Life in coun­try Aus­tralia is pretty peachy. It’s just a shame that we can’t seem to con­vince Syd­neysiders of that fact…

This topic of con­ver­sa­tion always gets me in trou­ble in Chris­t­ian cir­cles — so I apol­o­gise in advance for the offense I’m about to cause you city dwellers. I know some of you know peo­ple who are going to regional Aus­tralia. I know some of you are keen to go over­seas. I know some of you have good rea­sons to stay in Syd­ney and feel “called” to do so — but if every­body is “called” to be in Syd­ney you’ve got to start ques­tion­ing where the call­ing is com­ing from…

My friend Mike, a min­is­ter in a regional cen­tre in Queens­land, posted a fairly innocu­ous appeal to city min­is­ters as his sta­tus yes­ter­day. And he got in trouble.

I’m going to play the role of cavalry.

This is what he said: Mike wants to remind my friends that the mis­sion field is big­ger than Sydney!

He copped a bit of a com­ment flog­ging. He was accused of empire build­ing. Which I thought was odd. Mike is from Syd­ney. His fam­ily live there. He’s tra­di­tional Syd­ney stay­ing fod­der. And he left. Much respect to him…

And this old chest­nut came up:

Australia’s pop­u­la­tion is not evenly spread — almost 1 in 5 Aussies live here. It would make sense then that 1 in five work­ers is here also. (There may be more than that I’m not sure).

News­flash — that means 4 in 5 peo­ple in Aus­tralia aren’t in Syd­ney. Sadly two out of four of Australia’s reformed evan­gel­i­cal train­ing insti­tu­tions are in Syd­ney. I would sug­gest that more than 1 in 5 reformed evan­gel­i­cal work­ers are in Sydney.

Some­one some­where should do some research — but anec­do­tally speak­ing — I’d say there are only a hand­ful of grad­u­ates from either Moore Col­lege or SMBC in Queens­land. I’d say the case is sim­i­lar in other states.

Off the top of my head there are only about 15 grad­u­ates from these col­leges oper­at­ing in Queens­land (but this is largely lim­ited to Pres­by­ter­ian cir­cles). That’s a rough head count.

Accord­ing to this site Syd­ney occu­pies about 2100 square kilo­me­tres. Accord­ing to this site Aus­tralia is 7,686,850 square kilometres.

I know there’s this big “the­o­log­i­cal” push to do city based min­istry — but really, our regional towns are the size of Bib­li­cal cities in some cases.

Can some­one tell me how we’re meant to reach the other 4 in 5 peo­ple in that sort of space with the con­cen­tra­tion of good min­istry stuff we’ve got going on in Sydney?

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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