Sydney: a city of many countries?

Yesterday evening I visited Windsor, in the NW of Sydney metro area, for a meeting. To avoid the traffic, I drove early - which allowed me to take in the changes that have happened in the last ten or so years.

Back in the good old days, when I was just a little lad, Old Windsor Road was one lane each way. And was surrounded by pleasant green rolling farm paddocks. Now, the new suburbs of Kellyville and Rouse Hill have been built amazingly quickly. The place feels like California (well, it's what I imagine California would look like...): big, multi-lane roads, freeway overpasses, enormous shopping centres, totally inadequate public transport (!)... and everything looks to NEW and FRESH and ATTRACTIVE!

Then I got to Windsor, which is still a cute country town perched on the edge of encroaching suburbia.

This reminded me of a passing comment that Peter Hughes made once in a seminar on evangelising Sydney. He said it's useful to think of Sydney as a bunch of separate countries cobbled together. By that he meant the different parts of Sydney look and feel different. They have a different history, a different ethnic mix, a different climate. So they feel different. It's like they have a different culture.

Maybe we need to think more broadly about multicultural ministry. Maybe, if we move from one part of Sydney to another, for home, work or ministry, we need to think of ourselves as cross-cultural ministers. Maybe we need to think more deliberately about engaging the culture of the particular part of Sydney that we're in, with its particular challenges and enticements and barriers to the gospel.

Thoughts, anyone...?

Comments

Roger Gallagher said…

My sister used to live in Winston Hills, and I was always amazed at the differences in the people groups at her local shopping centre compared to Merrylands, where I live.

I think you've made a good point. A good example is the series of video clips Mike Jensen put up on his blog last year which to him characterised Sydney. They were all set in the trinity of the inner city/harbour/beaches. How different are the images of Sydney conveyed in such movies as Little Fish or The Combination. We need to ensure that we can reach the latter people groups as well as the former.

9 May 2009 at 19:51

A better understanding of nonbelief

The Nones Project is an ongoing study into the belief systems of people who call themselves non-religious. A few weeks ago one of the project leaders, Ryan Burge of Washington University, posted some really interesting preliminary results on his Substack. 1. We've probably heard of people who are spiritual but not religious (SBNRs). SBNRs were "the largest group of nones" in the sample. They believe in the supernatural realm but not necessarily in "a God." They are "deeply skeptical of religion but highly interested in spirituality," therefore individualistic and anti-institutional. 2. But this study differentiated SBNRs from people they called Nones In Name Only, NiNos. They different to SBNRs by being religious about their spiritual. They believe not just in the supernatural but in "God." And they tend to engage in traditional communal religious practices while SBNRs practice individualised eclectic bespoke spiritual practices. The s...

The different distractions of secularity and spirituality

There has been a lot of discussion about the recent 'vibe shift' away from radical atheism back towards an openness to the supernatural. I don't think this new spirituality is necessarily an openness to the unique claims of Christ. It will more probably replace one set of commonly-accepted misunderstandings about Jesus with another. Under radical atheism, people dismissed the Biblical claims about Jesus' resurrection because they 'knew' that it was impossible. Jesus hadn't really died. He just passed out (after being beaten and whipped and crucified) and then woke up in the tomb (and rolled away the stone himself and overcame several guards). Or the disciples hallucinated that they saw him (even though Jewish beliefs of the time didn't expect one person to rise possessing eternal life himself; they expected a general resurrection at the end of time - see John 11:24 ). Or something else. The so-called 'explanations' of Jesus' non-resurrectio...

TGC Australia recently published an analysis by Dr Sarah Quicke of whether we are experiencing a 'quiet revival' of interest in and/or conversion to Christianity here in Australia. It does it a good job of describing the difficulties involved in both gathering and interpreting data about religious beliefs and behaviours, e.g. the difference between the 44% who (still) call themselves Christian and the 8% of people aged 18-35 who actually "believed and lived out the gospel." Quicke refers to the very insightful McCrindle report An Undercurrent Of Faith , released in March 2025, which uses an analytical method called cohort analysis to try and work out how a particular group of people tend to behave over time. The purpose of this post is to draw attention to one element of that report which agrees with Quicke's analysis but also adds some detail to it. Here is what the cohort analysis showed about different age groups' identification with Christianity: As y...

Multicultural Ministry Matters

Search This Blog