[0:07]
today Lucan thanks very much for joining us and would say we're talking today about the ethnic ministry that you guys are involved in up in Brisbane to begin with just because we've got a lot of people from around Australia and other places what is the ethnic character of Brisbane that is it you know particularly anglo-saxon or is it you know particularly Asian what is it I think Brisbane in comparison to faith Sydney is reasonably Anglo but I think that's probably been changing in the last few years I think with the number

[0:38]
of refugees coming out of the boat people of resettlement a lot of resettlement happening in and around Brisbane by the number of migrants refugees etcetera has increased significantly I would say over the past few years so tell us a bit about the ethnic group that your church has been seeking to form a relationship with so so is them not less effective of just one ethnic group sort of connected broadly so we've had a couple in our church quite passionate about reaching

[1:09]
the nation and quite in doing that through the Lich surveys what militia elsewhere and so they wanted to begin to do that with our church which we encourage and a number of other people have come along to help that so we started taking English in a suburb that is next door to the suburb where we mated the church each Sunday so that begins small and we fitted to a large and library area the western suburbs of Brisbane called an hour which is extremely multicultural Aboriginal large

[1:42]
Vietnamese community SHINee Sunni all the refugees I've been a lot of things settled into that area it's a bit of a hub and so we've been meeting there speak English and so there's people from China people census on Vietnam people from Ethiopia people you know it's partial ANCA you know but you can you can you can exist they come in and we could pretty

[2:14]
much have as many people as we wanted so there's I out this fort and it's really appreciated and yeah so it's really a matter of how many volunteers can we get from our church that come along to connect with in English – Wow so it sounds like you've got the world in your backyard at the moment how how are you building the connection between ESL and the church itself I mean obviously it is the relationship between the people but like what other things

[2:45]
you're putting in place to try and help that yeah well so there's a few aspects oh and you say relationally most of the helpers come from our church we invite them along that sort of stuff but it's being invited in such a context so it's seeing a bit of that happen on Sundays there's a bit more of a multicultural flavour so who's coming along on a Sunday morning we've got to shake hands coming up so we're inviting all along as yes so we've

[3:15]
got kind of a superb reduced-price that kind of getting to be affordable for that group so we're inviting them along to that so I can connect without chefs community row so you know each week we teach the Bible through your Bible you come interactive Bible story each time are they getting a bit of the flavor of what Christianity is about and church is about and as people show interest and a

[3:47]
bit more interest we bring them along to church people are doing in Bible study that's a fact it's one-to-one meeting them investigating genius read the Bible about so let me see if I can clarify this for the people who are listening the ESL classes you've actually integrated those in the way that you you witness so some content of the class itself actually has a sort of a Bible element that's right so we we do in we do probably about 45 minutes of topic

[4:19]
might be worried it might be what is whatever the topic is what's in that actually tied into the Bible story so we we start with the Bible story in in mind and then take the topic that's out of that around that topic that we talk about but in general and then have one tea and someone will get up and give a Bible tells the Bible story physically today absolutely something along those

[4:50]
lines engage with simple English and then we go back and spend 20 minutes talking about that story and what means so might be the story the profile the clear of last week and you know Australia is becoming increasingly multicultural and for that reason a lot of church planners are interested in reaching their Nations I guess that God is bringing to us but how much of what you're doing depends on having had some people come to you as I mean like you know talented

[5:22]
people within your own congregation and how much have you've been able to train people up because some people might feel like oh gosh if I but I don't have somebody who's an English teacher like this couple you're talking about I guess it's not really open to me sure so I would say the majority of our volunteers have never done anything like that before but pretty much we say if you can speak English you can do it and the reality is is a number of ministries a number of people that do this around the plate and

[5:53]
so you can actually you can get all the lessons you don't even have to do that for yourself if you don't want to so you can get all that sort of stuff and it's very very basic hook through and some questions its conversation let's talk about family okay losing your family what do you know you can speak English anyone can do it it's very simple so this is tangible love and intangible service connecting through to real opportunities let me ask you just about those opportunities when you preach the

[6:26]
gospel to different ethnic groups have you had to adapt change be mindful of anything in particular when you're trying to preach it probably the Bible story we're not adapting anything when you get to actually meeting to talk about the gospel you we take it to the basic tools and then you have to adapt them a little bit so primarily the biggest issue probably hasn't been the cultural issues in the lack of foolish and so if you're

[6:59]
gonna communicate the gospel in very simple English it just it takes longer you've got to think about it a little bit the way we've got some set courses that we run but for someone who's very simple English it's just going to fly right in their head so we worked at the simplifying one concept of week take it a little bit longer instead of reading a big chunk of the Bible let's just read a verse and what's this day you know let's

[7:31]
talk about the scene instead of let's look at Romans one two three opponent record let's let's look at Romans 3:23 what does that say