Ministries

Local Aussie students show little interest in Gospel

There has been fewer local Aussie students coming to recognise Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, said Richard Chin, the director of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES), but it doesn’t mean God cannot change their heart to come to know Him.

There has been fewer local Aussie students coming to recognise Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, said Richard Chin, the director of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES), but it doesn’t mean God cannot change their heart to come to know Him.

In an interview with Christian Today Australia, Mr. Chin said despite the faithful evangelism conducted by Christian youth leaders, it was difficult to bring Aussie students in. Thus, this remains a top priority for the Christian ministry in 2008 which targets university students.

“Despite faithful evangelism we have not seen as many local Aussie students come to know Jesus as their Lord,” he said. “So we want to keep evangelism high on the agenda.”

He attributed the local disinterest in the Gospel to the society we are living in which is thriving and prosperous.

“As a thriving and prosperous western nation we live in a post Christian, post modern society that is spiritually hardened to the gospel of Jesus,” Mr. Chin said.

Going further, he believed the ‘defeater beliefs,’ espoused by Tim Keller from Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, was especially useful in Australia’s context given it is a Western- nation dominated by individualistic belief, where the truth and what is right-or-wrong are discovered by one-self.

Defining the term ‘defeater beliefs,’ Tim Keller, the senior pastor of the Church, said it was a set of common-sense consensus that automatically makes Christianity seem implausible to people. For example, if Belief A is true then Belief B cannot be true. Thus, for example, some people might think Christianity is not true because it cannot be the one ‘true’ religion.

Keller, Chin noted, had been useful in helping the youth-oriented ministry find two methods to connect the Gospel to the people. The first, negative, approach is to show the current culture’s perception of Christianity is false. The second, positive, approach, is to show the contemporary culture aspiration, hope, and conviction cannot have a ‘happy-ending’ unless it is in Jesus Christ.

Despite Keller’s suggestion, the only way to bring these Aussie students in, said Chin, is through God and the Gospel. He emphasised that Christians must have full confidence in God and the Gospel in order for them to succeed.

“We have to always ensure that our confidence is in the power of the gospel and the sovereignty of our great God and Saviour who can change their hearts no matter how bleak the scene might be,” he said.

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