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by Sheree Schmaal

They say music is a universal language. A young Lutheran composer is using it to help audiences discover God the creator.

Humans speak more than 6500 different languages. Yet God’s word—as recorded in the Bible— has been fully translated into only 531 of these. Another 2352 have at least one book of the Bible translated—but that’s still fewer than 40 per cent of languages.

They say music is a universal language. So wouldn’t it make sense to have a musical translation of the Bible?

It could be called the New Instrumental Version—an album of 66 tracks that translate God’s word into melodies and harmonies, and reveal the glory of his creation, power and saving grace not through words or lyrics but through instruments, notes, rhythms and keys …

But is it really possible for the Holy Spirit to speak through music?

Composer Kym Dillon believes it is. The 25-year-old member and musician at St Paul’s Lutheran Church Grovedale, Victoria, sees music as ‘a sort of language that can communicate aspects of God that are very difficult to convey through mere words alone’.

His compositions—including two largescale orchestral pieces commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO)—are not overtly Christian or ‘sacred’. Yet he says it’s impossible to separate his creations from his faith in God as his creator.

‘I am fascinated with the human creative process, and our abilities to be creative artists, considering we ourselves are the result of God’s artistic creation, and are also made in his image’, Kym says.

‘I often reflect on my own creative process as a composer through this lens of our God as, among other things, an artist.’

These reflections are explored in Kym’s 2012 and 2014 works for the MSO, LOGOS and Liber Creatorum.

The Victorian College of the Arts graduate says he has found Liber Creatorum (Latin for ‘book of creation’ or ‘book of the creatures’) a great place to start when sharing the gospel with non-believers.

The eight-minute orchestral piece centres around Kym’s interest in natural theology. He believes that if you look at the universe in all its complexity and beauty, and trace these things back in time to their origins and simplest parts, you will find clues about its creation by a divine force, and what the nature of that divine force may be.

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by Nick Mattiske

Christianity has a long—some would say indispensable—history of pacifism. At the very least, followers of the one who asked us to turn the other cheek should be wary of war and its promoters.

This anniversary year, as we are bombarded with war imagery, in a climate where the television industry, breweries and sporting codes all cash in on the Anzac legend, how can we Christians be critical of war without disrespecting the war dead? How do we remember them without glorifying war?

First, we need to avoid oversimplification, including the idea that the Great War was inevitable, or that it was simply a case of sober Britain responding to German hotheadedness. Lately, some fine research has solidified into books such as Gordon Martel’s The Month That Changed the World, which covers the month after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo. Martel surveys the complex political and diplomatic manoeuvring as multiple European powers with their elaborate system of alliances and agreements delicately moved around each other, eventually becoming hopelessly entangled. Or so it seemed. There were opportunities to halt the march, with many working frantically for peace, even though in the end they were lost opportunities.

A select few wielded power undemocratically, and often secretly. This was accentuated by erratic and eccentric personalities, such as the German Kaiser, who was, at various stages, a sabre-rattler, a peace-activist, and maddeningly indecisive. Like most people, these elite were contradictory. They played dangerous games while fully aware that millions of lives were at risk. One persistent myth is that these figures couldn’t envisage the extent of the coming Armageddon, but they could— and were horrified by the prospect—but in the end a mix of fatalism, inability and pride succeeded in making their nightmares come true. War is not simply the product of impersonal forces but of sinful human beings.

Australian historian Douglas Newton argues that Britain’s participation in the war was far from unavoidable, but that some in government were more than reluctant participants. Prime Minister Asquith’s liberal cabinet was split, and early on most were desperate for peace (which would have, of course, kept Australia out of the war). But the great debate was steered and ultimately silenced by the warmongers, not least among them Winston Churchill.

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by John Schubert

For many of us with German heritage, this year’s commemorations of World War I might create an uneasy tension.

After all, for generations Germany was seen as the spiritual and cultural heartland of Australian Lutherans— notwithstanding the fact that many of our ancestors came from Prussia, or from the many other smaller Germanspeaking states. These states only became ‘Germany’ long after the Lutheran immigration to Australia, and decades before 1914. Such distinctions rarely registered in the public imagination, however, particularly as the Great War branded all things ‘Prussian’ as synonymous with aggressive militarism.

In the stereotypical eyes of popular culture, at least, the land of Luther and the Reformation, of Bach and Goethe, was also the land of the ‘murderous Hun’, led by a war-mongering Kaiser. The war memorials standing sentinel across the country are mute witnesses that condemn the monstrous conflict that took away the innocence of Australian manhood, and left a legacy of grief which has passed down generations.

For those of us with a ‘mixed’ ethnic heritage, this tension can be even more personal. My maternal ancestry is Anglo-Celtic, and I grew up with my mother’s soulful litany of war deaths. Her uncle died on the Somme in September 1918. That auburnhaired boilermaker from Port Adelaide succumbed to his wounds as the hellish trench warfare ground slowly to its inevitable conclusion. The news of his death came to his brother (my grandfather) at the north Wimmera flour mill where he worked. The date was 11 November, and the telegraph boy had pedalled his message of loss through a town resounding to the cries of ‘Armistice’.

Then there was the old digger who lived across the street as my mother was growing up. Every so often, the unending war in his head would prove too much and he would seek consolation in a bottle. Alcohol and the effects of poison gas made a corrosive cocktail, and my grandfather would be called over to restrain him until the doctor arrived to administer a merciful, if temporary, oblivion.

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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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