In Sydney, which wears the crown of Australia’s most fractious city, Christian leaders and lay, Orthodox to Pentecostal, Uniting to Anglican, came together in two sold-out concerts in the Opera House last weekend.
Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan premiered the First Hymn at the Opera House, with three very diverse choirs: The Pacific Islands Choir, The Australian Byzantine Choir, and the St Andrew’s Cathedral Choir, performed, with Danni Im and Budjerah among many others.
Wesley Mission CEO Stu Cameron posted, “Last night I joined 2500 others in the Opera House for #onesydney – a coming together of the church to celebrate our unity in Christ. We were blessed by an incredibly rich, diverse, and talented group of artists – Byzantine, Pacifica and Cathedral Choirs, modern worship, rap ‘duels’, stunning dance and a whole lot more.
“For me, the most moving moment (along with lifting the roof off singing ‘How Great Thou Art’) was the opening prayer.
“Father Shimshon Temmo of the Assyrian Church of the East prayed the Lord’s Prayer over us.
“In English. And in Aramaic – the language Jesus and his disciples spoke.”
The day of concerts was the second significant Unity event organised by the Christian Alliance Council in the last twelve months. In August, a church heads event at Parliament House addressed by Premier Chris Minns and Tony Abbott drew a wide range of denominational heads. Spread across these events were a long list of denominational leaders, including Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher, Anglican Archbishop Kanishka Raffel, Australian Christian Churches Mark and Darlene Zschech, Uniting Church moderator Faaimata (Mata) Havea Hiliau, and the Maronite Bishop Antoine-Charbel Tarabay, among many others.
Some of the heads of churches at these events had never been in a room together, Pastor Andrew Harper, spokesperson and Vice President of the Christian Alliance Council, told The Other Cheek. At the Heads of churches event in Parliament House, “it was quite a powerful moment where we handed everyone a little wooden cross and asked them to put some prayer into that cross for themselves and their movement and who they represent, and then hand that cross to someone else in the room that they did not know and pray for them.”
“It was a beautiful moment that God opened up the room, the conversations, the chats, the mere fact that they’re in the room together around each other. So that’s gathering the head. And then the second strategy is to gather the body with the heads in attendance, knowing that quite often you won’t get the body without the head, the heads of the churches.”
Harper tells The Other Cheek that people often ask about the agenda of the Christian Alliance Council. “We are just focused on gathering.”
One church head dug for more. “He said, ‘What’s next? And I said, ‘I don’t know. that’s up to God.'” Harper quotes Psalm 133: “God’s word says when his people live in unity, he will command the blessing.”
” Our agenda is not to create some right-wing thing or left-wing thing because as soon as we try to do that, we show up our division. I don’t want to wade into Palestine or whatever. Having said that, we want to create an atmosphere and a place and a space for all the different Christian associations to be there and be under one roof, even those that do have differences in the past, I can tell you without any agenda, without any political push from the left on the right, but just focusing on the name Jesus and focusing on what we have in common. There was just such a beautiful sense of God in that room [when the heads of churches met]. And then also in our event we did in last October, and then our event we did on Sunday, the same…
“We’re not trying to make that room more Catholic or more Protestant or more Pentecostal or more Anglican. And our events that we’ve done before, and even the event we had on Sunday are expressions of the different ways we worship. And a lot of people have said that obviously we had some high profile performers as well, but mixed in all of that, you had a visiting choir, which a lot of people wouldn’t experience. You had different people from different parts of God’s church speaking and praying in different ways. We had Archbishop Anthony Fisherpraying, then the myself, and then the Anglican [Bishop Michael Stead], then the Salvation Army and we all do it different.”
Harper is Pastor at Bayside Church in Arncliffe in Southern Sydney, an Australian Christian Churches Church. President Paul
The President of the Christian Alliance Council, Paul Sedrak, is a member of the Coptic Church in the south of Sydney, and was a councillor on the former Rockdale Council. Another South Sydney local, Ben Irawan, CEO of Kingdom Culture Christian School in Arncliffe, is secretary.
Christian Alliance Council collaborated with Philip Ryall, a Catholic and founder of Harvest Journeys, which specialises in pilgrimages and is also passionate about Christian unity and leader of Dear Unity, a movement that seeks “radical forgiveness, and love across denominational lines.”
Ryall may be the odd one out, geographically, among the drivers of the One Sydney concerts as the origin story of the Christian Alliance Council is a very South Sydney, even Arncliffe or Rockdale story.
It started one Ramadan, Harper recounted. “The challenge was pretty much from the Islamic side to say that, why don’t you guys get together, you Christians. The conversation came on Ramadan, where essentially the Muslims lay down their separations and come together, and then it was like, “Oh, you guys could never do that.” “Why, you guys are just so disunified, fractured.” “We can gather, but you guys can’t, but are you Christians?” And it turned into a little bit of a challenge. That lit the fire, the match was lit.”
Image: One Sydney at the Opera House. Image Credit Ben Irawan FB
That’s Wesley Mission John. Thanks