nsiah, in 2022. Sam has now gone on to Bible College and Kwabena is currently working for Reach Australia! This year Rob has 2 new apprentices, Carlos Dyonisio (Rooty Hill Campus) and Anok Doong (Blacktown Campus). Anok is heavily involved at the Blacktown plant with him, primarily overseeing kids church.
Rob’s experience of doing MTS was very different to how his apprentices are trained. But this is a testament to both the growing support and systems of the MTS team AND the nature of MTS being flexible and contextual to ministry and people.
At MBM, where apprentices are often involved in the higher levels of teams, organising ministry and leading their own leaders, Rob is focused on their character, their motives and their heart.
He shares, “I get to sit with my apprentices and I feel like it’s a bit of a moment in the eye of the storm of ministry where I can really dig into their heart, their motives, their thinking. We’ll read the Bible and I’ll try not to focus particularly on the ministries they’re doing, but how their heart and thinking revolve around those ministries. I’m convinced that no matter what ministry you’re doing, it’s not going to work until you know who you are before God. I love meeting with these apprentices, bringing them back to not how your ministry is flourishing, but how your heart is flourishing before God.”
For those ministers and ministry leaders on the fence about bringing on an MTS apprentice, Rob has a challenge for you:
“It does take time. You’re investing in people who are not where you might want them to be. All of ministry takes time and emotional energy, but we have to see ourselves as doing the work of multiplying ministry.
If we think we don’t need MTSers, because we’re doing the work, then we’ve lost the point of ministry. Ministry is equipping the saints for works of service. And MTS is just such a helpful space to take people on, and like Paul says, to not only share the gospel with them, but to share our lives.
The way ministry works is generally that the church will imitate their senior leaders. Why not then bring people even closer to imitate your whole life in order to build a network of ministers for the next generation?”