~ Mission to Australia

It would seem that the vision the imperialists in control of the British Parliament in the decade prior to the first colonization of Australia may be coming home to harvest. I don’t know how well it is known nowadays but the British Government felt no need to civilize the local inhabitants let alone to Christianize them. In fact as a “Penal Colony” it served the administration to leave them “out there, and as savage as possible” because it made it easier to keep the prisoners under control.

In a sense my opening paragraph had a healthy dose of skepticism mixed wih a reasonable amount of historical truth. Australia was settled as a dumping ground for Britain’s criminal element. This was no reformatory; our founding fathers were the hard core sinners that Jesus had announced He came for to seek and to save.

So now two hundred and thirty years later this nation of “reformed descendants’ having had religion foisted upon it by an enlightened later administration is heading back to the point that many of the original ancestors were supposed to have come from.

The organized church is seen as in decline both statistically, with people voting with their feet, and from the standpoint of an orbit of influence. There are two reasons for this perception. First is that the church is increasingly seen as irrelevant by those looking from the outside, and the second reason it that the forces of antichurch are making increasingly aggressive probes to weaken the churches claims to be the primary moral arbitrator.

Ten or fifteen years ago Sue and I used to teach Religious Instruction in state schools up the country. We were constantly amazed at the amount of Bible illiteracy among the kids in the classes that we taught. Given that Sue’s kids would have been around ten at the time, they would possibly be starting families now and if their illiteracy has not been resolved then they would be the parents of the next generation of Bible illiterates.

So then where do we go from here? It seems obvious to me that we need to have a major public education program to increase general biblical literacy. It is impossible to discuss an issue from the Bible if at least one of the one of the discussion members is unaware of, or worse, has their perception warped by twisted interpretation; and unfortunately it is often believers who are the uninformed.

We need to build a primary mission mentality into our daily life, given that Australia has a major ethnic composition, I think the number of people groups extant in Australia is in three figures. This means that the opportunity is there to reach out to about 160 people groups who still use their native heart language. There is yet another mission group that we need to reach out to. This is the English speaking “currency” people who have had no exposure to the Good News of Christ Jesus.

This is the good news, Jesus ‘Great Commission to Go make Disciples and teach obedience, can be done without even needing to learn a second language or leave home. The bad news is that if we do not stand up for the Master, then the way that Australia goes downhill will be down to us directly.