Second-generation Tongan Seti Latu has been sent out as a missionary in his own parish as he works among the second-generation Pacific Islander community of the Cooks River area.
Seti, who graduates with a Bachelor of Theology from Moore College this month, was invited by his cousin, ex-NRL player turned boxer Solomon Haumono to join Connect " a Tuesday night service for islander young adults - in the middle of last year .
Seti now preaches and leads Bible studies at the Tuesday night meetings, which have outgrown Solomon's lounge room and now see up to 40 second-generation Pacific Islanders meet at St Peters Town Hall.
The group is made up of a combination of high-schoolers as young as 14 and young adults in their 30s, who take part in a service that includes a Bible reading, testimonies and a talk.
"Seti is a very devoted and very thorough person who really works hard to get the truth out. He has really dedicated his life to proclaiming the word," says Solomon.
Teaching the Bible is one of Seti's main passions when it comes to this ministry.
"I thought "well these guys need solid Bible teaching, and we need to start at the top with the leaders’, we have to teach leaders what the Bible has to say about leadership".
This led to a weekly leaders study, as well as a weekly group that has just started Moore College's PTC course.
"Expository preaching is still very new to them, so I'm trying to get them to have a better understanding of biblical theology in the gospel of Mark."
Many of the young people in this group are caught between the church culture of their local church and the traditional Pacific Island church culture, which Seti says they struggle to understand.
"The pastors sent out from the islands to oversee these churches don't have an understanding of what young Pacific Islanders go through. They have married culture with Christianity and so a lot of young people are unable to distinguish what culture and Christianity are " so there are a lot of confused people out there."
However Seti says he is already encouraged by the learning he is seeing in the group.
"A lot of them are talking about how important it is to have a right and proper doctrine " that's not something you'd normally hear a Tongan talking about."
A model for local mission
Cooks River rector, the Rev Shane Rogerson, says ministry workers like Seti are what the doctor ordered for ministry in Sydney today.
"We see Seti as a local missionary, (and what we're on about is) every one of us is to be a minister and missionary " we can't see mission work as just something that just happens overseas," he says.
"If we want to be serious about engaging in the culture and connecting with people, we need to be looking at models outside the dominant paradigms church ministry."
"We're not trying to create a homogeneous grouping. The failure of most churches that are homogeneous in their mission is that they never move beyond that," he says.
Shane says his church is completely supportive of Seti's appointment, and even hopes he will be deaconed.
"They've seen Seti's life and doctrine over the last five years and they're locally recognising him as a biblically qualified elder who is able to teach and under God, gather people into the kingdom," he says.
"In the islander culture, which tends to be more hierarchical, ecclesial recognitions opens doors " people trust you if you've got a collar."
