About this Church
Open Icon Baptist Church — formerly South Yarra Community Baptist Church — is a new expression of one of the oldest Baptist congregations in Melbourne. We look for the image of God in every person, and seek to be a living icon, an open window through which the life of God is glimpsed. We are a small online community of people who take seriously the call to follow Jesus: not as a set of beliefs to defend, but as a way of generous and resilient love — for God, for the earth, for our neighbours, for the stranger, and for ourselves. If that sounds simple, perhaps you haven’t tried living it without exceptions.
We gather live online daily for worship and prayer that have deep roots in ancient Christian tradition yet are vibrant, playful and participatory — and we’ve discovered, somewhat to our own surprise, that caringly cultivated online community can be profound, grounding, and genuinely life-giving. We have learned to sit with pain and brokenness, in the world and in ourselves, without looking away or pretending we have all the answers. All are welcome here — not despite who they are, but because of who they are.
Life Together
We are a small congregation — typically 25 to 35 at Sunday worship — and that’s a treasured feature rather than a bug. At this size, you can be known, valued, cared for, and accompanied on the journey rather than lost in the crowds. If you are looking for anonymous consumerism, or a large pool of potential romantic partners, we are probably too small a pond. But if you are looking for a community where your presence genuinely matters, you may find that we’re just the right size.
Melbourne is still home to more of us than anywhere else, but around a third of our congregation have discovered that location is no barrier to full participation in our common life. Regional Victoria, interstate, overseas — distance no longer keeps us apart.
Worship that Breathes
Our worship is unusual for a Baptist church — labels like bapto-catholic and ancient-future capture something of the paradox. We bring together the Baptist instinct for congregational freedom, quality preaching, and the priesthood of all believers with a deep respect for the timeless liturgical traditions of the wider church — shared texts, sacramental richness, and the tested rhythms of common prayer. If you can’t define all those words, you’ll probably have no trouble with it. It is usually only those who can who get hung up about it. The result is worship that is earthy, contemplative, and highly participatory —
unhurried enough to go somewhere, and alive enough to surprise you as it does.
Melbourne is still home to more of us than anywhere else, but around a third of our congregation have discovered that location is no barrier to full participation in our common life. Regional Victoria, interstate, overseas — distance no longer keeps us apart.
From Crisis to Calling
Most churches tried some sort of makeshift online arrangements during the COVID lockdowns of 2020 — but our approach transformed our life together so deeply that, even in the first few months, some of our people started thinking we might never go back. What we discovered surprised us: the radically participatory style of worship we had developed over decades translated into the online environment not just adequately, but remarkably well. While many churches relied on pre-recorded streams, with people watching separately instead of in community, we found ourselves gathering more intimately, more accessibly, and more regularly than we ever had before. Many of our people say it was the depth of our online community life that carried them through the trauma of those times. By the time the crisis had passed, the congregation had voted unanimously to make online our permanent home. We haven’t looked back — and you may begin to see why.
Inclusion to Practice
We seek to be as inclusive as we can — and as followers of Jesus, we keep learning to be more so. Our welcome reaches across age, ethnicity, cultural background, sexuality, gender identity, ability, and theological perspective. Our welcome of LGBTIQA+ people is unequivocal — we may have been the first Baptist church in Australia to make that commitment formally. But inclusion here goes beyond background and identity: we welcome doubt as readily as faith, and brokenness as readily as wholeness. If you’re wondering whether someone like you would be accepted here, we’re doing our best to make sure the answer is yes.
Beliefs that Shape us
We are unapologetically Jesus-centred — not in the sense of defending a set of doctrines about him, but in the sense of taking seriously his vision of what he called the kingdom of God: a world being healed, reconciled, and made whole. We read the scriptures as a living conversation, not a closed argument, and we hold our theological conclusions honestly, aware of both what we know and what we don’t. What we are more certain about is the practice: gathering regularly for worship and prayer, forming one another in love, and supporting one another in going out to live as though the culture of God is both on its way and already here — because we believe it is.
Our Wider Family
Our congregation is affiliated with both the Baptist Union of Victoria (our long-time home state association), and the newer Open Baptists, whose vision of Baptist life resonates closely with our own. Baptist churches are self-governing — our congregation makes its own decisions through its own members meeting together — but we value the connection, accountability, and fellowship that come from being part of something larger than ourselves. They’re different kinds of belonging, and we value both.
Our History, Many Chapters
Founded in 1854, we were one of the earliest Baptist congregations in Melbourne. We were also the first to propose the formation of what is now the Baptist Union of Victoria. For most of our history we were known as South Yarra Baptist Church, moving through three locations in that neighbourhood. After coming close to closing in the early 1990s, a period of renewal gradually brought new life and a new worship identity. The fully liturgical style that now defines us, taking shape from 1999, has been our soul food ever since. 2020 brought another transformation: the move to fully online gathered worship, which the congregation discovered they were being called to embrace as their distinctive vocation. And in 2026, after handing our South Yarra building to another congregation, our renaming as Open Icon Baptist Church marked the beginning of a new chapter in a long story that remains very much alive.
Our Name
Our name was chosen through nearly two years of congregational discernment — a process that took seriously both our history and our new reality. The need for a new name arose simply: without even the building, we had no remaining connection to the South Yarra neighbourhood. But the naming process became something more than a practical exercise. It became an opportunity to ask who we are and what we are called to be.
The name Open Icon holds together two layers of meaning. In the Christian tradition, an icon is not simply an image to be observed but a window — something through which the gaze is drawn beyond itself toward the living reality of God. In digital culture, an icon is similarly a symbol through which one enters a larger space. For an online congregation, both meanings describe exactly what we are called to be: a point of entry into something that exceeds us. The word ‘open’ speaks of our intentional stance — toward God, toward one another, toward the stranger. To speak of an open icon is to hold together reverence and hospitality: depth without exclusion, contemplation without distance, beauty without possession.
But the name reaches further still. The Christian tradition has always understood human beings as icons — bearers of the image of God. We are not merely people who use icons in prayer; we are called to become icons ourselves: open windows through which something of the life of God becomes visible and accessible to the world. Individually and together, our call is to live that image openly — not claiming to have arrived at it, but remaining oriented toward it, allowing the light of God’s love and justice and welcome to show through us, however imperfectly. This is what we mean when we say we seek to be a living open icon. It is less a description of what we are than a direction we continue to travel.