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by Julie Hahn

‘Are you excited yet?’ we asked Otoli, Ariet and Jackson two months ago.

The immigration papers for their family to come from Dadaab Refugee Camp, in Kenya, were in their hands. To us, it was evidence that our prayers of four and a half years were being answered.

But to our question, ‘Are you excited yet?’ their answer was ‘No, not yet’.

Over the past couple of months, that question has been asked of them many, many times. When we knew that the medical checks had been passed; when the children had safely returned to the camp from their long and dangerous trip to the Australian embassy in Nairobi; when bribe after bribe had been paid to officials; when the International Organisation of Migration had accepted payment for the airline tickets; when the flight schedule arrived in an email …

Still their answer was ‘No, not yet’.

How could they dare to get excited, when for ten years they hadn’t seen their children? The children had been left with their grandmothers in Ethiopia when Otoli and Ariet had run for their lives, carrying little Jackson in their arms. They hoped then, that by splitting the family, at least one of them might survive.

‘Are you going to have a party?’ we asked Otoli in the few days before the plane was scheduled to arrive.

‘No. I would rather give thanks to God. And I want to thank the people at the church.’ He explained that at times when he felt as though he should give up hope that he would ever see his children again, someone from the church would ask, ‘How are things going? Are your children coming soon? We’re continuing to pray.’

When he looked forward to having their children come here a couple of years ago, there were not enough humanitarian visas available to meet every desperate cry for help. When it looked like they could come, Australia had a change of government and a change in policy; when it looked like they would come, a grandchild and husband were added to the equation (so that the process had to begin again). Every time his hope had run out, Otoli was comforted that others were praying. And he was encouraged to hope again.

Even as we stood together, watching the first of the passengers walking from the plane onto the gangway and into customs area below us, Ariet’s answer was still ‘No, not yet’. Otoli’s smile, though, grew wider and wider.

‘My heart is going boom, boom, boom inside my chest!’ he said. Jackson, now fourteen and taller than his dad, maintained his Aussie-teenager

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by Rosie Schefe

‘If I were in Africa, I would be very old’, Baindu loudly declares. ‘In Africa every day is hard work.’

‘You have to go bush to get wood before you can cook. You walk half an hour to get water. Anything you need, you have to walk long distance. You put wood on the fire all the time until cooking is finished. You sleep and you cook in the same place, very smoky’.

Not that hard work frightens this widow, mother of seven children and grandmother of ten. After seven years in Australia, Baindu is still working hard to give her family the best possible chance of success in this country.

The women are all from different countries; we all met here. We are building a foundation for each family.

Baindu comes from Liberia in West Africa, where bloody civil war is a recent memory. She took her children to uncertain refuge in neighbouring Sierra Leone following the death of her husband.

‘They would chase people for money. If you would not give them money, then they would kill you.’ Baindu and her family spent eight years in refugee camps in Sierra Leone before they came to Australia in 2007. ‘We came here and everything is good— even if you’re not married they help you a lot’, she says. For Baindu, whose own literacy is poor, education has been a top priority. While in Sierra Leone some of her children were sponsored to go to school, but when sponsorship ran out, they had to pay. Medication was also difficult to obtain without access to money. Now, she says, her children speak good English and the two still living at home are in school (a son in Year 10 and a daughter in Year 11). She has very high hopes for them.

I met Baindu over lunch at the Lutheran Community Sewing Group (LCSG), which gathers at Good News Lutheran Church in Albert Park, a north-western suburb of Adelaide with its own high migrant population. It was Baindu’s graduation day, an acknowledgement of her persistence and new levels of skill. Although she began to sew on ancient pedal machines in refugee camps, now she can use an electric machine, she understands the uses of different fabrics and can read a sewing pattern for herself.

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by Fiona Weckert

Young adults – who are they and where are they?

It can be difficult to define a young adult. The Australian Bureau of Statistics records young adults as between 18 and 34 years of age. Some would argue you’re a young adult at 16 and still a young adult at 38! Often the church refers to a young adult as someone aged between 18 and 24, but then where do you fit after the age of 24 if you aren’t a ‘young married’ or ‘new parent’ or are still living at home (a ‘kidult’)? It’s a challenging time for the church, but an equally challenging time for young adults.

Early in 2014 Lutheran Youth of Queensland (LYQ) conducted an online survey of young adults aged 18–25 to find out how they view themselves, their faith and their church.

Of the 321 persons who responded, 283 identified as Christian, 22 as non- Christian and 16 as ‘sort-of’ Christian. Two hundred responders had grown up in the Lutheran church and around 85 per cent of them still identify as Lutheran. Most (257 survey responders) attend worship at least monthly, with almost 72 per cent of them attending church each week.

It is important here to remember that this survey group is very small: the majority of them come from the 20 per cent of young people who have stuck with the church and with faith in some way. Other research tells us that we lose 80 per cent of young people who were connected to the church as children by the time they become adults. Christian researcher Phillip Hughes estimates that this is as many as 50,000 young people every year from Australian churches.

All survey answers were given anonymously. Questions were asked around several main themes, most of them with set options to choose from.
These included:

• the experience of transition to new congregations and the extent of preparation for such an event;
• the spiritual background and current spiritual activity of family;
• aspects of a faith journey to this point, including youth group and Christian Life Week attendance, family devotions/faith talk and times of ‘wandering away from the faith’;
• spirituality and current church attendance of friends;
• for all regular and non-regular worshippers, two free-field questions:

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by Ruth Brisbane

After many years of prayer, fundraising and hard work, the West Australian District and St Johns Lutheran Church in Perth have completed their major project: a striking modern building set next to the historic inner city church.

The Bible has endless stories and images, so I was in my element

The new building is multipurpose. Stage One provides a church hall, kitchen, meeting rooms and offices for the congregation and district, as well as lease income from its tenancies and car park. But it is the exterior walls of the car park that will serve as a statement of faith to passers-by.

When St Johns building committee learnt that planning regulations required one per cent of the project costs to be spent on public art, they seized the opportunity to present gospel images to the surrounding community. The striking metal artwork produced also serves the security and ventilation requirements of the lower level car park.

The sculptured panels were created by shaping and welding solid steel bars and plate, completed with a galvanised finish to create a silver-grey colour.

Artist Voytek Kozlowski was excited by the commission. ‘The Bible has endless stories and images, so I was in my element’, he said.

It was a joy for the St Johns committee and Pastor Andre Meyer to work with Voytek, who understood so well the message behind the images. Voytek was raised in Poland where, he says, his first exposure to visual art came within his boyhood church. As a child he loved to gaze at the wooden carvings that covered the walls, and these images continue to inspire him today. But these days Voytek is drawn to the permanence of working with metal. ‘When I am gone, this will still be here’, he said.

St Johns’ Pastor Andre Meyer described the significance of the images stretching across the six panels:

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by Stuart Gray

What a joyous occasion!

On 9 November, more than 500 people were privileged to experience the joy and excitement of witnessing the dedication of a new church building, at Shepparton, in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley. Celebrations were particularly jubilant, as the congregation’s African choirs’ rhythmic singing exuded praise, thanks, honour and glory to God.

The opening of the new St Paul’s Lutheran church was the culmination of a wonderful story of God’s grace to a small, struggling congregation and to people who had fled their countries, losing all that they had owned.

They saw the Lutheran church as their ‘mother’

The emphasis of the day was not on the journey to get to this point but on the new beginning that the dedication of St Paul’s represents.

Rev Matt Anker of St Paul’s summed it up succinctly: ‘The building is complete, but the journey has just begun’.

But the journey towards the completed building is a story worth telling.

Before Pastor Matt took up his call to Shepparton in February 2007, he was advised by then St Paul’s chairperson, Bev Schumacher, that a couple of Africans had been worshipping with them for a few months. African refugees had begun to arrive in Shepparton and, because they had come to know Jesus in the Lutheran church back home and were then cared for in refugee camps run by Lutheran World Service, they saw the Lutheran church as their ‘mother’. They wanted to be part of the church in Australia too.

First were Baharti and his family from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—and they alone increased the size of the congregation by one-third. Then came more families—from the DRC, from South Sudan and Burundi.

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