Team Australia

By: Chris Kingston
December 1, 2006

There is a silent, huge problem with today’s youth with the fact that cultural influences such as movies, television, radio, ipods, internet and video games quickly altering the minds of the youth and taking away the positive perspectives of our teenagers around the world.

I am not going to bash the media and the way kids are influenced in today’s society, but what I do what to point out is everyone is becoming so individualist and losing so many great opportunities to interact with other people, humans, friends, and families by always focusing on being entertained. This is a full fledge epidemic!

Jesus Christ was focused on people, serving and healing others, and the inner condition of their hearts. We are here in Australia sharing the good news of the Gospel to the youth.

What our HSE team is discovering is the fact that Australian youth and teens are just like the American teens. They are influenced by the same shows, music, video games etc. They are not receiving the love and time needed from key adult figures and roles models in their lives.

We have been blessed by what God has given us the opportunity to go and do while down-under in the Sydney area. God is giving us a daily chance to go into public schools and interact and share who Jesus Christ is, what he has done in each of our lives, and what HE wants to do in each one of the youth lives, To give them Hope and a Future...

This mission’s trip has been non-stop from the time we landed on November 12th. ome people might think, wow, the team went to Sydney, what a nice vacation. Wrong, our intention has always been to be available and ready to serve God and be used in all the blessings he has waiting for our team. That has turned into many 14+ hour days with constant opportunities to interact and share with the youth here.

Please pray for hundreds or thousands of youth to come to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. Please specifically pray for the following schools: Model Farms H.S., Kellyville H.S., Castle Hill H.S., and Pacific Hills. Pray that the bondage of deception, discouragement, and any sin be taken out of their lives.

Also, please pray for our time and relationships with the youth group at Calvary Chapel Church were we are serving. We pray that they will be raised up as the future world changers and leaders of a spiritual revival in Australia.

God Bless you all for your prayers,

Chris Kingston
HSE Team Australia

On Mondays we have a rest and relaxation day where we don't have a full day of ministry booked. Some of us have used the days to rest and do laundry or hang out at our host homes. Others of us have gone out to see the sights of Sydney. Here are some pictures from the last two Mondays.

One of the service projects we've been doing this week is creating a mural on a big boring brick wall in the JJ's (Juniors for Jesus) Room at the church. We photocopied pictures from a Noah's Ark book onto overhead transparencies and projected those on the wall and traced outlines in pencil. Now we are working on filling in color with paint and outlining with paint or paint pens.

Last Thursday we went into Castle Hill High School and taught the "Choices" class for six of their scripture classes. Unlike Model Farms, where there is one scripture teacher and the kids rotate around when they have scripture, at Castle Hill, they have a large group of scripture teachers come in on Thursday mornings and everyone has scripture at nearly the same time. The scripture teachers we met at Castle Hill High School are all young and seemed to primarily come from Hillsong Church.

Here are some pictures of us meeting with the scripture teachers before class in a meeting room in the school library:


Like everywhere else we have done the choices lesson, the kids responded well to it. Many of the kids were a little roudy, which is almost to be expected in classes of 7th and 8th graders, but when we shared our testimonies they were really interested and attentive to what we had to say.

A lot of our message was stuff they'd never heard before. One class genuinely had no idea whether "sexual purity" means you have sex or don't have sex--purity was a completely novel idea to those kids. And we thought they might understand integrity well since it appeared to be one of the school's "core values" that was on their bulletin board, but again, it was a message that if they had heard before it didn't sink in fully.

Jessica's Experience:
My (Jessica) heart was really broken for these kids. The school, as we understand it, has a little bit of a "bad reputation" compared to some of the other schools in the area. These kids desperately needed to hear the message we were sharing. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to go into this school again, and its been on my heart to pray for the scripture teachers at that school, that the word of God would penetrate these kids through their time at the school.

One of the teachers, "Diego" (because he is from San Diego actually) is a little bit of a legend aroudn the school. When I was at Castle Hill Shopping Centre on our day off on Monday I talked to a group of kids who were begging for change for the bus, and after asking whether I went to Hillsong and hearing why I was in Australia they asked whether I knew Diego, because he'd been their scripture teacher at Castle Hill High School. What a coincidence that I'd just met Diego a few days before and could connect to the kids on that level!

We have done cafe outreaches the last two saturdays in a row. These pictures are from the first one, and give a pretty good picture of what the event was like--bands from the church played clean secular music and there was a good mix of people from the church and non-christian friends, giving us the opportunity to bring them into the church facility in a non-threatening "non-churchy" atmosphere. The following weekend we had a follow-on event with a more christian focus, including worship music, games, pizza, and fellowship.

On Saturday we had an evangelism training workshop for the church. The concept was a two hour workshop focused on approaches and encouragement to share your faith. We wanted to show them that there are a lot of different techniques you can use when you are evangelizing. In doing that it provides them exposure to different techniques that suit varied personalities. Some people will love using the law and ten commandments to show people their need for Christ. Others will feel more comfortable sharing a testimony of how God has personally transformed their life.

We also included a lot of encouragement about why we should evangelize, including two video clips. One was of a thirty second enactment of the rapture coming in the middle of a church service. The other was an audio clip we heard at the school of Evanglism about a little old man who handed out tracts on George Street in Sydney Harbor (can you think of a more relevant place to be using that as an encouragement??) for 40 years without hearing of a single salvation, and then all of a sudden before his death he is met by this baptist pastor from London about all these people who'd come to know the Lord after receiving his tracts.

If you'd like to watch either of those videos here are links:
Rapture Video (view on youtube, downloadable at the potters house)
Man from Sydney Video (one thing to note on that particular video site: if you do not have ad blocking software that blocks the popup ad, click the x button on the popup that appears...do not click "ok" unless you want spyware installed on your computer)

We presented our material using powerpoint, having each of us take turns speaking on different topics. At the beginning there were a couple of glitches due to an out of order slide and conversion from powerpoint to open-office format overlapping some of the text and pictures, but overall it went really smoothly and we were thankful we'd been able to get the powerpoint to show up on the projector at all. The setup to make powerpoint project on the projector instead of the computer monitor is a little complicated, but the right people were able to be found beforehand to help us set it up right. Praise God he listened to all the prayers for this event!

Originally we wanted to have a "go out and practice this" practical ministry experience time immediately following our workshop, however, due to the second cafe outreach being scheduled a few short hours later, the timing just didn't work out. So please pray that another opportunity would arise where we could go out and practice evanglizing with the locals from the church.

After the two hour presentation, we spent another half hour just answering questions from the audience, which was a huge blessing all around. The questions were extremely relevant to what we'd just presented and showed an understanding of the material (it hadn't just floated over their heads), and gave us more opportunity to share about personal experiences we've had evangelizing, and how God has worked through those experiences.

Wednesday Novenber 22nd at Model Farms

John and I (Diana) taught out of the book of Ephesians, telling each class about the Gospel with an emphasis on grace and God's purpose for their lives. During one class we were led to share with the class why we trust in Jesus, so John and I both took turns explaining what God has done in our lives since we surrendered to Him. The kids were in awe! I asked them if they have seen God move in their lives like that, and they just sat there. Then John asked them if they have seen God move in another person's life, and once again they just sat there. So I asked them who wanted to see God move in their life, and without haste many of them raised their hands. We led them in prayer to invite Jesus into their lives, and to surrender to His will. While we were praying I couldn't help but look up and see if they had their heads bowed, and all of them did! One boy even had tears in his eyes. I was amazed to see God moving in their hearts the way He did because this is a class we had the day before, and they couldn't stop moving and teasing each other. Even the kid who most vocally and negatively responded to the definition of grace the day before was one of the first to raise his hand expressing he wanted to see God move in his life.

Lia asked me to share with everyone what she's seen God doing in the past week:

This past week I have seen God work in the hearts of the church members. About 16 members came to the Evangelism Training on Saturday from 12-2 pm and members asked pertinent
questions till 2:30 pm. The Holy Spirit's presence was felt, it ministered to us all. We had a sweet time of fellowship afterward. We were blessed with Janet helping to set-up for the Cafe Outreach [scheduled for 7 pm the same day].

The Moran family opened their home to the team to have a spot of lunch and fellowship with them and others that dropped by in between the two events.

I have experienced God's love through my brothers and sisters, God is moving in our hearts to surrender ourselves entirely to Him for His work.

Saturday's Cafe Outreach was very intimate we worshipped God in Spirit and truth. There was a sweet time of prayer lifting up special requests. Afterward we broke bread and fellowshipped through games and conversation.

At Sunday's service God's Spirit was evident in the sharing of God's word. There was healing, hope was renewed, I believe that God's will was expressed through forgiveness. God is at work daily.

God's word says in Psalm 37:4 "Delight yourself in the LORD and He will give you the desires of your heart." He desires that we would forgive one another. We reflect God's character when we forgive others.

P.S. This is what I saw God doing this week. Praise God

lia