Over 90,000 Baptisms? 😲
Have you heard the news? Over 90,000 people were recently baptised in Papua New Guniea during the PNG for Christ campaign.
THAT. IS. INCREDIBLE.
Since this took place, I have heard a few SDA’s ask — what will it take for that to happen here, in Australia?
And by extension, how can we see the same results in other secular western countries like Europe, Canada and America?
Here are my thoughts:
We must keep context in mind. Long before SDA’s showed up, 98% of PNG’s population already identified as Christian. To the contrary, Australia’s Christian population has dropped from 86% in 1971 to 44% in 2021. In the meantime, the number of people identifying as having “no religion” has grown from 7% in 1971 to 38% in 2021. In other western secular countries, the stats are much the same.
Context dictates method. PNG’s culture is deeply religious which means a traditional religious frame works in evangelizing its population. To the contrary, Australia has a deeply secular culture meaning a different frame must be used if we want to root the gospel here.
But what does this actually look like?
Here’s what it DOESN’T look like:
More church programs
More traditional prophecy or doctrinal seminars
More advertising campaigns
These approaches simply don’t work in secular, post-church environments for three reasons:
Secular people are by-and-large uninterested in religion no matter how its “packaged”
Millennials & Zed’s are the most “advertised to” generations of all time. They can smell a sales pitch from a mile away, especially a religious one.
Almost every outreach model our church fails to speak meaningfuly to the anxieties faced by emerging generations.
So, if what we are doing doesn’t work — whats it going to take?
I recorded a simple video to help answer that very question,
Pastor M
