Migrant and overseas Christians help keep Australian churches alive!

Photo credit; ABC News

An Anglican Church bishop in Queensland says that his 11 Pacific Islander ministers serving the region’s parishes are saving those parishes from collapse.

ABC News reports that the clergyman Bishop Keith Joseph said, “Together they make up half of my full-time workforce in the diocese.”

Data shows the number of Australians who identify as Christians has halved from 98 per cent in 1971 to 44 per cent in 2021.

However, the decrease has been tempered by Christtan migrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific.

Bishop Joseph said priests and brothers have been recruited from the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu to fill the service gaps in regional towns, Aboriginal communities and the Torres Strait.

The diocese is also in financial distress because of the compensation owec to victims of historic abuse.

Keeping the parishes going also involves vital volunteer work including running op-shops, providing chaplaincy to aged care homes and hospitals, and pastoral care to seasonal workers.

The Pasifika priests are so valued by the community that a migration pathway was set up between the diocese, the Church of Melanesia and the Department of Home Affairs, according to the bishop.

Reverend Dr Seforosa Carroll, a theologian at Charles Sturt University, said more than 90 per cent of the population in the Pacific was Christian, making religion inseparable from culture.

Christianity was tied to colonisation because becoming Christian ofte required becoming “civilized” which equated to9 being “Westernized,”  she said.

Theological anthropologist at the University of Divinity’s Whitley College, Reverend Dr Titus Olorunnisola, said one reason why Christianity remained popular outside the West was because of the prevalence of existential threats like poverty and political unrest.

Another reason why Christianity was strongly embedded in some Pacific and African cultures was because people still held Indigenous beliefs of evil spirits and demons. 

According to Dr Olorunnisola, “The way to be spiritually protected for most people was to be a practising believer.”

It is ironic that regional Australia is now importing religious leaders from countries that were once converted by Christian missionaries from the West.