Multicultural Ministry Matters

I spoke last weekend at a church camp on "the opportunities and challenges of reaching post-Christian Australia." The main theme of my talks was the need to have a sufficiently basic, therefore flexible, understanding of the gospel and the Christian faith in general – an adequately simple yet rich ‘theology’ – to engage with the diverse, often contradictory, alternate systems of belief and behaviour which people believe in, and therefore live by, today.  I analysed three broad forms of belief and their associated ways of life: atheism, non-religious ‘spirituality,’ and organised ‘religion.’ The overarching message of the three talks was that ‘religion’ is the only stable option of the three, and that we therefore need to prepare to engage with the coming religious resurgence.  Because God really exists, atheism is radically wrong – it is wrong about the fundamental, foundational realities of the universe, therefore wrong about everything else – and is therefore unsurprisingly...

We live in a globalised world. The internet and social media has made it possible to communicate with people across the whole world at the speed of light. Relatively cheap air transport has made international travel more accessible more than ever before. Contemporary globalisation is the result of this international accessibility. People and ideas from across the world – especially from areas which used to be far away, therefore 'foreign' and different, 'exotic' – are now nearby and accessible. The 'other' has become our 'neighbour' – physically, electronically, or both. We may even speak of the situation of 'globality' – the mindset and expectation, brought on by the processes of globalisation, of having access to the apparently limitless options offered by the whole world.  This barrage of information can be exciting, exhausting, or frightening. It can be exciting because we can learn from different sources, and get different perspectives on ev...