Overseas Council
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was a Village. I then became Pastor to the Slums of Inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a Country Parson and a Teacher at a One Teacher Bush School out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a Suburban Minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
When Jesus gave us the Great Commission to go into all the world and preach the gospel He gave us a command that has never been repealed. Every Christian in every church has to be interested in taking the message of the gospel to people who have not heard it. Wesley Mission has always been committed to the support of first the Methodist Church and then of the Uniting Church of its ministry to people in other countries. Every week, a portion of the total offerings given in all congregations are sent to the Synod in order to help in the ministry of reaching overseas people with the gospel. The Uniting Church’s overseas ministries cover about thirty different countries of the world. Not only are funds sent to help local congregations but skilled people are sent to help not only in the proclamation but also in the work of education, agriculture, village development, teaching, orphan support and many other programmes.
At Wesley Mission we have also adopted a number of programmes to help people in other countries by additional giving by the congregation.
When I came to the Mission in the late 1970’s the Mission had the International Leadership Training College. This was an initiative set up by Sir Alan Walker to bring an outstanding leader from each of a dozen countries each year to give them an internship at Wesley Mission. After a year of training with Wesley Mission they were to return to their countries and provide some local leadership. Each year the Mission paid for about a dozen students from countries like Korea, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, India, and other parts of the world to train as interns.
In 1980 I realised we had a problem with this programme. A number of the students did never want to go back home and one Korean lady, while she was about to board an aircraft at Sydney Airport had gone into the female toilets and literally just disappeared. Three years later incidentally we found her married to a Korean in Sydney and by then she was an Australian citizen. What disturbed us was that those who were trained and competent, when they returned to their own countries, inevitably applied for scholarships to go to other countries, particularly the United States of America so our whole plan of training good quality leaders to serve the church in their own countries was being undermined by the natural tendency to go to the other paddock where the grass was greener.
About this time I discovered an organization that was intent on training Christian leaders in their own country. We would provide funds to train the students to provide libraries within their theological seminaries, to provide funds for professor support and to encourage local theological seminaries to become accredited with proper degrees with world accreditation. This meant the student was kept in their own country, they were trained in their own language, they did not have visa and immigration problems, they did not need to return to their homeland for leave every couple of years and they were trained for life in their own environment. This was a much better was of doing mission.
The organization that I discovered was The Overseas Council for Theological Education and Mission.
It was a long-term missionary Mr. John Alison, a friend from Queensland who informed me about this work and indicated that the founder from the United States was visiting Australia. That is how I came to meet Dr Charles Spicer and his wife Phylis. They were delightful people who had established this Overseas Council for Theological Education to do the very thing that we felt was necessary. That is to train leaders in third world countries by building up their theological education, by providing professor support, accommodation, individual student support and library support to help them establish their facilities. The thing that impressed me about Dr Spicer was the story of what had happened at the Seoul Theological Seminary. Seoul Theological Seminary had started after the Korean War and had attracted a significant number of the best of Asian theological brains. Very quickly the number of students grew from 200 to 1000 and then to 2000. With the help of the Overseas Council for Theological Education, the Seoul Theological Seminary grew with new student accommodation being built, new classrooms and facilities and with the booming Korean economy and the commitment of Korean Christians to theological seminary development, the seminary began to grow very rapidly indeed. For many years we supported from Australia, America, Canada, New Zealand and Great Brittain students in the Seoul Theological College. After a while it was quite obvious that overseas help was no longer necessary and that the Koreans could develop that ministry themselves. I am pleased to say that 20 years after I first started supporting a Korean student, that Seoul Theological Seminary today is the Seoul Christian University with over 30 000 students and a worldwide reputation for high academic qualifications.
John Alison, Charles Spicer and myself agreed that we should establish the Oversees Council for Theological Education in Australia. So in those early years after coming to Wesley Mission we established an Australian Board which included John Alison and myself as chairmen, Robert Coles a friend from Victoria and the heir to the GJ Coles fortune, Kimberley Smith an accountant in Victoria and Robert Kerr a distinguished and benevolent Christian businessman. Over the years other people were added to the board.
The major role of the Overseas Council in Australia was to raise funds to support students in third world countries. One of the first countries we began to support was Croatia. Little did we know how much the Baulkans were going to appear in world history during the 1990’s. The Evangelical Theological Seminary of Croatia was founded by a man who became a close friend, Dr Peter Kuzmic. Peter had an excellent PhD, was a very committed evangelical and I first met him in 1983 at a world conference which I attended in the United States. From that moment on we began to provide funds for students at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Croatia. Since the conflict developed in the 1990’s with Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Albanian residents in these countries, the Evangelical Theological Seminary has been bombed, blasted by tanks, and suffered destruction, rebuilding and destruction again of all of its facilities yet Dr Peter Kuzmic continued his lecturing, building up of staff, gathering theological works for the training of young ministers. Right throughout the Kosovo/Croatian/Serbian conflict the Evangelical Theological Seminary kept training ministers for their own people and in a world where thousands of people perished the presence of their own ministers was of great blessing and comfort to the people. Today there are more than 300 students in the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Croatia and Dr. Peter Kuzmic is still continuing to train students to minister among people in all of that devastated area. Whatever money we raised in Australia and provided for student support and in particular for the rebuilding of their library and replacement of theological works has been abundantly blessed. Two of our good Sydney supporters joined the board of the Oversees Council. John Dingle a senior manager of the AMP society and formerly state manager of Queensland, South Australia and New Zealand, followed Rob Kerr as Chairman of the board. After 10 years or so, I stepped down from both the Chairmanship of the board to let Rob take over and then gradually to step out of fundraising.
Frequently we had visitors from overseas theological colleges visit Australia and we would organise dinners of supporters to support the ministry in those countries. Many of these people you may have heard on this programme. You may have heard the Vice Chancellor of the University of Nairobi speaking on this programme, Dr Talitwalla, who spoke about his 30 000 students and about the way the Overseas Council for Theological Education had provided support for buildings, professors, accommodation and individual students. He indicated that from his university, distinguished leaders in every academic field had fanned out throughout Africa providing Christian leadership at the highest level.
The same is true for other parts of Africa. Over the years I have had many visitors on this programme from the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology. They are one of the few schools of Theology with a fully accredited PhD programme anywhere in the world. All of their lecturers have received not only ministry training in Africa but Post Graduate studies in Great Brittain and the United States of America.
One of the theological seminaries that Australians have supported particularly has been the Nusantara Bible Seminary in Indonesia. For more than 20 years we have provided funds for this seminary and today they have about 400 students training for ministry. Their graduate ministers are now ministering right throughout the great land of Indonesia.
There are a number of seminaries in India, which have been supported in training large numbers of Indian ministers. I guess the one I think of most is the Allahabad Bible Seminary. They have had more than 900 ministers graduate with bachelors and master’s degrees of whom over 98% are still in full-time ministry. Currently the school has 102 full time students and 130 part time students working in Hindi the language spoken by about 500 million people in India. You may have seen recently on television a million servant Hindu men and women gathering to bathe in the Ganjes river to wash away their sins. This happened in the city of Allahabad. It is right in the midst of this strong Hindu area that there are graduate students. One of the needs at the moment is to send one of their long serving professors to Oxford where they will continue his PhD studies.
There are many stories about student support where individual students have been funded by Australian people. Currently there are 180 students in India, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea who are supported by Australian Christians. With their wives and children they come into the theological seminary and do their Christian ministry training. Accommodation buildings and blocks have been built in many of these countries due to the generosity of Australian Christians likewise professors have been supported and libraries supported.
Today the Overseas Council for Theological Education are supporting 4,500 students in more than 100 different evangelical theological colleges in 63 countries of the world. Apart from that the council have provided 68 campuses with new buildings, lecture rooms, accommodation blocks and libraries and have been responsible for providing the facilities in educational centres for more than 30,000 Christian students currently studying for the ministry.
When Jesus gave us the commission to go into all the world, He gave us a command that every Christian should respond to and support. Throughout the last twenty years of my life one of the real pleasures has been to see the results of the support we have given to theological education in third world countries.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.