The Beginnings
Little Rock Down Under unofficially began in Jan's kitchen somewhere around the beginning of 1994.  For just over 2 years Jan had been talking to groups about the urgency of Christ's call for every baptised person to proclaim the Good News.  This was in response to Pope John Paul II's proclamation of a Decade of Evangelisation (1990-2000) and Jan's own personal call to mission.

Jan soon realised that most grass roots Catholics felt ill equipped to speak about their faith and so began to look for ways to help people become more articulate about what they believed.  Participation in a local ecumenical Bible Study had been a rich growing experience for me so I began a search for Catholic bible study material.  Jan looked for something that incorporated good teaching, prayer and faith sharing. 
After a long search and through a series of ?Divine coincidences? Jan found Arkansas USA and the headquarters of LRSS.

Jan's kitchen became a busy place of distribution of LRSS materials and transposing of videos from the NTSC format used in the US to the PAL system used in our part of the world.

1998 was full of new developments:

1. The way became clear for us to be official distributors of LRSS in Oceania, and

2.  Our PP, Fr Peter, decided that it was time to move out of Jan?s kitchen and offered 2 rooms of his presbytery for our official distribution Centre.

We named it Bethlehem (House of Bread) Fr Peter also suggested that more than one person was needed to run this ministry and asked Kathy Robbie to be part of the new team.  Shane her husband joined us and the two have been generous and faithful workers.

Kathy manages the office and shares in the on road promotional work.  Shane?s domain includes the finances, ordering etc.  He is also a computer whiz!   We are all volunteers drawing only expenses.

2000 saw us move to a larger building on the parish grounds.  Every need was supplied.  We were able to have all the office furniture we needed from a local hospital that was being demolished, shelving for our stock room from a library that was being renovated, and the loan of a computer.

Fr Peter, on return from his sabatical in 2000, introduced the parish to "Little Books" and in 2001 we took on the task of supplying these gems to, not only our own parish, but to neighbouring parishes as well.  We now supply the "Little Books" to over 300 parishes across Australia and New Zealand.

In 2003, Jan and Kathy brought back with them froma trip to Chicago, USA, the Catholic Returning Home programme with the blessing of the originator, Sally Mews.  We work in partnership with the Archdiocese of Brisbane in promoting and supporting parishes running the programme across Australia and New Zealand.

In 2004, we were approached by a couple of producers of other scripture based resources to become distributors within Australia.  In response, we now distribute:

• CaFE programmes from Catholic Evangelisation Services, Diocese of Westminister in UK,
• The Word Among Us magazine from The Word Among Us, Baltimore in USA

Today we serve nearly 1000 parishes and groups with the Word of God.  LRSS is in every state and territory of Australia and beyond to New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, South Pacific Islands etc.  Over 2000 people receive The Word Among Us each month.

Amazingly this work has spread through word of mouth.  We once paid for an advertisement and had no response.  Now we leave it to the Holy Spirit!