Roving ministers Nick Hadges and Chris Thanopoulos say that if you spend enough time in Marrickville you'll see that it's cosmopolitan, dynamic, multi-cultural, left-leaning and alternative in mindset.
Unfortunately, the Anglican Church is widely perceived as the opposite.
The Bishop of Georges River, Peter Tasker, has selected these two men for a one-day-a-week role. They will explore how ministry opportunities in the area might be developed.
The vacancies in the Marrickville and Canterbury parishes have been further catalysts to this work.
Nick and Chris bring complementary skills to this huge task. For the last few years, Nick has been a youth worker and scripture teacher in the St George area giving him experience with children, and teenagers, and Chris has been the assistant minister at St David's, Arncliffe giving him experience in working among multiple ethnic groups.
Chris says the community can be grouped into two halves.
"There are the older, migrant communities " Italians, Greeks, Vietnamese, Chinese and others that have come in successive waves of immigration over the last 50 to 60 years," he says.
"However, the area is being gentrified. There is an increasing number of young, middle-class professionals who enjoy the proximity to Newtown."
Chris says the local Anglican churches in this region have been in decline in recent years.
"We have heard that other Protestant churches in the area are small and struggling as well. These churches had large congregations in the 1950s but have been in steady decline so the ministry requires a reinvention," he says.
Schools anti-Scripture
Nick says rejuvenating youth ministry will be a big challenge, particularly given the reluctance of high schools to do any religious activities and the negative vibe to anything "churchy' among local youth.
"After speaking to many schools and trying to understand how Scripture is received there, we found staff were very negative. We were also surprised to find that young families of Anglo background preferred not to enrol their children in Scripture and some even preferred Buddhist or Baha'i Scripture," Nick says.
"There was a real attitude that spirituality was a personal thing that children could take up later if they wanted to.
"The ideal would be to establish a local Scripture Board to oversee primary schools which makes sure Scripture is done well and is positively accepted by the school community," Nick says.
The roving ministers are speaking to community gate-keepers and locals " school principals, politicians, social workers, small business owners, as well as residents on the street and in their homes. The duo are convinced this is a more effective way of reaching people and understanding the community.
"We regard this as the church doing its homework before dedicating resources to doing intensive outreach," Chris says.
"It is about getting an understanding of the community in order to focus our resources in the future. It's about meeting people where they are rather than expecting them to come to us."
