Coz challenges churches to think deeply about mission contextualisation: who’s missing from our churches, how boundaries shape our communities, and why demographic averages often hide local realities.
Coz helps us think through what it looks like to walk, shop, and live locally—so that we can truly know and reach the people God has placed around us.
Coz Crosscombe is the Project Director of the Well Training Centre
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TRANSCRIPT:
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
G’day, I’m Pete Hughes and you clicked on the Reach Australia podcast.Contextualisation is an important tool that we need to understand, but it’s not just the big esoteric ideas.It’s also understanding the suburb that may be right near us but is very, very different.
0:25
Cause Cross Comb has delivered this great presentation of helping us to understand contextualisation in terms of the suburbs that may be different to ours.Enjoy I’ve.Run through some stuff in hopefully just saying like the first thing you’re really saying is that every time I walk into a room, the first question I ask is who’s missing in that room?
0:49
And I can be a bit of a jerk about it.And I, I mean, if you around me when I’m in this place that I can be a complete jerk about how I feel about these things.But that’s the first question.And I’d say that you all said in your church, it’s who’s missing from the room.And if you think that the culture in your church is a fair representation, have a look at the demographics you’ve been shown.
1:10
And if you still think it’s a fair representation, maybe I’ll come and and I might be able to find a few holes in that of who’s in that area.So that’s the first thing is when I walk into a room, who’s in the room and who might be missing from that room that should be in the room.Next thing I’m trying to figure out is how do I understand my community?
1:30
And we talk about boundaries and understanding your boundaries.So Derek and I went back and forth heaps and heaps on on the demographics for you guys and came to a compromise of of a 15 minute drive time because most of you probably got commuting churches.But when we do demographics, what we spend a lot of time is figuring out the physical boundaries in a community and the psychological boundaries.
1:50
And they’re actually never circles.Like if you take a circle around your church, just know that no one other than you will ever function in that circle unless you’re in a walled city, a European walled city.Other than that, no one functions in circles in Australia, right?Sometimes people function in in post codes because they’re dealing with a school, but if they’re not dealing with a school, post codes don’t even even match up.
2:12
So when I came in and I’d done a bunch of demographics work, we came into demographics by working with some companies we thought we knew the best in, in Philly, we we the church experts in understanding communities and we watched businesses just outthink us every day of the week.So we found those businesses and said, hey, what do you know?
2:27
Like how does McDonald’s not make a mistake when they put in a site?How do they just get it right every single time?And so we got opened up into demographics and the first thing began with boundaries.Understand how people move.And so I came into Mount Druitt, they gave me Anglicare and their beauty, gave me this packet of data and said here’s your parish and this is what it looks like.
2:46
And I said, hey man, it’s completely useless because you’ve given me 13 suburbs, 75,000 people averaged out.And the average is nobody.Nobody is that average.And so I said give me suburb by suburb, at least to begin, and I could show you just the radical difference.
3:04
But in Mount Druitt, the eastern side of our suburb is 25% Muslim.It’s heavy Muslim population.The western side is the largest indigenous population in NSW.Those two populations do not do life together at all.There’s no correlation between their lives.
3:22
So when you average those two things out, you get half and half and it doesn’t exist.So you get your boundaries.And once you know your boundaries, one way to do that can be to map out your congregation and draw some boundaries around it.Then you start to pull out the data and you start to see actually who lives in your community.
3:39
And you’ve been asking the question, are we interested in reaching these people?And if we’re not interested, is there somebody else who’s going to do that for us?And how do we connect with that other group of people that might be doing it?Pretty quickly when you do demographic analysis, it gets overwhelming and you start to say, wow, this is way, way bigger than I thought, You know, so I look at 75,000 people.
3:57
I’m like, there’s a lot of diversity in that room.How do I actually even think about reaching that?Well, then I want to start building alliances, figuring out who else is on the same team, figuring out how else we’re going to use those things.Another tool that we use is shopping locally.That might be what you do every day.
4:15
We generally find when people coming into a poorer community from outside, they actually don’t shop locally.They, they find the shops that they like and they go there.So like, you know, sadly there’s no ALDI in our community.So there’s no ALDI.But there’s also only one coffee shop in 13 suburbs.
4:31
So that’s great because I don’t like coffee.I think it’s, I think it’s just a weird thing.So, but it’s a fascinating, right?How many places I go to that are driven by a coffee culture in the middle class.We’ve got to have a coffee.I mean, I was at something the other day and I’d say 4 ministries in a row presented on their coffee shop they’re putting inside their their church.
4:51
Now we serve coffee at church.It’s like comes in this container bottle thing and it’s like all these little grounds and it’s got usually got woollies written on the side of it.I don’t know, people drink it, right?It seems like it works.No one’s ever complained when I’m serving coffee.We don’t live in a coffee culture in our area.
5:09
We live in, it’s driven by different things.So if I’m going to meet with people, I’m not going to go meet with them at the coffee shop.I’m going to meet with them at the pub, or maybe I’ll meet with them at Maccas around the corner.Shopping locally, understanding your local context and community.You start to see different things, you start to interact with different people and you start to see what’s going on.
5:26
Considering where you send your kids, it’s a really hard thing, but where do your kids go to school?Is it in a school that interacts with the rest of the community or is it a school that’s a bit more exclusive than others?If you’re trying to reach and interact and do life with people, My wife is a natural at this.
5:42
She doesn’t really.So she doesn’t, she says she doesn’t think much about stuff like this.I don’t know.But she’s quite brilliant.She’s a school teacher, works in a in a tough school elementary, so she’s usually teaching kindergarten to about third grade.She says after that they get she’s pretty tall.
5:58
But she says after that they get bigger than her.A lot of Islanders in her school.So she likes kids who are who are shorter.But she does everything locally because that’s just who she is.So she constantly talks about her interactions at the supermarket, and she’ll come and she’ll say, you know, I ran into such and such a kid at the supermarket and their family.
6:17
I said, I had that girl.And she goes, oh, the kid was, you know, tugging on their mum, pointing.And the mum’s shaking their head and she pointing and shaking their head.And finally the mum comes over and says, my kid says that you’re one of her school teachers and said, yeah, yeah, I am.She has a new shop where we shop.And she goes, yeah, yeah, I shop here.
6:32
She’s actually, I live around the corner.They’re like, no way.There’s no way a school teacher would live in this community.She goes, why not Like, this is where we do life, right?This is where I shop, this is where I live, this is where I go to church.It’s all within the same community context.And so she’s quite brilliant at knowing the feel of the community who’s out there, the diversity, because that’s where she shops.
6:50
She shops locally.She doesn’t make the choice to say there’s a nicer shop down the road, but I’m actually going to shop locally.So we do that as well.We talk about people walking, you walk your community.Now, if you’re in a more rural area, sometimes it’s that’s a tougher thing, but walking is a great way.
7:06
I like to bike because you see more of everything.But getting out of your vehicle and actually interacting as you go around the community.And I’m saying just about door knocking or things.I’m just saying as you go about life, actually go through the area and start to see who’s in that area.The number of churches I’ve seen that really have no clue who lives in their community churches, it’ll just tell me that these people don’t exist.
7:27
I’m like, I see them all the time.It’s like, how did you miss them?Because they don’t fit into your paradigm.You can live in a community.We did research on a community one time as a gentrifying community.So the hipsters were moving in and displacing the poor.And students of mine went in and did did some research and they said, Yep, the poor are gone.
7:46
It’s up, gentrified and moved out.So I ran some data and I said, actually 15% of the population in that community are living in extreme poverty.I said, how did you miss them?You were there for a couple of weeks.What went on?And they said, oh, we just didn’t see them.So I said, all right, where’d you go out to lunch?And they told me I was like, yeah, so that’s like, you dropped $20 on lunch.
8:06
But over here is another shop where you can get lunch for $10, right?And so this is where the poor are eating in here and said, where’d you go for coffee?And, you know, they’re paying $6 for a cup of coffee.I said, well, over here is 711, you can pay a dollar for a cup of coffee, right?Nothing in their lives and their interactions were in the same context, even though they lived in the same community.
8:24
And so people could miss that stuff all the time.So all the way from where you are in your church, where you’re looking, how you’re identifying leaders to be thinking about what could I be missing?And if I am missing that people group, how could I potentially interact with them and look at them?
8:47
Yeah.I was going to show you guys a few slides, but I don’t think they’re going to be super helpful.Derek, let’s see if the clicker works.This one.Yeah, Yep.Every individual needed to accomplish God’s purpose.
9:07
You may not agree with that.That’s kind of one would sit that every Christian should be involved in meeting God’s purpose.Every person deserves the opportunity to be engaged in their context and understanding what that means.Just all the time be thinking is, is my culture what I’m doing?Is that actually Christianity or is that just my cultural dynamic and understanding how to separate those two things out?
9:29
Is that my culture or is that actually Christianity?And they’re often, we confuse those two things all the time.You know, I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, never prayed before we eat, actually don’t pray before we eat generally Now it’s just, I’m just not quite sure why, right?
9:44
And, and some of you guys would be like, of course you pray before you eat.And I was like, why a knife?I’m grabbing a snack.Do I pray?And then I’ll sit down with these Christians, right?And they eat the salad 1st and they have the soup and then they pray.I’m like, well, good thing that was salad was OK, right?Because am I praying that’s healthy?I’m not.It’s a cultural thing.
10:00
I don’t know what their cultural thing is.You might find it good, but don’t necessarily think that that is the right thing.The dynamic of your, your church and the service and the way it goes is usually a cultural thing, right?You don’t find the service layout.I mean, you can try and search through and make the excuse that it is or make the justification from Scripture, but most of what we do doesn’t reflect what Scripture is.
10:21
It’s, it’s not that it’s bad, but it just may not work for other people.And so to understand that community transformation happens through relationships, like all the time.Yeah.I was listening to a quote written by NT Wright.And we have this this thing we talk about from theory to practice.
10:38
We say that our theology should be practice, that I’m far more interested in your practice than I am in your theory, that your theory doesn’t actually drive things forward for me.It doesn’t drive your mission forward.You can have all kinds of theory.It doesn’t doesn’t mean that you have any practice and NT Wright was talking about that he wished that you know, 50 years ago somebody told him that that the early church didn’t grow by 1 intellectual sharing a great idea with another intellectual.
11:05
But with one poor Sermon on the Mount Christian loving another person.That’s where we saw the spread of the gospel.It’s through relationships.I think more than ideas.That’s that’s right.What we own we own relationships.I talk about this church planting I’m going to take a shot at a lot of church planters show you the data.
11:27
I think most of our church planting unfortunately just moves sheep from 1 paddock to another paddock that we actually don’t often have a strategy to reach new people and this one will sit counter to some.So you may be in the church plant that that it’s been really effective to send a large group out on the church plant.
11:45
I know there’s stats to say they’re more sustainable.However, when you send 30 to 60 people out, you’ve already established culture.You you, you don’t reach people who don’t look like that culture very well after that.And that’s fine if that’s your cultural group.But I’m seeing churches that are moving into other cultural areas with those plant teams and wondering why no one from that area is coming to church.
12:07
I’m like, yeah, because you’ve already established culture.So we actually talk, we’ll do a little bit tomorrow and workshop about how we look at that a little bit differently.But for in our cases, small church plant teams can be far more effective.We’re also using a bivocational model, so you don’t have to worry about getting to sustainability within three years, which is a little bit of a problem.
12:27
Hey, that might be all my slides.There we go.Move people around more than reaching them.Church is being in general decline now.It looks like there might be, we’re flattening out a little bit.
12:43
It’s kind of good news, But generally we’ve been in decline.Often the churches that are growing are growing slower than the churches that are in decline.And I think that’s just always good for us to sort that out and actually look at the data.Most churches spend most of their money on themselves.You know, we did some research away on church plants.
12:59
Great thing early first three years of first plants, people are reaching people.The budget then just does this major shift to facilitating those who are already turn up in church.So once I love about our churches, no one comes church shopping to our church.If you’re church shopping, there’s great churches, right?It’s an MB M MB M guys probably all took off already today.
13:19
MBM you can go shop at MBM.You can go up into the hills district, right?They are they’re they’re great churches.But if you’re a non Christian, you come into our church.It’s a different dynamic, right?We’re different place Christian.
13:39
I think Christians coming into your church is actually a little bit more problematic because they tend to drive certain expectations.You know, they want a certain kind of music, they want a certain kind of creche, they want a certain kind of coffee, all these things.Non Christians don’t have those same paradigms, right?
13:55
So if you ask the new believers in our church what Christian music is, they’ll tell you it’s a column Buchanan music video from probably, I don’t know, the 1980s because that’s I don’t know why we play those things.I actually have nothing to do with our Service plan.And I think it’s pretty terrible preaching.
14:12
The preaching’s OK, but everything else is pretty terrible.But the unbelievers who come in don’t care because they have nothing to measure it against, right?So we’re not competing with the other cool coffee shops down the road because you’re not sure shopping across that.And So what happens is that the Christians often drive you to spend most of your money on the internals of the church.
14:33
There’s a few exceptions, but generally we spend 90 to 95% on ourselves and not on the mission.Sunday morning’s quietest time to travel for a reason, right?If you ever wonder, are we reaching many people just go out on a Sunday morning.
14:49
I mean, I’m a cyclist.Sundays are great because no one’s out driving there, right?Because not everybody’s rushing off to church.So we know that just, it’s just a good way of a metric and looking around your community and say Sunday morning’s a quiet time, then just about who lives boundaries, I’ll just show you a map.
15:10
It’s not the best map. 2 minutes.Cool.All right, this is how I break down the community.So just give you an idea.When I’m looking at people groups, that area there maybe has about 40,000 people in it, maybe 50,000.
15:30
I’m looking at least that many subgroups when I’m trying to do my demographics and see who really lives in there, to actually see how people move around and, and how they go in those areas.Yeah, this is a quick one as we broke down suburbs.So when we looked at at the differences, you can just quickly see, you know, if we look at the weekly income, I don’t know why it’s just U.S. dollars.
15:48
It must have been on the PowerPoint I had.It’s actually Australian dollars.But you see quite a difference between people in the far right in Bidwell who are making $890.00 a week versus those in Rudy Hill that are making double that amount of money.So they’re doing completely different lives, right?
16:05
And so they can be living one suburb apart from each other, but their lifestyle is completely different in those ways.Last quick story, my my son goes to a school that’s a loafly Anglican school, the cheapest in the community.And they did increase the ministers discount the other day.
16:23
And and I was like, no, I don’t need a discount.Like I get paid as a minister.Actually, we get so genuinely our ministerial team, we get paid.We’re the richest people in our church by far.I mean, we make triple what the average family makes.It’s quite, quite problematic.And so I said, hey, can we just give the money to a scholarship, the extra money because I we don’t need it.
16:43
And they said we don’t do scholarships.I said, what do you mean?They said, well, we’re a cheap school.I said you’re a cheap school for half of the community and the other half of the community are completely unaffordable.You know, $10,000 a year may be affordable if you’re making $100,000, but if you’re making $45,000 a year, it’s way out of price.
17:00
How do you do that?Because they couldn’t see the other half of the community, right?And so again, often when we do things we’re we’re missing into those areas.So thanks guys.Well that was cause Cosgrove and he has done an amazing work with the well as he continues to reach people from different suburbs to the ones that we often are a part of.
17:27
Take some time to to digest what you have heard and to pray for it.I’m Pete Hughes, chat soon.
