October 19, 2011 by Steve Chong 0 comments

Posted in: Kirkplace Events

Kirkplace opened up it's doors recently to host a night thinking about social engagement.

Pastor Steve was one of the speakers along with Kirkplace friends, John Dickson and Tim Costello. It was great night hosted by World Vision and it has been written up by a Christian Newspaper called Eternity.

Here's the artcile below - enjoy!

 

Preachers turn around on Social Justice

1:34am Sunday, 2nd October 2011
Written by John Sandeman for Eternity news

Preachers usually ask other people to repent. But two well-known Australian preachers publically announced their repentance at a World Vision forum last month.

“I used to preach that every dollar you give to the poor is a dollar less you can give for evangelism. So why would you do it?” John Dickson told the meeting at Kirkplace Church Sydney. “I really preached that. I had to repent.”

“I was preaching lies. There was nothing about the poor in my first four or five books.”

Dickson outlined a biblical basis for social engagement, pointing to many New Testament texts and many historical examples of how early Christians served their neighbours to the astonishment of the pagans. “Jesus was insistent on the humble service of the world.”

He pointed out that recent atheist criticisms of Christianity, that it ‘poisons everything’, “at best … only prove that Christians have not been Christian enough. They have not followed their master.”

Steve Chong, Kirkplace minister and director of the RICE Youth Movement, frankly discussed his change of mind.

“This is the story of my life –I am the before and after person on social action.

“My Christian understanding meant that my existence on earth was for only one thing.

“I started to sort my bookshelves recently. Two thirds of my books were on winning people for Christ.

“That consumed me. There was only one thing for me: to tell people about Jesus. That is the ‘before’ shot.”

Chong showed a video of the shock on his wife’s face when they visited a poor family in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. That was his conversion moment. Chong, like Dickson, remains a passionate evangelist.

“In the Scriptures, wherever you go Jesus is caring for people,” Chong says. “Jesus is in the compassion business.”

“Our job is to be the hands and feet of Jesus. We are in the business of bringing joy and peace to the world. We do that as we proclaim the gospel. But as we get our hands dirty we also get joy.”

Tim Costello, CEO of World Vision Australia who took the Chongs on their trip to Southern Africa, said that despite the Somalia famine being a replay of Ethiopia in 1984, with a predicted 700,000 deaths in the next six months, “It’s really hard to get the world’s attention.”

Costello described his experience growing up in a Christian family, struggling to learn to take this world, as well as the next one, seriously. But it was a visitor who grabbed the most attention. Jayakumar, Christian World Vision India National Director, who despite his exalted title lives amongst the poor like all his staff, said he approached the topic of balancing social action and evangelism “as someone whose feet is on the ground and whose hands are dirty”.

“Poverty is about people bleeding,” he added. “It is so evident that the world is hurting by our absence, not by our presence.

“We spend our lives trying to balance between social action and evangelism and being of no use to either.

“The world wonders, ‘Where is this church, where are the followers of the carpenter Jesus Christ’?”
The forums in Melbourne and Sydney were held as a “soft launch” for World Vision’s DVD study series on Christian social engagement, called The Faith Effect. Pre-orders for the series can be made on http://www.worldvision.com.au and search for Faith Effect