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8/7/2019 MMW Mission to Australia
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Mission to Australia
It would seem that the vision the imperialists in control of the British Parliament in thedecade prior to the first colonization of Australia may be coming home to harvest. Idon¶t know how well it is known nowadays but the British Government felt no need tocivilize the local inhabitants let alone to Christianize them. In fact as a ³Penal Colony´
it served the administration to leave them ³out there, and as savage as possible´because it made it easier to keep the prisoners under co ntrol.
In a sense my opening paragraph had a healthy dose of skepticism mixed wih areasonable amount of historical truth. Australia was settled as a dumping ground for Britain¶s criminal element . This was no reformatory; our founding fathers were thehard 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 ³reformed descendants¶having had religion foisted upon it by an en lightened later administration is headingback to the point that many of the original ancestors were supposed to have comefrom.
The organized church is seen as in decline both statistically, with people voting withtheir 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 thoselooking from the outside, and the second reason it that the forces of antichurch aremaking increasingly aggressive probes to weaken the churches claims to be theprimary moral arbitrator.
Ten or fifteen years ago Sue and I used to teach Religious Instruction in stateschools up the country. We were constantly amazed at the amount of Bible illiteracyamong the kids in the classes that we taught. Given that Sue¶s kids would have beenaround 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 nextgeneration of Bible illiterates.
So then where do we go from here? It seems obvious to me that we need to have amajor public education program to increase general biblical literacy. It is impossibleto discuss an issue from the Bible if at least one of the one of the discussionmembers is unaware of, or worse, has their perception warped by twistedinterpretation; and unfortunately it is often believers who are the uninformed.
We need to build a primary mission mentality into our daily life, given that Australiahas a major ethnic composition, I think the number of people groups extant inAustralia is in three figures. This means that the opportunity is there to reach out toabout 160 people groups who still use their native heart language. There is yetanother mission group that we need to re ach out to. This is the English speaking³currency´ people who have had no exposure to the Good News of Christ Jesus.
This is the good news, Jesus µGreat Commission to Go make Disciples and teachobedience, can be done without even needing to learn a secon d language or leavehome. The bad news is that if we do not stand up for the Master, then the way thatAustralia goes downhill will be down to us directly.