Events in my life and ministry seem to have drawn me back recurrently to Moore College. At the same time, ministries in cross-cultural and diverse settings have called me out into the public space. I spend my ministry working at the interface between church and society, clergy and laity, theology and practice – sometimes as the host and sometimes as the guest.
My story so far: I came to college in 1990, as a relatively new Christian intending to study for a year, but like many others, I stayed for four. After College, my husband and I headed to St Andrew’s Hall in Melbourne with our family, to the training college for the Church Missionary Society. We then served in Tanzania for a decade at a remote rural Bible college and hospital.
On our return from Tanzania, and after everyone else had settled into work and school, I began to look for a ministry position and so I applied to Anglicare for a chaplaincy position in a children’s hospital. Within a year, I had moved from a poorly resourced primary care Christian hospital in rural Tanzania to a state-of-the-art, quaternary training, government-run hospital in a major city in Australia. During this time, I also became a chaplain to Moore College students, so once again I felt I was moving between environments with vastly different outlooks on life. And yet, before God I was the same person ministering in different contexts.
As part of my Anglicare training, I attended courses in chaplaincy training. These were excellent in raising my awareness of listening to the other person, understanding the emotional content of what was being said, as well as learning to respond helpfully. However, I struggled during this training to know where my Christian-self fitted into the training model. This added to internal tensions that had begun building during our time in Tanzania, which increased with my ministry in the children’s hospital and with College students.
I found myself cutting-and-pasting unresolved quandaries to a clipboard in my mind, because problems in ordinary life rarely present themselves in such a way that there is a straightforward biblical or theological answer. Yet, in many ways, my questions were not vastly different from every Christian’s, who is trying to put everyday life together with their belief in Christ. It also occurred to me that all ministry involves crossing cultures. Any Christian seeking to care for others engages with at least three cultures: their own, the ancient culture of the scriptural text, and the cultural context of the other person.
We become prayerfully conscious that we exist within a world inside God’s providential care, and we acknowledged our dependence upon the living work of the Holy Spirit through scripture in our lives. But this does not lessen the effort required on our part to understand the world in which we minister. The world created and sustained by God’s providential care is a place of vast cultural variation. It has a mix of different languages, family backgrounds, religious beliefs, ethnic and social norms, national and political frameworks, as well as geographical and climatic circumstances.
As a former missionary, I have experienced the richness of a God, who spoke in different languages and genres, and to people in different times and places. I also saw his word could speak truthfully and clearly into different cultures, and I came to believe that it applied to all Christian ministries.
When I began working in a hospital in Australia, it was immediately clear to me that very few people in our wider Australian society shared our knowledge and dependence upon scripture. At best, it serves as a distant cultural memory. For the most part, Biblical concepts of God, salvation, sin, repentance, forgiveness, repentance, redemption, new birth, and eternal life are foreign terms. Very often, they are seen negatively and obliquely through news stories and other second-hand encounters. In many ways for me, Australia was little different to Tanzanian society that had people of Christian, Muslim and Animist backgrounds who did not share a scriptural understanding of being human. And so, there was a need to really listen in order to understand what people really did believe and what were their underlying assumptions and questions.
I commenced an MA(Theol) here at Moore College concurrently with an MA(Chaplaincy). In each subject, I was asking: how did the Word of God relate to the world of the people we were ministering to, and how did we do this best? Together with a few Anglicare chaplains, we began reading widely around the subjects of pastoral care, soul care and chaplaincy. I was trying to piece together the history of different movements to try to understand how these ministries fitted with other Christian ministries, both within and beyond the church. We also began teaching a new practical pastoral care course at Anglicare, and over time, a new training course was developed for Moore College. All this led me back again to Moore College and its comprehensive library.
I am currently completing my MTh, while ministering as Anglicare chaplain in a major general hospital in Sydney. In my research I have been retrieving the practice of soul care of several European pastoral care practitioners in the Reformed evangelical tradition from the mid-twentieth century. There is much to be gained from recovering some ‘dropped stitches’ of pastoral wisdom from previous generations that will help us move in the ministry space that exists between us and our beliefs, and those of the people that we seek to serve in the name of Christ.
