Australia

November/December 2006

This trip was our “final project” for the Horizon School of Evangelism–we had to (in groups) organize, plan, and execute a five week mission trip. Normally the “internship” is a six week trip, but since we’d already taken two weeks to go to Korea to help out with the Festival of Life, it was shortened a little bit. We were free to pick wherever we wanted to go, though there were a lot of technical requirements such as working under the leadership of a reputable local contact in the destination country, and the purpose of your trip being related to your sense of ministry calling.

When I first heard Australia was one of the internship options, I wasn’t even considering it. It sounded too much like a vacation destination, not a “serious” missions destination, and besides, I was always convinced I’d visit New Zealand long before I visited Australia. People don’t go to Australia to do “serious” missions work do they? God totally broke down my attitude though and gave me a change of heart. Since I felt my ministry calling being missions ministry, ANY of the trips would be applicable which is not terribly helpful when you’re trying to narrow down your options and make a selection. One of the other teams was planning to go to Africa, and I’ve definitely felt a tug on my heart for that continent, however, I was not enthused about the particular type of ministry they were planning on doing there, it just wasn’t my thing. So I went and talked with one of the team members about what I wanted to do, and asked, aren’t there any trips where I could do something like work with college kids or do teaching? And then Amanda suggested to me “What about Australia? They’re going to work with the schools.”

So then I started to consider the idea. And the more I considered it, the more I could see how God was carving out a unique place on the team just for me, that there were opportunities uniquely suited to my abilitities and interests that I might not have had if I had chosen a different internship option. The Australia team needed a communcations person to blog or email updates about our progress and prayer requests to our prayer warriors back home. The church in Australia that we were going to work with needed a little IT support. Others in my class had said (after I presented a devotional in class for an assignment) they thought I had the gift of teaching, but I really wasn’t confident one way or the other whether that was one of my spiritual gifts, so I was looking forward to the opportunity to test whether that was a spiritual gift of mine. They say the way you discover your spiritual gifts is through attempting to exercise them.

Before the trip there was a lot of prep-work we had to do. Aside from the logistical stuff like fundraising and ordering airplane tickets (which praise the Lord somehow came in several hundred dollars under budgeted! Only the Lord can work that one…) and coordinating transportation to LAX (its considerably cheaper to drive 2 hours up to LAX and fly from there than to fly out of San Diego), we also had ministry preparation to do. One of our assignments was to write a plan for what our ministry goals were, a mission statement that then was broken down into specific objectives, and punch-lists of things we needed to do to prepare for those objectives. The mission statement we wrote was:

Our mission is to purposefully invest five weeks to impact the youth of Castle Hill, Australia with sharing the love and power of Jesus Christ. We will do this through the contribution of evangelism, outreach to schools, assisting with two major planned events of Calvary Chapel Sydney (Youth Camp and Cafe Outreach), and through church support.

I’ll spare you the full multi-page report of our plans and just summarize the highlights.

Under our evangelism objective we had a lot of ideas such as teaching the youth group a drama and performing it at a local university, doing street evangelism, and teaching a workshop on evangelism at the church. We planned to work with the high school and university christian groups, thinking it might be like our experience in Poland where groups went in to a number of schools and held assemblies on issues relevant to youth with a bible-based perspective, but without being a religious lesson. Our contact in Australia was the pastor of Calvary Chapel of Sydney; he had apparently came and spoke at the School of Evangelism a couple semesters prior, so it was very easy to get the approvals we needed for him to be our point of contact in Austalia, even though our team chose a destination that wasn’t on the pre-approved list of suggested trips. His church had a youth group, and a children’s ministry, as well as a few planned events including a summer youth camp (in December!) and evangelistic cafe outreaches scheduled, so assisting in whatever way we could with these events was also listed in our plan. Some of these areas, like children’s ministry were just “not my thing”, but compared to the other internship options, it was still a better match than the alternatives.

But then we got to Sydney.

That’s the great thing about missions. We knew we were planning a bit for the unknown, and that our plans would change when we saw things in person. It was more an exercise to demonstrate that we’d thoroughly thought through how we COULD use our time, so that we wouldn’t get there and be sitting around not knowing what to do. We kind of figured if we ran out of other things to do, we could always spend our time out on the streets doing street-evangelism.

Only, we hardly ended up doing any street-evangelism. And as it turns out we didn’t work with the universities at all–exams and holiday are a bad time to outreach at universities. Nor did we teach anyone any dramas. There’s just a lot you can’t plan for until you see things for yourself. We were not familiar with the geography of Sydney, and although much of Sydney has excellent public transportation, we were really staying in the suburbs, in one of the few areas that is difficult to access public transportation. But God was faithful to provide us with transportation, and we ended up being able to borrow two cars from local church members. That meant we had to learn to drive on the left side of the street, and a lot of prayer since we didn’t have money for auto-insurance in our budget! But it gave us a lot of flexibility that was perfect for where we were staying.

One thing that was hard, in a way, was that our team, which finalized to seven people, were not all staying at one location. This meant that unlike our previous semester’s mission trip to Poland, it wasn’t easy to just “pop downstairs” for a quick debrief and planning for the next day after dinner. Instead we were staying with three host families, which definitely had its blessings, free-rent aside. I absolutely loved my Australian host family! I don’t think I could have imagined a better match. It was a big family with six kids ranging from 10 to 22 years old, four of them living at home. Some people might have been intimidated by the size of the family, but coming from a family where my mom grew up in similar sized family, I looked at the big family as fun and exciting, just like when all my aunts and uncles would invade the house at the same time when I was a kid.

And my host Mom, Christine, loved to cook, always with lots of salads and yummy veggies–we ate homecooked meals for almost every meal on the trip, even my lunches were leftovers from home-cooked meals, and the meals were all really good, the kind I’d eat back home like tacos or chicken or lasagna too. A lot of people asked whether I had a hard time with my food allergies in Australia. But praise God, it was really not an issue like it was in South Korea. It wasn’t hard for the family to come up with plenty of meals that weren’t laden with peanuts or soy sauce and Christine did a great job of reading the ingredient labels to make sure things were okay for me to eat. They really made me feel like part of their family in that respect, it wasn’t burdensome to them to be accomodating to my needs any more than it was burdensome to them to accomodate their daughter Anna’s insulin shots (I was really lucky to get to know Anna! She was such an amazing girl). In fact, I actually was doing better with my food allergies there than I was doing back home, and was excited to realize that more-complete soy in any form avoidance was all it would take to cut out that peristent cough I had given up on ever going away!

For those of you not eating home cooked food constantly when you travel, the food in Australia is a lot like the food in the US–Pizza Hut and Subway are both popular there like they are in the States. They do seem to do a slightly better job of labeling the ingredients in their food packaging, so I’ll give Australia a thumbs up for that. I really liked the Mueseli Bars they had, because unlike the granola bars and cereal bars in the states, they actually had ones that don’t have soy or peanuts in them, which is beyond impossible to find in the states, and their cereals are all oddly healthy to the point where even if you’re not into sugary cereal you might add sugar manually to your breakfast cereal. I was excited to see they have Just Right cereal (that’s very hard to find in San Diego), only it turns out its different, they put puffed rice in it among other differences, and I ended up finding Fruity Bites to be a more delectable choice that I missed when I got back home.

As far as ministry goes, the church was a bit smaller than we might have guessed it would be, but it was quality over quantity, we ended up spending a lot of time with the youth group, more than we’d expected we’d get to, they quickly adopted us as integral in their youth group activities for the whole time we were there, and we even took them out bowling on our final meeting of the youth group (though I don’t care for bowling, for the record).

We also got the opportunity to paint a mural on the wall in the children’s ministry room. This was something we completely did not expect to do, but Diana and Lia and myself were having so much fun with painting the mural that the rest of our team would find themselves having trouble dragging us away from our paint to go home for dinner! The kids (and parents) all loved the mural when we were done, a permanent reminder of their visitors from San Diego.

We also got to speak at church, at each of services (morning, evening, mid-week, youth group) someone would share a devotion or testmony. I got the opportunity to share my testimony in front of the entire church one Sunday morning (the highest attended service of the week). I was a little nervous, especially since I felt like God was calling me to be really vulnerable and raw and include some details that I often leave out, and told my testimony in a way I’d never told it before, starting with a line that had only just come to me, “When I was a teenager I believed the lies the media told me”. But by being raw and vulernable, it really cuts to people’s hearts, I saw a few people tearing up and crying at hearing my story (including some of my host family!), and had several people come up to me later and share how they’d been really touched and impacted by what I shared. It was a powerful mesage on being who God created you to be and not trying to follow the crowd going down the road that is wide and leads to destruction. “You need to keep telling your story Jess” was the powerful message to me there. Testimony is one of the three things mentioned in Revelation by which Satan is overcome.

And I think the biggest of the ministry was the schools. Only, it wasn’t colleges, like I came in wanting to work with. Instead, our biggest opportunities were with the Junior High students. We had a good connection with Model Farms High School, and their scripture teacher welcomed us not only to come in and speak, but to come back every day for the duration of our trip, for as many periods as we could accomodate in our schedule. Only in Australia, “High Schools” include both Junior and Senior High, so the high schools are 7th to 12th grades (or “years 7 to 12” as they would say in Australia), but the 11th and 12th grade students don’t take scripture class as the students continuing on after year 10 are generally focused on a heavy college-prep course-load, meaning we were focused on 7th to 10th grade students for most of our trip. We did get to teach at a few other schools, like Castle Hill High School, but Model Farms was really our primary focus.

Our expectations proved a bit different than the situation once again at Model Farms. Since we were teaching in the Scripture class (and students may elect to “opt out” of scripture if they have a religious objection) we didn’t have to tailor our presentations for a secular audience, we were welcome to go into as much scripture as we wanted, and say Jesus as many times as we wanted, even do altar-calls in class. In fact, the thing we found was that many of the kids were nominally Christian, but had no idea what the bible says, or who God is. Their perception, when we’d ask them probing questions, was that God was this big mean guy in the sky who likes to smite people and cause diseases. Whoa whoa whoa, that’s not the Jesus I know. So our big objective was really to clearly present the basics of the gospel–what does the bible say about how you go to heaven, what does the bible say God’s character is like, and so on.

We tried to teach a bit out out Ephesians, at the suggestion of the teacher, but the concept of grace was clearly going over the heads of these kids. And after praying for something that would reach the kids better, God showed better lesson-plans. God spoke to me through my team members and my host family; my host Dad, Phil, was actually the one who suggested old testament stories like Daniel work good with kids that age. And I love old testment stuff, and my wheels started spinning immediately, and came up with an entire lesson plan based off of the story of Daniel and the Firey Furnace, complete with testimonies of what kinds of miracles God’s done in the lives of people I know, and emphasis on what the story shows about God’s character and abilities, an attempt to introduce people to who is this character in the bible called God. And that lesson worked so well that we continued teaching it for about a week and a half (after that you start hitting the same classes again, so we had to rotate onto a different lesson!).

Sometimes I’d get discouraged that I wasn’t very good at this teaching thing, its hard–I’m not a trained teacher, and they pretty much just threw us in front of a classroom and said “okay, teach”. But somehow the schedule would always work out that I’d have disproportionally more days teaching than doing service projects than some of our team-mates. So in not knowing what to do, I looked to God, and prayed. And the more time I spent in prayer, the easier the teaching would be. The more time I spent in prayer, the more I’d walk out of class amazed how attentive the class could be, how the distracting students just weren’t, how the right words would just pop into my head. It was a huge lesson about the importance of prayer! And I mean extra prayer, not just participating in the daily morning team prayer that we had every day, but really praying specifically for my classes and students and what I was teaching them–its a responsibility to teach, even the bible says those who teach will be held to higher standards on judgment day, so its not something to be taken lightly.

We shared our testimonies a few thousand times too, the kids loved hearing our testimonies. That and they liked asking us if we had those “funny” american accents, and they wanted to hear us say aluminum and banana over and over with our funny accents. They’d ask all sorts of amusing questions too, like whether everyone in America owns guns, or whether we lived in ghettos, and such things that they were familiar with from the movies. One class even had a little debate whether they thought America was more like the OC or the Simpsons. International culture differences are fun!

And if you’re want to hear more about what we did in Australia, you can read our team blog on blogspot. I was the author of the vast majority of the blog, because apparently I’m good at that. We blogged our progress several times a week throughout the trip.
http://teamaustralia.blogspot.com/