Riverlife Baptist

My name’s Phil. I live in Brisbane in Queensland. I’m married. I have two adult children.

I’ve been riding or cycling for some 10 to 15 years. In 2013, my oldest lad asked me if I’d like to join a group called Altitude. He’d been riding with them for a few weeks and really liked the people. And, I didn’t really wanna go to be quite honest because, I heard that the Altitude crew were mainly Christians. So I kinda resisted for a few weeks. And then, one morning, Matt got up and he said, “come on, join me on a ride”. And I thought, oh, why not? And so I kind of enjoyed the morning, and then I started riding with him on a regular basis.

I think back in 2015, before coming to Christ, that I was probably close to being suicidal. I just didn’t know how to do it. It’s just, it was one of those things. But I also felt that, you know, with my family that I couldn’t let them down. That would have been a very difficult thing to do, but there was also, I probably could have just abandoned everything and left home and lived on the streets. It was that close.

I was able to share that with these guys, which I wouldn’t share with lots of other groups, but because of the relationship that we built with these guys and their character, I felt quite comfortable in doing that. From that conversation that evening, Rod rang me up and, asked me to come to Alpha.

So the night that I rolled up at Alpha, it took me by surprise. I hadn’t really been to church, and and that’s the thing too – I’d not been to church for, at that stage, for some 40 years.

And the first thing I noticed in there was that, it was a very welcoming, very loving, and and they engaged me, and they asked me questions. We had the video, which I really enjoyed. And I went away and thought about that a lot, the following week and actually looked forward to the second session. And again, the questions, the video was really good. I really liked the the topics and, they really sort of started to open my mind up to thinking about that through the week.

By the the third week, I was pretty much all in. I remember drive driving home that night and thinking, wow, this is probably the best thing I’ve ever done.

My world was just collapsing around me. I’d lived internally relying on my own strength to live through the the difficult times, and I couldn’t do that anymore. And now through Alpha, it’s opened up that I can actually lean on on Jesus, and and that now I go to church regularly, still mentored through Rod, and the other Christians I know.