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How will they hear?

by LISA MCINTOSH

Two young Australians are leaving their families and taking their baby – and the gospel – to West Asia.

’‘You’ve got a new baby, and you’re doing what?’

It’s a question Mary and John have become somewhat used to as they prepare to head overseas to serve as volunteer cross-cultural workers – with baby James in tow.

The simplest and best answer is that they’re answering God’s call and following his lead to wherever he guides them, no matter what the cost.

Members of a Lutheran church in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, in South Australia, Mary and John will be going to serve people in West Asia for a time to be determined, but probably at least six years. In the interests of their security, The Lutheran is withholding their names, their exact destination and other details.

They’ll spend the first 12 months learning the local language and culture and building relationships with local people.

Then it will be a matter of what God has in store for Mary, a teacher in Lutheran schools, and John, a software engineer, both in their early 30s.

Their supporting agency Interserve Australia has identified a number of potential voluntary roles, possibly working with refugees, and, in Mary’s case, perhaps with children with autism.  The aim, as with many development roles, will be to train local people to do a needed job.

Their long-term service overseas has been arranged through the supporting agency, which has a Memorandum of Understanding with the Lutheran Church of Australia International Mission. They won’t be paid a wage while they are away, but will rather draw on a living allowance and medical cover from Interserve, which will be funded purely by regular donations from individual and church partners.

James will be just six months old when the trio hopes to leave Australia in April, and the young parents know that being away from their families at such a time in their lives will be difficult – on them and their loved ones.

However, Mary and John believe God is behind the move and offers reassurance in the Bible.

‘Mark chapter 10 has really spoken to me because it’s about giving up things, and we’re going to be leaving our families’, Mary says.

John adds: ‘Even though it’s going to be tough leaving, that’s been really encouraging to have Scripture like that’.

‘Having a baby made us think longer and harder about whether it was the right thing for us, but it didn’t ever change our minds. Once we started this journey towards going away, we met so many people with families and discovered that most of the people serving overseas have children.

‘It’s a sacrifice for the people who stay behind as well. Our families are sacrificing a lot and missing out on things. We realise it doesn’t affect just us, our going away.’

Indeed, their decision to leave their families, friends and church family, give up secure jobs and sell their house hasn’t been taken lightly. Nor has it been made overnight. The duo believes God has been working for years to prepare their hearts for this move.

After meeting Mary, John went on a short-term volunteer trip to Cambodia, organised through the LCA International Mission.

He says that once they started planning their wedding, the idea of ‘staying overseas, doing something meaningful’ became stronger.

Married in January 2012, they spent four months in Malaysia volunteering at Bethany Home (a school and accommodation for young people with disabilities), as part of an overseas trip.

Including that LCA International Mission-organised service as a component of an extended honeymoon did have friends and colleagues questioning whether it was a sensible move for newlyweds.

‘People thought that it would be
tough on our relationship’, Mary says. ‘But we found that it was better because we weren’t just going straight into (normal) life.’

At Bethany Home, Mary worked with students with a wide range of disabilities, and ran meetings to train staff, as well as developing resources for the local workers. That work moved her to do specialised study in the field of special education, which she continued after returning to Australia.

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Here we are, send us!

by Nathan Hedt

I am a missionary.

I heard God’s call and said, ‘Here I am, send me!’. And God said, ‘Okay then,
I will send you to Pakenham’.

Pakenham? A suburban satellite of Melbourne in the sprawling south-east of the city? That’s not a very exotic location for a missionary to be sent to, is it?

God has been shaping my life, my family, my calling, my community, and my church for many years, to bring
me to the point of being sent as a missionary.

My earliest years were cross-culturally shaped, as my dad and mum took our family to Tanzania when I was six months old. Dad worked with Lutheran World Service among refugees for four years. I grew up surrounded by African kids, and I spoke both Swahili and English.

As I grew older, I had a longing to be a pastor. Originally it was because I wanted to help people. But as my calling grew clearer, I knew that it was really because I wanted to share the life-giving, gracious news of Jesus with people. I’m an evangelist at heart. One of my greatest joys is communicating the gospel with people and seeing them ‘get it’, knowing that what God did through Jesus, he did for them.

Church planting and ‘mission to the West’ fascinate me. For almost 20 years I’ve researched, learnt, observed, and prayed about effective ways of making and multiplying disciples of Jesus. I recently completed a Masters of Arts in Theology, majoring in Missiology – the study of mission. My conviction has been steadily growing that we need ‘missionaries to the West’. We can no longer consider Australia a ‘Christian country’, and we need people who will sow the gospel in contextual ways in our secular, materialistic culture.

Sometimes I thought I wouldn’t find a call that would match my passion for church planting and mission within the church which nurtured my faith. So when the LCA developed a church-planting strategy through the Board for Local Mission (see breakout), I was very excited. Could my internal call to be a missionary possibly match God’s call through the church? And when a call as church-planting pastor and college pastor in Pakenham opened up, I knew that God was bringing things together. ‘Here I am, send me!’

But it’s not just me. God has been shaping my wife and family, too, to be missionaries and church planters along with me. ‘Here we are, send us!’

But it’s not just my family either. God has been preparing a committed group of his people in Pakenham for this church-planting and mission venture. In 2015 we have begun to learn how to live as missionaries in our local community. Who can we serve? How can we be family to each other? How can we learn to live and walk alongside the risen Jesus in everyday life? And how can we bring the good news of Jesus in natural, culturally appropriate ways to the people in our neighbourhoods so that they understand this is good news ‘for them’?

It’s a long journey, because many of us ‘established’ Christians don’t consider ourselves ‘missionaries’.
We have to learn new ways of being church and powerful ways of being community together. ‘Here is our Christian community – send us into our neighbourhood!’

What are we learning?

Mission is messy. It’s not linear. It involves both active servanthood and bold proclamation. It involves learning to configure our lives as a church community, not around ‘churchy stuff’ but around the gospel. We are doing this in Pakenham through groups called ‘Missional Communities’, or MCs. Our MCs meet weekly for a meal (or, in our case, dessert), to share God’s word and prayer, and to pray, think, plan and act in local mission. They are more than Bible study groups (which are great, but often focus on the growth and nurture of the Christians within them) because they have an intentionally outward mission and service focus. MCs are not just about us; they exist to be in mission to particular people around us.

In Pakenham some of us sense a call to be in mission to the families of Lakeside College, which connects with many people who may not yet be disciples of Jesus.

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The Godfather

by Tick Zweck

When Ern Heyne died, an entire city mourned.

Riding the tram in suburban Adelaide one day, I noticed the woman next to me fidgeting in her handbag one minute, peering intently out of the window the next. I asked whether she was okay and she responded she was from the country, and had no idea at which stop to get off. I said she could follow me as her destination was on my way.

We chatted and, when I discovered she hailed from Port Pirie, I asked if she had any connections with the Lutheran church there. She didn’t, and wanted to know why I had asked. I told her my mother’s eldest brother lived there, and she insisted I elaborate, so I inquired whether she knew of Ern Heyne. She answered incredulously: ‘Everyone knows Pastor Heyne!’.

A former primary school teacher, Ern made a huge impact on this large regional centre in the Mid-North of South Australia. Ordained in January 1964, he was installed in the Port Pirie Lutheran Church soon after, and continued to serve the city until he retired (officially) in December 1997.

In a civic reception in 2014 he was honoured for 50 years of service to Port Pirie. In 2012 he wrote in his regular column, ‘My Say’, in The Recorder, ‘When I was appointed as pastor of the Port Pirie Lutheran Church, there were people in the big smoke who, in their ignorance, said, “Port Pirie?” My simple response was “Yes. I prayed last night I would get Pirie”.’

He was bound to make an impact, though when he first arrived, sporting long hair and riding a motorbike, one parishioner inquired who he was!

This was a man who sincerely said, ‘Here I am, Lord, send me’. I’ve learnt that when you offer your service to God in gratitude, he will take you up on it, and use you to be his hands and feet to glorify him.

This was a match literally made in heaven. In his own inimitable style, he reckoned God thought, ‘Ern’s a bit rough, Pirie’s a bit rough; they’ll get on great’. He often said he would not want to be anywhere else: ‘I look into people’s faces and

I think, “Port Pirie is the most beautiful place in the world”’ (The Recorder, 18 September 2014).

Ern’s care for the people of Pirie was evident in the 2132 weekly columns (‘My Say’) he wrote for The Recorder spanning 41 years. His final message was on 19 November 2015, only 18 days before he died. Even when he was overseas visiting House of Hope, the children’s home he sponsored in Sumatra, or seeing his nephew working in Uganda, Ern submitted an article. Featuring both everyday issues and broader social topics, they ‘enlightened and inspired people, but also enraged some or caused strong debate’, according to an editorial in The Recorder (9 August 2011). I have read hundreds of the provocative pieces, infused with personal observations and childhood reminiscences. The latter were arguably to illustrate the importance he placed on faith, family values and forgiveness. The same editorial put it this way: ‘Ern is a quiet believer in his faith who has his say, but never forces his opinions on anyone.

 

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Tuck in, everyone!

by Rebecka Colldunberg

The ‘tuckshop’—it is an Australian institution. Sweaty children packed shoulder to shoulder, jostling and wriggling, peering desperately over the top of each other in the swarming, heaving lines, in order to catch a glimpse of what’s on offer. Is it burgers today? Sausage rolls? Chips? Apple muffins? Banana muffins? Hot dogs? Or, my personal favourite, the classic meat pie, which may or may not contain remnants of something that was once a cow. If the students are lucky, sauce is free.

Yes, the tuckshop. It is transcendental. It transcends gender, it transcends age and, at St Peters Lutheran College (SPLC) Springfield, Queensland, it transcends religion.

‘There was a time not too long ago when Lutheran schools were attended predominantly by Lutheran students’, SPLC chaplain Pastor Matt Wilksch explains. ‘But this is not the case in 2015. At St Peters Springfield, which was established in 2008, the proportion of students who identify as Lutheran has always been relatively small, while the number of students following other religions or having no religious affiliation is growing. So how do we conduct ministry to a culturally and spiritually diverse community?’

One way, arguably the most important way, is through hospitality. Anyone who has ever been on a diet; anyone who is vegetarian or gluten-intolerant; anyone with an allergy—in short, almost everyone—knows that to be excluded from a meal, albeit unintentionally and without malice, is one of the loneliest experiences a person can have.

With several Muslim children attending SPLC, the school has taken the step to provide a tuckshop menu which includes halal options.

Pastor Wilksch explains that it is through small gestures such as these that ‘students feel included, parents feel supported, trust between families and the school is fostered and Christ, who welcomes us, is honoured’.

The initiative is the brainchild of SPLC tuckshop convenor Shirley Thompson. ‘I had several parents approach me asking what sort of meat we were using in our menu’, explains the passionate British chef with more than 25 years of experience. ‘So I started making some inquiries into halal meat options.’

What Shirley found was a vast selection to choose from. Her next step was to speak with Pastor Matt and school principal Jill Lange-Mohr. ‘It did involve some soul-searching’, Shirley continued. ‘I wasn’t sure how the initiative would be accepted in a Christian school.’

As it turned out, Shirley found she had nothing to worry about—quite conversely, Jill was excited by the initiative. ‘Within the SPLC community it is important for us to be respectful and inclusive’, Jill said proudly.

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Longest Lutheran Welcome

by Andrea Cross

Lutherans are well known for putting on a ‘good spread’. Perhaps this stems from Martin Luther’s example of hosting his ‘Table Talk’ gatherings. Or could it be a more recent phenomena fostered by the bounty of blessings many of us share today? Ultimately, of course, it is Jesus who inspires our Longest Lutheran Lunch, with his example of hospitality to ‘the least of these’.

More than 100 Lutheran congregations and schools shared the gift of hospitality by taking part in the Longest Lutheran Lunch this year, as part of the celebration of the anniversary of the Reformation (31 October).

Registrations for this annual event included seven congregations in New Zealand and even one in Ontario, Canada. All Australian states and territories were represented, apart from Tasmania and the Northern Territory, with South Australia having the largest by Andrea Cross contingent of 27. Four primary schools, two secondary colleges and one agedcare facility were involved.

More than 50 congregations and schools took part for the first time.

The official registrations are not a true reflection of the number of congregations involved, however, as some nominated as a parish and invited two or more congregations to events.

Some lunches were held as early as June, while some were in late November. Only one congregation registered a lunch on 31 October.

Others changed the name completely to fit in with their activities. Some participants staged breakfasts or dinners. Members from Zion Lutheran Church, Vectis, in Victoria’s Wimmera region, combined their ‘lunch’ with their annual German Night, which drew more than 120 people, most of whom were not members of the church community.

Others to ‘turn German’ for their Longest Lutheran Lunch included St Peter’s Lutheran Church, Loxton, in South Australia’s Riverland on 8 November, and three congregations from Queensland’s Gold Coast, which met at St Andrews, Tallebudgera, on 1 November.

By contrast, several congregations from the Barossa Valley met at Moculta on 25 October, with an Australian flavour to their lunch, featuring campoven damper, lamb stew and Anzac biscuits on the menu.

A short distance away at Redeemer Lutheran School, Nuriootpa, more than 400 staff and students teamed the Longest Lutheran Lunch with their 150th anniversary, under the theme ‘Eating Together in Our 150th Year’. Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Witta, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, hit the front page of its local newspaper with lunchers dressed in period costume.

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God loves eating and drinking

by Tyson Stelzer

Fluoro lights flickered under the galvanised iron roof of the besserbrick shed at the bottom end of town. The floor was set with trestle tables, complete with disposable plates and plastic cutlery. The spit roast was firing. Men arrived with armloads of baguettes, women with giant containers brimming with salads and desserts.

It was dinnertime, to the roar of a hundred conversations, hoots of laughter, bad karaoke and so much wine.

Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, the tiny village in the middle of Champagne’s famed Côte des Blancs (area), is the home of Salon, the champagne house that makes just one cuvée and sells it for $700 a bottle. Just a moment away is Krug Clos du Mesnil, the most famous sparkling vineyard in the world. Its fruits sell for $2000 a bottle. Vineyard turf is never less than two million euros a hectare. I could hardly speak their language. I knew the names of just two people in the room. But I felt at home.

What if we spent more time sharing loaves and fishes with our neighbours than discussing theology? What if God is calling us to share the gospel in bread, wine and chocolate slice?

And that night I learnt something about church. When it comes to getting together over food and wine, I can’t help wondering whether God doesn’t have a higher purpose in mind.

Just take a look at Jesus’ social calendar. His first miracle was to turn water into wine at a wedding banquet.

Matthew 11: ‘The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners”’. Was Jesus a glutton and a drunkard? Of course not. But so vital was the ritual of eating and drinking with sinners for Jesus that he was mistaken for a glutton and a drunkard.

In Jesus’ culture, to eat and drink with somebody was to publicly extend to them acceptance, friendship, love. Jesus ate and drank with the most unlikely, disreputable and unholy candidates. When Jesus saw Zacchaeus in a tree, he said, ‘Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.’ We don’t know what was said that night, but we do know that before the end of it, Zacchaeus announced that he would turn his life around.

Matthew was a tax collector when Jesus arrived at his house for dinner. Before dessert was over, Matthew was a disciple.

The Pharisees asked Jesus’ disciples why he ate with tax collectors and sinners. They queried why he didn’t fast. They criticised his disciples for picking and eating grain on the Sabbath. Jesus threw out their legalistic restrictions on what one can and cannot eat. And Jesus knew all about hospitality. When 5000 men plus women and children were hungry, Jesus fed them with five loaves and two fish. When the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples, he cooked them a barbecue on the shores of Lake Galilee.

How did Jesus describe heaven? Like a wedding banquet and a great feast. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus said, ‘I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer’. I don’t think it was any accident he chose bread and wine and the ritual of a meal as the way he communes with us. You see, I believe in a God who loves eating and drinking.

And he always has. Back in Israel’s history they put together a tent to show that God wanted to be with his people. It had a table. It had a pitcher of wine and the bread of the presence of God. In Psalm 23, God prepares a table to sit me down with my enemies and, in sharing a meal with them, he will affect reconciliation.

And it is about fun, too. Ecclesiastes 9:7: ‘Eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart’. You see, God loves eating and drinking. And he has set us up to love it, too. Of all the miraculous complexities of our bodies, scientists tell us that smell and taste are the deepest mysteries of all. Not just that no-one knows how we smell, but that we should be able to do it at all. Scientists now believe that we can distinguish between one trillion different smells. God has engineered your nose as one of the most complex mechanisms in all of creation. Why? Because God loves eating and drinking. But what if it’s more than that? What if our open invitation to our homes could create connections with neighbours…

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Getting your church Christmas-ready

by Dean Eaton

How do you get ready to welcome newcomers into your congregation during the Christmas season ?

When visitors decide to attend your church, how will they know where you are and what days and times you will be holding services or events?

What kind of welcome will they receive, and how will they feel as they go away after attending your Christmas service(s)? Here are six tips to improve your welcome, and ideas to maximise this opportunity for sowing the gospel this Christmas.

Advertising

Invest in a good-sized, attractive advertisement in the ‘Christmas services’ section of your local newspaper. If you have a website or Facebook page, place your address and service times clearly on the front pages. Within council limitations, hang some Christmas lights and signs advertising your services and events at least two weeks prior to Christmas Day.

Prepare your church buildings

Ensure the cleanliness of your buildings and grounds. If you are having multiple Chris Ensure sufficient parking for the services. Request that regular members leave the best car parks for visitors. Ensure your toilets and baby facilities are well signposted inside the building, and consider including them in a building map in any handouts and/or on a pre-service PowerPoint slide.

Prepare your welcome team

Roster on extra ushers and welcomers for your Christmas services. Train the team to smile. The body language of those they meet is what visitors will observe first and remember. Hand out breath mints to all welcome team members. Have the welcome team wear a special t-shirt or welcome badge.

Seating

Ask your members to sit up front, leaving the back rows for visitors, who are likely to arrive late and may even leave if the only seats available for them are in the front rows. You’ll still need to bear in mind, however, that visitors need to be able to see what’s going on, for example, parents like to see their children in a Christmas play.

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Where love comes to life

… in the water

Baptism—the sacrament that brings us God’s grace, that washes us clean of our sin and that brings us as Christians into God’s family. It’s where it all begins for us, so it was fitting that Convention began with our remembering it in a special way. At the opening service (and also at the closing service) the bishops were accompanied in procession by children. They gathered together around the baptismal font, where the bishops dipped their fingers into the water, blessed the children with the sign of the cross, and then the children did the same to bless the bishops.

It was a powerful reminder that we are brought into Christ’s family, not by our natural birth, but by being born again in baptism, and that we come together in need of God’s grace and forgiveness.

… in bread and wine

Every morning delegates, visitors and volunteers came together in worship and at the Lord’s table. Every morning the bishops were there to serve us.

Day by day, it became increasingly evident that there was more than simple goodwill holding us together as Synod. God was working in us, too, through this daily meal with Christ himself and all the saints.

The daily celebration of holy communion may have, at first, appeared to some to be an indulgence we could not afford in a tightly scheduled convention, but half way through the week nobody was complaining. In fact, many were asking, ‘Can we make this a regular feature of Convention? Can we have Eucharistic worship every day?’ Feedback from delegates and visitors is consistently rating ‘daily communion services’ as a soaring highlight of Convention.

… in the word

Over the six days of Convention, we travelled through the six chapters of Ephesians. Each day one of our bishops used a chapter as the foundation of his sermon. Full texts of the six sermons were published daily (and are still available) at www.lcasynod.org.au/sermons. In addition, an innovation at this convention was a daily devotion booklet, presented to delegates and available for everyone to read or download from the convention website. We were invited to read one chapter of Ephesians each day and to reflect prayerfully on the notes provided by the bishop preaching that day. The notes were accompanied by striking black-and-white photographs by Geoff Schirmer, which were also projected during worship in the chapel each day.

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ORDINATION We listened

Thursday

It was about half an hour into the session before we realised something in the room had changed. There was a constant low buzz of voices, punctuated by soft, polite laughter. There was concentration on delegates’ faces as they leaned across the circular tables to better hear speakers. There were smiles, and soft hand gestures.

Ordination Dialogue Group (ODG) co-chair Pastor James Haak was smiling. ‘We’ve done about five dialogues now, and this part is always the same’, he said.

If you couldn’t be at Convention, it’s possible that all you heard was the ballot result. But delegates, who had listened deeply to each other and prayed together, heard something else … the pain, the fear, the grief, of a brother or sister.

‘First, delegates pair up, and each gets to describe their own journey with the ordination question. Then they share their partner’s story with the rest of the people at their table.

‘This session is empowering. To share tell the story of someone whom they may not agree with, but have been asked to understand … it means that delegates can no longer view the other as the enemy. Instead, they come to see each other as a brother or a sister in Christ.’

At the end of the day, as delegates gathered again in the light of the Christ candle, we prayed once more that the his light would shine in this place, that his love would come to life here, where 420-plus delegates are tackling a difficult conversation, in his name.

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team@work

It’s impossible to tally the hours that national, district and local planning teams contributed in order to create the best convention experience possible for delegates and visitors.

The national team consisted of some old hands (this was Linda Macqueen’s sixth General Convention), but there were some new faces, too. This was the first time Bishop John Henderson had chaired General Convention, and he received much commendation for his professionalism and even-handedness. In a break with tradition, the chair was assisted, officially, by a consultant with experience and expertise in constitutions and meeting procedures. The onthe- spot advice of Fred Kleinschmidt (pictured centre right), a lawyer, allowed Bishop Henderson to pay attention not only to the business, but also to the people and the spirit of Convention.

Also supporting Synod, out of the limelight, was Geraldine Hawkes (top right), Executive Officer of South Australian Council of Churches. Prior to Convention and during it, Geraldine offered insightful guidance to the church’s leaders and the ordination dialogue team for the conduct of the dialogue and debate sessions. For example, the daily journey of the Christ candle from the chapel into the business sessions was Geraldine’s idea, as were some of the symbolic candle-lighting and extinguishing rituals.

The planning team is indebted to Geraldine and Fred for their fresh approach and innovative contributions.

Working hard behind the scenes—for two years prior to Convention, and during it—was LCA Business Manager Debbie Venz (above) and her support crew, including the ever-attentive minute secretaries. Debbie played the leading role in operational and logistics management across all of Convention, including the agenda of the business sessions.

 

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