In one week's time the Year 13 Youthworks Gap Year team will arrive in Fiji for their second short-term Fiji mission trip since the program began in 2006.
As a central component of the year-long discipleship program, the Fiji mission trip will run from June 25 to July 23, enabling the 38 students and 10 leaders to partner with local churches as they share the gospel in a variety of contexts.
"Going to Fiji is awesome because it puts global mission on the agenda," says the Rev Shane Rogerson, minister at St Peter's Anglican, Cooks River, who helped organise the mission.
"What Year 13 does is teach relatively young Christians to be global Christians. It expands their horizons to think about how the Lord might use them for the rest of their life and even if they never, ever leave the country again, the chances are they are much more likely to be mission-minded Christians."
Whilst the goal of the mission trip has not changed since 2008, this year's mission trip will be more strategic in strengthening ongoing partnerships between the Fijian and Sydney churches.
Brother Lai, a Fijian gospel worker who assisted with the Year 13 mission last year, explains that because Fijians are very relational, he would love to see the Year 13 mission as a long-term initiative in order to further develop ministry opportunities in Fiji.
"The real need for the church in Fiji is good Bible teaching. And generally speaking even our senior pastors don't have the knowledge to give us Bible teaching,” he says.
When Fiji came to Sydney
As a result of his contact with Year 13 last year, Brother Lai came to stay with Mr Rogerson for three months this year in order to train himself in the Bible by completing the first two PTC subjects with Moore College's External Studies program.
Planning to complete the whole certificate by 2010, Brother Lai has returned to Fiji filled with a desire to teach the PTC course to others so that they may grow in their understanding of the Scriptures:
"In Fiji there are many people who know the name of the Lord Jesus and many people who have been evangelised, but the commitment to then taking people into a knowledge of the Scriptures, which helps people to be discerning and wise hasn't actually happened."
Brother Lai attributes this widespread nominalism to the communal culture of Fiji which makes individual decisions difficult to make, as well as the highly hierarchical societal structure whereby the people simply "take their cue from those on top".
He explains that one of the key areas to begin mission in Fiji is with the youth who are mostly unemployed: "The churches, government and villages in Fiji don't seem to value young people a lot" we are not in a process of [seeing] a way forward for future leaders and grooming people up".
For this reason, Brother Lai views the Fijian Youth Leadership Conference which will be run by the Year 13 team as a culture-changing initiative " "it's not only beneficial to youth but [also to] the adults looking at the young people as future leaders and spending time with them".
During the Fiji Mission (June 25 " July 23), Year 13 students will be keeping Sydney readers updated on their journey through their Bula Blog at sydneyanglicans.net/insight. Click here to read the first post.
