The 2025 Tinsley Lecture, presented by Morling College, began with a quiz. “I’m going to ask you who this group is. I want you to try and guess. They’re spiritually open. They’re suspicious of institutional Christianity. They’re a growing subset of Aussie society. The majority live in cities. They’re establishing careers, they like tradition. They have low biblical literacy, and they’re craving community.”
And then Jeri Jones Sparks, Tinsley lecturer for 2025, did a reveal. Two groups fit that pattern, Gen Z (with birth years commonly dated from 1997 to 2012), and South Asians.
Morling’s Mike Frost introduced Sparks: “She’s an Indian Australian Tamil woman. She has worked at an Anglican church in Croydon as outreach minister, but she’s currently dividing her time between a couple of ministries, particularly with an interest in equipping and evangelising South Asian people, the Good News Series and Satya network.”
The Gen Z scenario was familiar to her audience. She described how it worked at her old job.
“We saw dozens and dozens of 20-somethings become Christians at a church of 300 adults. We hosted an alpha course last year of 101 people, and it was full of Gen Z. And when we see increased gospel fruit like this, we know it is entirely a move of God. We don’t control how God works, and at the same time, the way God loves to work is to partner with his people. Our whole church prayed desperately for that alpha. Some of us busted and worked, and I don’t doubt the reason that we’re seeing this shift in Gen Z across our nation and the world is because God is answering the prayers of many saints, because grandparents and parents have been begging God for salvation among this generation.”
But then began to explore the dreams of the other group that fit the pattern of the quiz that opened the talk.
“What I’m trying to get at is that there is a cumulative and circular effect of God working in a new way. God’s people notice that, and then that continues, right? God continues his work, his people participate, and that is how kingdom realities are formed in partnership with God. That is how we start telling new stories and dreaming new dreams. And I wanted to start with this premise because the goal of this lecture is to help us start dreaming new migrant dreams because look at how similar these factors are. What if we were ready to recognise how God might be doing a new thing by bringing a tide of migrants, especially South Asians to our backyards? What if we stopped settling for an old story about how migrants are harder to reach than your classic Anglo Aussie? What if we started contending in prayer with God for salvation? Just like Gen Z, South Asians are spiritually open and craving community, and so the opportunity before us is ripe for a work of God.”
The Stew That grew
Using the story of “The Stew That Grew,” a 1990s children’s picture book, Sparks depicted the first of five dreams – a dream of multiculturalism. “It is set during the Australian gold rush era of the 1950s and it’s kind of prophetic. It’s anticipating a future multicultural society. The story follows Molly O’Drew and her husband Blue, who begin a stew with some potatoes, and as people from various backgrounds, often migrants, add ingredients from their home countries, the stew grows into a rich and multicultural dish symbolising the blending of cultures in Australian society. In the dream of a multicultural nation, Australia invites the best from around the world to contribute their best to the holes in our economy and society. There’s so much I love about this story. It pulls to mind the very biblical idea of diversity and unity, but the story we tell in any national ideology is by nature naive and utopian. So it helps us to love the nation. We actually have to engage with critique of the simplistic stories that we tell about ourselves.”
Sparks cites a critique of the book, that the character Blue remains in charge of the stew, and the other characters simply add flavours. Speaking of the anti immigration rallies the day before the lecture, Sparks describes their challenge head-on. “They oppose and they’ve identified in their own materials, Indian migrants in particular, as a threat to European cultural heritage. There’s a kind of logic to this. I suspect that they’re okay with the dream of multicultural Australia 1.0 where people were allowed to come here and contribute to the stew because in that dream we migrants remained a minority and Blue was in charge of the stew.”
But there’s a challenge for the evangelical churches: “My sense is that most mainstream evangelical churches have The Stew That Grew dynamic. Anglo culture has been central and in charge, and maybe there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. There is again, a certain logic in going with the modus operandi of the majority because until now the Anglo majority of the church has been reflected in the wider community, but now we’re at a point of evolution. There is a future in which mainstream evangelical churches keep doing things the way we always have and we become increasingly culturally irrelevant in our context and we die.”
A second dream, the migrant’s search for security with education and preserving culture, also leads the myths within Australian culture. A “stereotype has often been attached to south and East Asians who are perceived as highly educated skilled migrants for entering Australia through a points-based system, hardworking law, abiding socially upwardly mobile, often associated with professional sectors like it, medicine, engineering, finance, and this has led to media and policy narratives, framing Asians as the success stories of our multicultural experiment. And this stereotype isn’t just externally imposed, it’s also internalised by the first generation… Asians are from high power cultures, which means we’re very comfortable with some people having more power than others, and this makes us predisposed to accepting, being misunderstood and mistreated.
“The first generation is just so grateful to even be here, so they will generally stay out of the way of big social conversations and decisions. “
There’s the first generation of migrants, then a second generation – but Sparks inserts generation 1.5, of which she is a part, children born overseas who have grown up here. Australian-born Chinese have ABC but “the best we have is brown, which I think is symptomatically vague… I see us as the in-betweeners, there are unique struggles. It’s the feeling of being neither here nor there not being Aussie enough, not being ethnic enough, especially if you can’t speak the language, you’re trying to figure out who you want to be and who you belong to all while you probably don’t have parents who understand you as you like.”
Sparks engagingly recounts how in-betweeners like her code switch. “It just happens when we talk to our parents or relatives. Our English accent changes without even noticing and when stuff like this happens, we want to, isn’t this code switching? Isn’t it changing the way you speak and present yourself kind of depending on who you’re around, what context you’re in? Isn’t that damaging? Yes, I think so. If only you have to code-switch to survive or succeed. But if you are acting out of your agency and freedom and I think it’s just cultural intelligence that you didn’t have to be taught, it’s that natural muscle that comes to you.” She see’s that as a strength, it means you can be a bridge builder.
Mosaics, tapestries and interculturalism
“Max Jeganathan, who works for the Centre for Public Christianity, had this excellent Sydney Morning Herald article earlier this year with this astute observation that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He’s talked about how Australia is such a multicultural nation, and we are; that’s our reality. He had this great metaphor about multiculturalism being like a mosaic. So many cultures live side by side, like small colourful tiles, but they’re not really touching or interacting in a meaningful way.”
Sparks presented an addendum: “[Jehanathan] was talking more broadly about society, but we can see it in the church too. It is possible for us to value diversity and have a whole range of cultures in our churches and be stuck in mosaic mode. God wants more for us than just looking colourful, sitting next to each other in the sun. The biblical vision is less like a mosaic than like a tapestry.”
“Tapestries are closely knit, and each colour thread must stretch and weave between the others. Every thread has to give way to other threads so that it can contribute to a bigger picture. It’s more than cultural diversity; it’s cultural mutuality. It’s more than being a multicultural church. It’s being an intercultural one. “
So what does an intercultural church look like? Sparks outlined three principles:
• Churches reflect and reach their local communities. “Does our church look like our local community, and are we reaching that local community with the gospel?”
• Gatherings express united diversity and inclusion of outsiders. “Do you use insider language that a church regular gets but you are accidentally, unnecessarily alienating the outsider in your midst?”
• Leadership is representative and meaningful at various levels. “How can you include and raise up qualified people from various cultures in places of meaningful leadership, leading teams sitting on the church board, exercising the ministry of the word.”
A new dream for the church
“A new dream of mission among migrants has to be mainstream for the church with our fast-growing demographic. This is not a niche or side project anymore. God has shaped our context in such a way that the outreach of a local church has to be for mission among migrants. Most churches are in metro areas, and most metro areas are multicultural, that’s a mindset shift for us. It’s huger than we think.”
Sparkes sets out practical ways forward for even the most anglo church.
• Seeking out ethnic ministries to partner with.
• Making room for first or second-generation migrant leaders
• Anglo leaders can contribute “Usually you’re a bit closer to the pot of stew and you have more influence than you realise.”
Summing up in prayer
God of the nations, we are so grateful that you have brought the nations to our cities, to our neighbourhoods, to our networks and our backyards. Father, we recognise that you have given us incredible privilege and a task to participate in the great commission. We confess that we become self-facing and self-indulgent and selfish. God help us to feel the need and urgency of those around us from every background and especially all the new migrants coming in. Help us to do what it takes to shape our imagination. To start dreaming new dreams for the sake of your gospel, for the good of those who hear it and ultimately for the glory of our Lord Jesus. In his name, Amen.
Image: Jeri Jones Sparks