The view from down under Down Under

Tasmania isn’t literally the end of the earth, but you can see it from here, and, like island communities everywhere, Tasmanians are fiercely independent and proud of where they live.

Jenny Cullen defines an island as ‘A place where people are usually nice to each other, nobody’s in a hurry, people stop and talk to each other on the street even in nasty weather, there are no secrets, and life just pretty much works the way it should most of the time. It’s not too complicated’. That’s what it’s like most of the time.

Vision 100

Hobart is Tasmania’s capital city and home to about 200,000 people. Vision 100 (http://www.vision100.org) came into existence in the year 2000. It began as a joint Presbyterian and Reformed ministry to reach the city of Hobart. The vision was to see 10% of the population under the gospel. We worked out that would require 100 new churches in Hobart. Since then the vision has spread to the rest of the state. It has evolved into a network of churches and para-church ministries co-operating together to reach Tasmania for Christ. What unites us is the conviction that the best way to evangelise Tasmania is to multiply churches and ministries. We are a diverse bunch of people. Just recently we have welcomed three new partners to our network:

Christian Connexion

Christian Connexion is a small group of committed Christians working together to plant household churches in Northern Tasmania. Brian Wilson, who heads up that initiative, writes, ‘We have chosen the household church model for three reasons: (1) because of the home’s natural and convenient environment in which to operate as the family of families (the church); (2) because of the ready-made atmosphere in which to interact with family and friends for mission; and (3) because household churches provide us with the opportunities and resources to multiply churches quickly, effectively and economically’.

The Branch

The Branch is a large independent Reformed church in Launceston, Tassie’s second largest city. It has an interesting history. Fred Van Hulst was converted under his own preaching, together with about 150 of his congregation, and found himself ‘put out’ of the rather narrow denomination they were then a part of. Now Fred together with Alistair Bain and a great team of elders are pioneering this new work in Kings Meadows, Launceston. Fred writes, ‘We would like to see gospel growth all over Tasmania. We support the idea that a big number of small, motivated churches is more effective in gospel ministry than a few huge churches in dense population areas’.

Focus

Focus is the AFES group at the University of Tasmania led by Sam Green. ‘We see the university as a strategic place for gospel ministry’, Sam writes. ‘We want to see more churches started and so train our students to serve in their churches.’

So far

Since 2000 in Hobart, we have seen two Presbyterian churches (Crossroads and Cornerstone) and three Christian Reformed churches (Bay, One Way and Summerleas) planted. Another Presbyterian plant started this year and Vision 100 has provided funding to help support Jim Mobbs as a pioneer church planter on Hobart’s eastern shore and to help support Luke Hansard as an AFES worker, alongside Sam Green, with overseas students at the university. Also we are trying to help revitalise one of Australia’s oldest congregational churches at Richmond, a tourist town just outside Hobart. We are looking out for a missionary to the Midlands, which is a sparsely populated, drought-hit area between Hobart and Launceston. Funding is coming in for all of these projects, and we are grateful to our supporters who share the vision.

Completing the task

Paul left Titus on the island of Crete to ‘straighten out what was unfinished’ (Titus 1.5), part of which was to appoint elders in every city.

We realise that, if the job is to be done, we need to take very seriously Paul’s exhortation to Timothy (2 Timothy 2.2) to pass on the baton to the next generation. Every year Vision 100 hosts the MTS Challenge conference (http://www.mts.com.au).

This year’s conference is at Camp Clayton, Ulverstone, from August 22 to 24, and speakers include Dave Thurston from Central Sydney Presbyterian Church, Mikey Lynch from Crossroads, Hobart, and Tracey Gowing from Sydney Uni. The aim is to challenge people to consider giving their lives to full-time ministry. Over the past eight years we have seen a few dozen go off from Tasmania to various colleges to train for gospel ministry, while others are staying put and investigating the option of church-based theological education (www.bild.org). This is not simply an exercise in career diversion. We are very conscious that we need to ‘ask the Lord of the harvest to raise up labourers’, but we expect that prayer to be answered largely from our own congregations.

Comparing islands

Crete is the largest island of Greece — the fifth largest in the Mediterranean — a diverse area of more than 8,000 square kilometers. Tasmania is at least eight times larger than Crete — an area of 68,401 square kilometers, but very sparsely populated, with a population of just under half a million people. Almost a third of the island is prehistoric wilderness. There are few centres of population. Our vision is to see those centres taken for the gospel, to see our cities littered with communities of light, to see the whole island criss-crossed with a network of like-minded gospel workers and gospel churches working together to make Christ known. We believe the gospel can have a very noticeable impact on an island community like Tassie, but we don’t want to be insular. As Christ’s followers, our eyes are on the world. We fully believe that Tassie could be a place where gospel workers are sent out into the global harvest.

Mainland Australia

If an island is ‘an area of land 100% surrounded by water’, that means we can speak of the Australian mainland as the north island. Tasmania is often overlooked because of its proximity to the continent of Australia. There was the famous occasion when it was inadvertently left off the map altogether. We are grateful for the help and encouragement we get from our Christian friends on the North Island. At the moment domestic travel is relatively cheap, though that is likely to change soon. We have been well served over these past eight years by visiting speakers and church leaders from the mainland, and we have been able to send our leaders to conferences and colleges for training. Today is a very good day to be a gospel worker in Australia. There are huge opportunities in our larger cities for cross-cultural mission. God has blessed us with strong godly leadership in some of our denominations, and some excellent theological educators, but there is still so much to do, so many still outside the Kingdom.

David Jones is minister of Crossroads Presbyterian Church, Hobart.

News from some churches in Tasmania