What is the least evangelised country in the world? Africa, Asia, South America, the lands of the 10/40 window? The countries of the former Soviet Union? True, these are all poorly reached countries, but let me put forward another destination.
A continent barren not only spiritually, but also physically: Antarctica. 26 countries contribute towards a summer population of 10,000 in small bases on the world's most remote continent and yet in all but a few cases, such as at the American bases where chaplains are included on the staff, God's representation is conspicuous only by its absence.
I have spent two summer seasons working as a scientist at an Antarctic research station for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). A season's work involves four months away from the UK between November and March. Only half of that time is spent carrying out work and the rest of the time is spent in transit; from England to the Falklands by aeroplane, and then from there to the frozen continent by ship. That time is shared with approximately 50 others, some of whom are known from working at BAS headquarters in Cambridge, but the majority are complete strangers from professional and social classes that are seldom encountered in the closed life of academia at home. A small number of people spend a two year period in the Antarctic, including winters when there are three months of darkness. Each year BAS sends nearly 300 such scientists, support staff and ships crews down to the Antarctic and yet I have only heard of one other Christian apart from myself making the journey.
Maintaining faith
So, how easy is it to maintain a Christian impetus in such an isolated, secular environment? Well, there are two main obstacles to faith encountered, firstly, the problem of remaining spiritually self-disciplined for that length of time, and secondly, fulfilling the Christian responsibility to evangelise under these conditions.
Working in the Antarctic releases you from the context of conventional living and therefore self-discipline becomes important, not just spiritually but in other ways too. There are numerous opportunities to indulge yourself through eating and drinking as well as sexually.
Maintaining an active relationship with Christ in this environment suffers similar problems to maintaining a human relationship. When you are at home, keeping human relationships strong is easy as people are close and time is unlimited. However, introduce distance in a relationship, restrict time of contact, and maintaining stability is much harder. Misunderstandings arise more frequently and are harder to rectify. Love is tested when its sustenance is restricted to memories and when strangers become more familiar than friends. Similarly with faith. Although God is no further from you when you are in the Antarctic than he is on the High Street at home, the absence of the psychological supports of faith established through an active church life at home lead to an apparent distancing from your spiritual anchor. It is important to realise this because when participating in a close, secular society with no Christian focus, your migration from Christ can go on subtly and unnoticed.
In the wilderness
Paradoxically, Antarctica allows for both close intimacy with and great separation from God. Here the familiarity of home life is replaced by a cultural depravation similar to how the Israelites must have felt during their years in the wilderness. There is a sense of need which naturally brings you closer to God and reveals his providence. Then there is the Antarctic itself. Modern urban life can be very detached from creation, concentrated more on the man-made than the God-made environment, but Antarctica is raw creation and its description lies beyond the superlative. If creation is this awesome, how much more magnificent must the Creator himself be?
And yet the sinful nature lives even here. During a discussion about faith, a wintering friend of mine told me he had never seen such godlessness as existed here. The wintering team live as an isolated community. Detached physically and emotionally from the outside world, the only rules are those set by their own morality, distancing themselves from God, although he is literally just outside their door. The same is true to a lesser extent during the shorter summer season. For some people, the Antarctic is a land outside the real world and so they behave according to that belief. As a Christian, in order to avoid falling into this lifestyle, you have to make the effort to regularly and constantly return to Christ, as he is now your framework on which every action you do is based.
Talking to others
Once you have this anchor established, then you have a base for evangelism. Working in the Antarctic provides an ideal opportunity, combining access to a large cross-section of people with ample time for friendships to develop. The upside of this is that it allows you to gain people's respect and therefore avoid personal prejudices about Christianity. This year we spent a month stuck in sea-ice on the ship which gave plenty of time for talking. Since evangelism should not be a suit you only wear on special occasions, but shoes for the everyday walk of life, talk of God inevitably arose. I am prepared to challenge other people's philosophies on life, because I think that few people these days have a philosophy on life. I try not to say that I am right and they are wrong, but what I do say is that I have a point of view with a personal and historical basis and ask whether they do.
The downside of the social claustrophobia which exists in the Antarctica is, of course, that you have to show by your actions that what you say is what you do and that your faith is something worth having. Unlike conventional evangelism, you cannot save up all the bad things to do when the preaching is over, your whole lifestyle is constantly in view and constantly under scrutiny. It highlights your own personal imperfections, because inevitably over that period of time with the same group of people not only is there the risk of aspects of their behaviour rubbing off on you, but your own spiritual failings will be exposed.
One careless act can undermine a month's careful evangelism.
Thus, the first lesson you have to learn is that whilst trying to fulfil Paul's objective of being all things to all men, your own inadequacies will mean that you can only expect to be a few things to a few of them. Doing a mental poll of my most recent seasons, probably half of the 60 people were aware of me being a Christian. Of those, I was able to talk to about ten in any depth. Of those, maybe five found discussion of any relevance to their own developing personal philosophies and of those for only one was it significant, but even then not life-changing.
Different hammers
But are numbers important? I don't act this way to convert people, because I know that only God can achieve that. We are all different hammers delivering different blows and one day one hammer will break one heart of stone. If that is mine then great, but God gets the glory whoever makes the final blow. I keep raising my hammer because I am convicted, because it is the way I life my life, because I see so many unhappy people who seem not to know how to live their lives, because I like to provoke people into thinking about something beyond the unbearable lightness of being, because God has blessed me so much that I want to and ought to share that with everybody, and the list goes on.
After two summer seasons in this environment, I feel confident that, ultimately, God's provision for us outweighs any hardships we might have to undergo, if we let it. The human spirit seems often so reluctant to accept the blessing that God wants for us, but if we can master the ability to orientate ourselves in God's direction and maintain the line of communication between him and ourselves, then there should be no restriction to spiritual growth and witness, whether we find ourselves in the Antarctic or in Aldershot.
Martin Varley
