NewStart WorldView is the online face of NewStart Rivercity Church of the Nazarene.
Here is a little of our history, the paradigm (perspective) that forms our approach to wholeness, and links to the beliefs and values of the Church of the Nazarene.
Our Story
NewStart Worldview, the missional face of NewStart RiverCity, was born in early 2025. But the story behind it began decades earlier, woven through seasons of pain, perseverance, friendship, and love. It’s a story worth telling — and one we’re honoured to share.
Summary
NewStart Worldview grew out of a long journey of exploring how God’s love restores human dignity and heals shame. What began through personal tragedy, deep theological reflection, and friendships across continents eventually developed into a community focused on helping people rediscover their worth in the love of God. Today that journey continues as NewStart Worldview invites people everywhere to explore faith, healing, and hope together.
A Part of the Story
Many threads come together to form the story of NewStart Worldview, but one important thread begins with the life journey of Roland Hearn. His experiences helped shape the ideas and passions that eventually led to NewStart.
The story begins with a tragic car accident on a highway north of Brisbane, Australia. Two young girls were killed, and Roland was the driver. He survived but suffered a broken neck. In the years that followed, he wrestled deeply with questions about God and the nature of reality. If God is loving, how could something like this happen?
The explanations he often heard suggested that God had somehow planned, allowed, or controlled the tragedy as part of a greater plan. That idea troubled him. It seemed to portray God as distant, controlling, and disconnected from real human suffering.
Over time, Roland came to a different understanding. He began to see God not as the one who planned or controlled the tragedy, but as the one who was present in the midst of it—bringing grace, healing, and hope. The accident was not part of a hidden divine plan. It was the result of the natural realities of life. God’s role was not control, but loving presence.
This new understanding changed the direction of Roland’s life. He felt called to help others find hope and healing in their own struggles and became a pastor. During his training, he met Emmy, whom he married in 1985. Emmy has been his partner and support throughout the entire journey.
Influences and a Big Move
While serving in pastoral ministry, two important influences shaped Roland’s thinking. The first was discovering the book We Are Driven by Robert Hemfelt, Frank Minirth, and Paul Meier. The book explored how shame and perfectionism can shape a person’s identity and behaviour. These ideas opened a new path of understanding and recovery.
The second influence came through an online friendship with Brad Mercer. The two shared a deep desire to understand what it really means to know a God who is love. Together they explored the question: If God truly is love, what does that mean for how the church lives and serves others?
Eventually, Roland and Emmy moved with their four young children to Frisco, Texas, where they joined Brad and his wife Karen to start a church together. Their guiding question was simple: How does everything we do communicate love—love that recognises the worth of every person?
During those years, Roland also faced his own deepest struggles. Under the pressures of ministry, family life, and expectations, he came face to face with a painful truth: his identity had been shaped by shame and self-loathing. The strain eventually led to a breakdown and a short stay in a psychiatric hospital in Dallas.
While there, Roland wrote words that would shape the rest of his life:
“God must be God, and love must be enough.”
Those words expressed a new understanding. Life cannot be controlled, and identity cannot be built on striving to be “good enough.” Instead, healing begins when we see ourselves as the object of God’s love.
NewStart’s Early Days
In 1999, the church in Frisco, called NewStart, began meeting in a living room with about thirty people. It quickly became a place where people discovered faith from a new perspective and experienced deep healing as they began to understand God’s love and their own worth.
After several years, Roland and Emmy returned to Australia. Soon after, Brad and Karen Mercer decided to follow their example and move their family to Australia as well so they could begin another NewStart community together. This new community, called NewStart RiverCity, began to take shape as people gathered around the vision.
But during those early days, the unexpected happened. Brad was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Even as the new community was beginning to form, the reality of his illness overshadowed the dream they were building. Brad passed away in December 2007. His death brought deep grief and uncertainty, and the NewStart journey paused for a time as those close to him processed the loss.
Shifting and Learning
During that season, Roland stepped away from ministry for a while and even drove city buses as he reconsidered the future. Yet his passion for understanding God’s love never faded. He returned to university, completing studies in psychology and religion and later an honours degree at the University of Queensland focused on how the church should respond to shame.
In the years that followed, Roland continued developing the ideas that now shape the NewStart worldview: that the human struggle with shame lies at the heart of many spiritual and emotional struggles, and that the love of God restores dignity, worth, and hope.
In 2017, Roland was invited to teach seminars at an international gathering of the Church of the Nazarene in Indianapolis. Before leaving for that assignment, Roland prayed that God might lead him to someone who could become a friend as Brad Mercer had been. Roland knew he needed a friend who could share the dream. During that event, someone gave him the phone number of a man who might be interested in his ideas. That man was John Comstock.
One phone call quickly turned into a deep friendship. John had spent years exploring similar questions while leading the denomination’s online discipleship ministry, The Discipleship Place. The two discovered a shared passion for helping people understand how God’s love restores identity and heals shame.
Building on the Foundation
In the years that followed, they created seminars, webinars, and online discipleship experiences together. Later, they were joined by Dr. Janet Dean, a psychologist and professor who helped bring further clarity and insight to their work. Together they explored how core Christian ideas—such as joy, freedom, forgiveness, holiness, and discipleship—become clearer when they address the human struggle with identity, shame, and worth.
After many years serving in leadership roles within the Church of the Nazarene in Australia and New Zealand, Roland felt a growing desire to once again pastor a community exploring these ideas. In 2024, he stepped away from those leadership roles to focus on building a new kind of church—one that could gather people from many places through an online community.
A small group of people who had remained connected through the earlier NewStart RiverCity journey encouraged this step and helped support the beginning of something new. From that shared vision, NewStart Worldview was born.
This journey—from tragedy, to healing, to friendship and shared vision—has shaped who we are today. As we look to the future, we invite you to explore these ideas with us and perhaps become part of the story that is still unfolding.
Our Paradigm
Love and Worth are experienced the same way
Joy is the lived experience of Love
Shame is the lived experience of brokenness
God is love
Our understanding of ourselves — our identity, the way we see who we are — is meant to grow within a context of love. A love that is overwhelming and affirming of our worth. Only God’s love communicates that completely, but every glimpse of love we’ve known, even the imperfect ones, can help us remember who we really are.
None of us come through life untouched. Our families, our histories, our own mistakes, they shape us.
Still, love heals. Love restores. Love calls us home.
Here, we are building a community that values people more than appearances. A place where anyone is safe enough to ask hard questions, to tell the truth about their stories, and grow at their own pace. We don’t expect perfection. Our commitment is to the process. We trust that God is already at work in every life, even when the path looks nothing like we imagined.
We choose vulnerability instead of pretending. Compassion instead of control. Connection instead of performance.
Most of all, we want you to know this: you belong. And in that belonging, we hope you’ll rediscover the deep worth that’s been yours all along, the truth written into you from the beginning.
Our Values and Beliefs
As a part of the global Church of the Nazarene NewStart Worldview desires to reflect the same perspective on the things we believe. You can see our foundational beliefs and core values here:
That’s our Worldview
Are you curious to know more …
or have a question?