Mission
Karen Anglican Mission on the Border
- Written by: Marc Dale
The Karen people on the Thai/Myanmar border have been persecuted for over sixty years, mostly because they are Christians. They are a minority ethnic group who have been driven from their homes with many living in large 'resettlement (refugee) camps'.
Anglican ministry amongst the Karen began some decades ago through a few trained evangelists who travelled through the jungles and villages of both the Thai and Myanmar sides of the border, establishing churches. These churches are together known as the KAMB – Karen Anglican Mission at the Border. They remain isolated from the resources of their official diocese, which is in Myanmar.
Christ Church Bangkok has been co-ordinating emergency supplies for the Karen since 1984, focussing upon the needs of the Karen refugees living inside the camps, but also supporting the Karen churches in the Thai border area, bringing training and encouragement to leaders.
Bringing the gospel to the nations in the North West
- Written by: Eugenie Harris
The wild, wide open spaces of the north of Western Australia make a big impression. Eugenie Harris sends us a postcard from the Diocese of North West Australia.
Arriving in the Diocese of the North West, my first impression was of ‘Australia on steroids’. Everything seems extreme. We’ve got the busiest port, the hottest town, most isolated community, most dramatic gorges…and the list goes on, because the region effectively powers our nation.
This vast land area draws people from all over the world, people chasing their fortune, pursuing travel experiences or escaping unhappy life circumstances. And the Diocese of the North West welcomes them all, taking every opportunity to proclaim the good news of Jesus. We are truly ‘bringing the gospel to the nations’.
Read more: Bringing the gospel to the nations in the North West
A new college in Singapore
- Written by: Andrew Reid
ETC Asia gets up and running
Andrew and Heather Reid have moved from Holy Trinity Doncaster to Singapore, with Andrew accepting the invitation of Singaporean friends to be the first principal of a new theological college. Here’s an orientation to ETC Asia. Andrew Reid is the Principal of the Evangelical Theological College of Asia
I still have the email. It is dated October 2000 and we were in our first year of church planting in Perth. The writer was aware of our earlier ministry at St Matthew’s Shenton Park in Perth and had just started up a ministry in Singapore called Project Timothy. He wondered if I’d be available to give some expositions for them at some stage in the future. While I’d never had a great interest in ministry in Asia or South East Asia, my wife Heather had always been interested in ministry to Asians and particularly Chinese. However, things began to change for me as God brought a steady stream of Chinese students to our church plant intended for Aussies and they were gradually converted as Heather met with them to do ESL classes using the Bible.
The Story of Peter Soedojo (1933-2006)
- Written by: Tony Nichols
Tony Nichols remembers the remarkable life of an Indonesian man he met as a student in Sydney, and who, having become a Christian under John Stott’s mission preaching, lived a life of fruitful witness and ministry in Indonesia.
Soedojo came to Australia from Indonesia in the mid-fifties as a Colombo Plan student. The Colombo Plan was a centrepiece of Australian foreign policy which aimed to strengthen relations with Asia. Thousands of Asian students studied in Australian universities, hastening the dismantling of the “White Australia” policy. I personally formed many lasting friendships. Considering the prevailing attitudes at that time, my parents were remarkable in their hospitality to the Chinese and Indonesian students that I brought home from Sydney University to Bulli on the South Coast of NSW.
Indonesian students, compared with those from Singapore, Malaya or Hong Kong, were disadvantaged in their studies. Not being from the British Commonwealth, they had little language or cultural preparation for survival in Australia. The friendship of Australian students who helped get accurate lecture notes and shared their lives was mutually beneficial. Soedojo, although a very traditional Javanese and a Muslim, learnt to play tennis and began to read the Bible.
The Windowless Room
- Written by: Peter Corney
Peter Corney points out the cramped and impoverished world that the modern materialist lives in. Peter writes, speaks, mentors and consults on leadership for various organisations
Materialism as a philosophy or world view is now the dominant framework of the Western mind, the lens through which most people view and understand reality. Materialism is the idea that the only reality is a material or physical one, there is nothing beyond the physical, no supernatural or spiritual, nothing that transcends the material: only particles, spaces and energy. At the biological level everything is explicable by the process of natural selection and the physical neurological activity of the brain.
One of the wonders of the times in which we live is that every day, it seems, we are discovering more and more of how all this material world works. We sit fascinated as the Professor Brian Coxes of this world explain it all to us via brilliant BBC documentaries and expand our minds and knowledge. We gasp amazed as some new and marvellous medical breakthrough is announced on the news.
But at another level our understanding is impoverished, limited and entirely enclosed in this immanent world of the material. It’s as if, with the threat of rain, the roof of the Tennis Centre has slowly closed to the heavens as the game proceeded and we didn’t notice. Now we are shut off from the transcendent and enclosed in this immanent mental framework. Indeed if you listen carefully, that is the view of reality that the charming and erudite Professor Cox assumes. Charles Taylor in his writing on secularism claims that this closure to the transcendent is what is at the heart of contemporary secularism.
To change the metaphor, it’s as if we are locked in a windowless room which is brilliantly lit by the scientific method that enables us to see and explain more and more of our physical world but is paradoxically a profoundly reductionist space. It reduces and limits all explanations and descriptions to the material and physical. It has no windows onto wider and bigger explanations of reality. It provides no answers to our deepest and most important questions, like what the meaning and purpose of our lives is, how to understand right and wrong, the nature of justice, beauty, love, shame, guilt, honour, duty, evil and good, why we desire social and personal accountability. The list of enduring human questions it fails to deal with goes on!
The present prosperity of consumer Western culture and the distractions created by our technological mastery temporarily shield us from these deeper questions but they cannot be repressed for ever. The present crisis in the mental health of our young people—one in four in Australia are suffering some serious mental health issue—is a warning sign. The list of global problems grows daily and our present politics seems unable to solve them. It may be that the other wisdom that modernity has put aside for too long may be sought again. Let’s hope and pray that it may be so!