Well, hello again.
Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast.
I'm Tony Payne.
Really good to be with you again.
And for those of you who might have missed the most recent episodes, I'm back here at Moore College as
the Director of the Centre for Christian Living and really delighted to be doing so. And I'm especially
pleased because the excellent Peter Orr, who's been looking after the Centre over the last 12 months or so,
has recorded a bunch of episodes so that I've got a few up my sleeve before I need to get into recording some for myself.
Now, I have recorded a couple of interviews already by the time you're listening to this, and they're going to be coming out soon.
But in the meantime, today we're going to be listening to Pete Orr in conversation with another Peter Peter Tong about the gospel in our schools.
Peter Tong is the chaplain at Barker College, and the two Peters are going to be talking about
what does it mean for the gospel to do its work in a school?
What sort of work does a school chaplain do, for example, and how does the ministry that takes place within our schools
sit alongside, complement, relate to the broader ministry of the gospel, say, that we're used to seeing in our churches?
Gospel ministry in our schools is incredibly important and strategic and has changed many lives.
And in this conversation between the two Peters, we dig into what that ministry
looks like, why school chaplaincy is important, and how we can support it.
I do hope you enjoy this conversation.
Here's Peter Tong speaking with.
Peter Orr about the gospel in our schools.
Welcome to Moore College's Centre for Christian Living podcast.
My name is Peter Orr, and today I'm joined by another Peter.
I'm joined by Pete Tong.
Pete is the chaplain of Barker College, and in this conversation we're going to talk about school
chaplaincy, what that looks like and about ministry in an educational context more generally.
Pete, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Pete.
And hello to everyone listening.
I wonder if we could start by just getting to know you.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, how you came to know the Lord Jesus?
Yeah.
I'm married to Caitlin.
We've got three kids, Chloe, Lilly, and Sam.
I've been in Anglican ministry for a little while now.
I came through Moore College and then worked in Anglican parishes in Sydney, and then moved into the school setting in about 2020.
But before that, I grew up in a family that came to church every week, Sunday School and youth group, and it wasn't unusual as a
family to pray or to read the Bible together at different times, and that was my introduction to knowing who God was through Jesus.
But there were certainly ups and downs along the way.
I can remember in mid-high school weighing up the facts as I understood them at that age
and stage and thinking that on the balance of probability, God probably didn't exist.
And it was very simple formula I used as I looked at the friends and people I knew there were more people who believed in no God.
Very few people believed in God.
So I thought, well, the majority must be right.
And I can remember lying in bed one night looking out the window and thinking, God, if you are really there, can you make it rain right now?
And I was looking out the window and there was nothing, there wasn't certainly
no rain, but not even a breath of wind in the trees, not a drop of water.
And I thought, well.
If God was there, why wouldn't he?
Why wouldn't he just do a little sign for me?
And in my mind at that time, that was actually a bit of a heartbreaking moment because I thought is God, who I'd heard about doing amazing
things through the Old Testament and in the Gospels, through Jesus, it must be made up because he couldn't do some rain outside my window.
But at the.
I was heading to youth group on Friday nights and we would do the very simple thing of
open up the Bible and the youth leader would say, you know, who's read something this week?
And then we'd go bit by bit through passages in the Bible.
And a number of years later, things started to click and I realized, well, that's actually how God speaks with us.
And so my faith grew.
My faith grew through the uni years, started getting involved in my church, leading youth group, teaching Sunday School Kids Church.
And ministry, I think, was on my heart from a very early phase, and then took steps in my mid twenties to train for ministry.
And here I am now as a senior chaplain at Barker College.
Before getting there and before going into ministry, you had a bit of experience in the educational world beyond just school and university.
Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, one of my early roles was teaching high school scripture in a state school.
The church was able to fund me, and then I went into the local high school, and that was my first
steps into a school ministry setting, which was brilliant and wonderful and exciting, and one.
Sense, but also terrifying and feeling like I was jumping in the deep end.
In another sense, I wasn't a trained teacher and I didn't have any teaching credentials
behind me, but I knew a little bit about kids and found my way through the classroom.
It was a chance to write our own material partner with other high school scripture teachers around and to share ideas and the best resources.
It was during that time, I think that God opened up my eyes and my heart to.
The potential of being in the world of the student and not only sitting at a church and praying that people would bridge the gap and come to us,
but by immersing myself or Christians immersing themselves in the world of the school, to be shoulder to shoulder with colleagues who are working
hard week in and week out, and to be in the lives of students, to know with them, to grow up with them, to gain that trust and respect from parents.
In that context to share the love and gospel of Christ with them.
So I think that was my first taste as an assistant minister.
Like many right across New South Wales, I was involved in scripture, in primary schools, in the various churches that I
was at, and the open door that we had there to bring the Bible to people who otherwise wouldn't know much about the Bible.
That was just such a privilege to be part of that ministry.
And I think it's always had a special place in my thinking about.
Ministry and where I wanna give my years in terms of my ministry time and ministry thinking.
Now you're at an Anglican school, a Christian school with a chaplaincy program.
What do you see as the aim of school chaplaincy?
In that sort of setting?
Yeah, it's a great question and one that I chat to with other chaplains about a lot.
I think the first thing is to say that every school does it a little bit differently.
A school is not a church.
It seems like an obvious thing to say, but that's a good starting point because.
When we can acknowledge that readily, it means we won't automatically bring all of our church categories over into the school world.
Of course, there'll be lots of points of contact, but we won't just download everything we do in the church world into the school world.
So each school does it slightly differently, and I think in the school context, the purpose of a particular school.
The culture, the contextual goals and aims and the values of that school can shape
what Christian ministry or chaplaincy ministry would look like in that context.
I'm in an Anglican school in Sydney and we are able to be pretty open about putting Jesus front and centre in front of the student, staff and parents.
The language we use is we long for, and we pray for a school that knows and treasures Jesus.
We want a school where we can make Christ known.
Now that means sometimes preaching the gospel quite clearly, it sometimes means playing the long
game with students as they range through their attitudes towards Jesus and Christian things.
But for us, it's an opportunity to be embedded in the life of the school and
not only show Christ in our words, which we will do in classes and chapel.
But to be living examples of Christians embedded in the world of the students and staff and parents.
Wonderful.
And in terms of the structure, how do you structure the chaplaincy program at Barker?
Yeah, at our school we've got our core ministries, which involve our chapels.
Our Christian studies and crew, I think a lot of schools would have those three areas of ministry as their core focus.
We do chapels for each grade, gets a chapel once a week.
We have chapels for staff at the start of terms, we have communion services on Wednesday morning for staff.
We also have Christian studies, which we do from pre-K right through to year 12, and our lunchtime groups, lunchtime
groups, some for all students together and other Bible studies that students can come to just for their year group.
Bible studies for staff as well.
They're our core ministry, chapel, Christian studies and crew.
We have some other ministries that we work on.
We have ministry to parents.
We have a parent prayer network and information goes out each month or so to
help them partner with us in prayer, and we have in person prayer meetings.
We ministry to staff.
A Bible study, communion service.
We partner with churches.
We have some indigenous campuses, and Barker has just started a refugee school this term, and so
we're embedded in those other campuses as well, bringing Christian ministry and chaplaincy to them.
And then there's the pastoral care that comes just from being in the lives of the kids and
the staff and whatever conversations come up from playing that role in the school as well.
Schools are busy places.
There's co-curricular, there's camps.
There's lots going on, and our goal is to be part of all of it so that we can be a Christian witness and we can build relationships
so that when we stand up in front of a class or a chapel service, the kids know us just that bit better and we know the kids
a little bit better having been with them on the camps and doing the various experiences that are part of their daily school
life.
Hmm.
Tell us a little bit more about the refugee school.
That sounds like a fascinating new venture.
A couple of years ago, Barker welcomed a refugee who had fled from Afghanistan and she had finished school over there.
She was at university, but.
Having left Afghanistan, she wanted to get into university in Australia.
She needed to then go back and finish the HSC, and so she started year 11 and 12 with us, and she graduated at the end of last year.
Through working with her and other people who were connected with her, it opened the door
for us to lots of refugee families who are already here in Australia, in our part of Sydney.
Close-ish to Barker College, and we started thinking about how we could create a more permanent school within
a school for those who have left their home, left their culture, left their language, and are now living here.
So we have a campus that's connected to our campus here at Hornsby, specifically for refugee
children, where we can do some targeted teaching for them and some targeted programs, but also.
Integrate those students with our broader Barker community.
For us at Barker, this is one of their very practical and tangible ways that we can express our Christian faith.
As a school, we would hate to be a school that is just talk, or we would hate to be a school that
just has Christian values plastered on the website, but it never finds its way into school life.
Hmm.
So our work with.
Our refugee campuses and service learning and other aspects of our school life, we see as a direct expression of our Christian heritage.
And I think that's part of my role as well.
And the chaplaincy team's role is to help.
People join the dots between some of the work we do at a school and the Christian connection to it.
And I find with a lot of parents, that's one of the ways that they can reassess what Christianity is about.
It is a real open door to gospel conversations when we say we will do these things as a school, and
we are linking it back to the compassion of Christ or the love of Jesus, or care for the outsider.
And these are all Christian things.
Hmm.
And in terms of your relationship with local churches, what does that look like in practice?
Yeah, we try and partner with local churches pretty intentionally.
We don't always get the balance right, but we recognize that a school is a parachurch ministry, and
as vibrant and as full as our chaplaincy ministry is, we know that it's not an endpoint in itself.
We want our students to become members of their local church.
We want them to be enfolded into youth groups.
They'll leave school come year 12, but we want them to be part of a church that they can grow in and grow through, through all the phases of life.
So I think the partnership between schools and churches starts with a theological understanding of what the two entities are.
What is a school and what is a church, and how do they fit together, at least theologically.
And as we talk through that, we are glad to open up pathways for our students and try and create
the time and the space for them to land in a church and experience what church life is like.
We do that pretty formally in a couple of times through the student's journey with us in year seven.
There's an assignment in Christian Studies where they have to visit a local
youth group and then come back and write up and reflect on their experiences.
I won't say loads and loads, but a number.
Go during that assignment, and then they keep going to that youth group.
Every year we hear of some students who do that.
Often their students who their families might have been connected to a church once upon
a time, but the connection's been lost or they haven't actually made it to youth group.
Now they're in year seven, and that assignment is just a trigger point to get them going again.
We also find that in year seven, the kids are very often open, so it's a very easy invite for the
youth group going kids to invite their friends along because they have to go as part of the assignment.
And then at year 11, the compliment to that is that they'll visit an evening church.
And as we lead up to that, our team are talking regularly with the local youth ministers.
We're talking with the senior ministers and ministers of evening congregations.
We're following up where.
A lot of churches will say, what can we do better?
What is it like for someone with no church experience to walk through the doors?
And the churches are really eager to find out what that's like.
Our kids are pretty honest in their assessments, so they're formal ways in which we partner and try and direct our students into churches.
We try and make our facilities.
We're blessed with some great facilities here in the school.
We know that local churches often don't have the facilities that we do, so we try and make them available for use on the
weekends or combined youth group nights or to support multiple congregations gathering at once and that kind of thing.
We also have some times when we ask local youth ministers come in and speak potentially at lunchtime groups or in chapel.
We have a week in the year that we call Faith Week, where we try and.
Dial up just a little bit.
Our intentional evangelism across the school, and in that week we call former
students to return and to share their faith and how their faith has grown.
Post school, in class, chapel and Christian studies.
And usually as they do that, they'll talk about their churches and they're trying to connect students into their churches.
We also try and get all of our chaplaincy team to be involved in serving in their own church.
I think that's a great way to model their growing Christian life.
Their school role here is pretty demanding, but where possible, we say, yeah, keep serving in your church as you can, 'cause you'll
grow in that context and that will actually help you be a great chaplain or Christian studies teacher through the week with us.
Hmm.
So it's an ongoing question.
It's one, I talk to a lot of other chaplains about how to do this well, and
we're trying to link in with the local churches as much as we possibly can.
Hello, it's Tony Payne here and one of the real bonuses of recently joining the faculty here at Moore College is that I've been able to
resume my role as Director of the Centre for Christian Living, a job that I did a few years ago. And it's been great coming back to CCL,
because I've always loved the mission of CCL: to bring the ethics that Moore College teaches, the theologically rich, biblically
centred way of thinking about our lives, bringing that outside of the College boundaries, outside of the walls of the College
to the Christians of Sydney to bless the wider community with that thinking. And it's great to be involved in that work
again, that's what the Centre for Christian Living does:
we bring biblical ethics.
to everyday issues. But it's great coming back to CCL after a bit of a break of a few years because you can look at things with fresh eyes.
And this year, I figured out we'd like to do a few things a little bit differently at the Centre for Christian Living.
One is I think we could do a little better in digging more deeply into some issues.
A lot of our podcasts and events have just been kind of one-off, dealing with a particular topic.
I thought it might be good if we dug into some issues at a little bit more depth, and so in our podcast this year on a few
different occasions, we'll take a little bit of extra time to dig into an issue in more depth and perhaps in a more satisfying way.
That's something I'd.
The second thing I'd like to try a little bit differently at CCL this year is in our events.
At our events as they have been going for the last many years, we usually invite a speaker
to come and speak on a particular topic and then people can interact with that talk.
But this year, I'd like us to
do a little bit less of the single speaker and a bit more of working together to think through an issue
from the point of view of the Bible—a little bit more of a workshop and a little bit less of a talk.
And so what I'm envisaging is that when you come to one of the new biblical ethics workshops that we're gonna run this year at CCL.
The team will bring a whole stack of research and ideas and input to that gathering, but then we'll work through the ethical
thought process together, a bit more interactively to dig into what this issue is all about and how we should respond to it.
As Christians, I'm really excited about this.
I think it'll not only be a, a great way of digging into an issue, perhaps a bit more satisfyingly and at more depth.
It's also going to equip you to think ethically, to think about how we actually think our way from
the Bible to how we should live to get better at how we do ethics as evangelical Christians.
And so the first of these biblical ethics workshops we've got planned is coming up on May the
seventh at 7:30pm here at Moore College, and it's going to be on the topic of “Neurodivergence”.
My experience, and I'm sure yours as well, and certainly statistically, is that neurodivergence is a growing phenomenon
community, by which I mean that some people just have different brains.
God has wired their brains a bit differently.
We give that difference names, like Autism Spectrum Disorder or ADHD, and these conditions are incredibly common, I'm sure.
Someone in your family or immediate family or circle of friends or at church who's having to deal with what
these conditions mean for how to live, but also how to be Christian and how to live as a Christian family.
And what we're going to dig into on May the seventh is “Neurodivergence and the Christian life”.
How do we respond to neurodivergence as Christians?
How do we think about it biblically?
How do we respond and care biblically?
Has it changed the way we work as churches and minister the gospel?
with these issues?
It's going to be a very helpful and interesting night, and we've already got some plans
as to who can contribute to the night and some of the inputs that we're going to have.
I hope you can join us on May the seventh for the first of our ethics workshops for the Centre for Christian Living.
Look forward to seeing you then.
And now let's get back to our program.
And in terms of your own ministry, you've obviously had experience in local church ministry, now you're a chaplain.
What are the similarities and differences between the ministries that you do now and that you would've done a few years ago?
Yeah, I think when I came into my current school, I thought the closest point of
contact from what I was familiar with church and youth group to the school setting.
I thought the closest point of contact was our school chapels.
I've probably got lured in a little bit because the form is the closest.
So in our school chapel, we sing hymns, we have prayers, we have a Bible reading, we have a message,
and that's the closest in form, at least to what we would've done at Church and Youth Group.
I. However, the further I've thought about it and reflected on it, chatting with other chaplains
and reading, and I think it's actually the furthest away from what we would regularly do at church.
And I think the starting point is not what does it look like, but the starting point is who is in the room.
Hmm.
And once we start to analyze a school chapel or school ministry.
Around the question of who is in the room, who is the audience?
It starts to flip a lot of our theological categories upside down.
So let's say that church is a voluntary gathering of mostly believers with some non-believers there week by week.
The school chapel is the opposite of that.
It's a compulsory gathering of largely non-believers with some believers in there.
Really grappling with who is in the room, I think needs to transform the language that we use.
It transforms the way we approach even singing hymns.
The prayers that we pray, and of course the way we steer and the tone of our Bible messages and the way we open up the Bible and explain it.
Even though the chapel building might look like a church building and the form of
the service is very similar, I think it's a radically different event or entity.
To a Sunday church gathering.
Now we are grappling with that and wrestling with that all the time, but I think that's the first big difference in a classroom.
Again, you're largely working with non-Christians, with some Christians in there, but the classroom brings expectations of its own.
We are a school.
A school is about learning.
There are particular ways that you learn.
Well, there's curriculums and lesson plans, assessments, and reports that all need into the learning framework.
Within that structure, we can open up the content of the Bible or we can look at some aspects of church history or ethics or philosophy.
We can do some apologetics, but that sits within a framework that's actually quite
foreign to a Friday night at a youth group or a Bible study as part of church.
I think the big things are moving from.
Ministry that's largely with Christians and encouraging them to grow in their faith as they live it out in the world through the week.
To ministry with non-Christians, which is wall-to-wall evangelism, a lot of
apologetics, a lot of relational building, which can just sometimes take time.
And then knowing the right moment.
To be really clear on what the gospel is.
But I think we've found through experience, I think most chaplains would agree with this, that if you are super clear on the gospel
and quite clear about calling for a response week in, week out, week in, week out, the students grow numb to that very quickly.
So yes, we can have as much gospel as we want, but it needs to be timed well
and with a view that we have a lot of these students for many, many years.
But in little goes each
week.
Thanks, Pete.
That's really helpful.
So it sounds like a really encouraging ministry, but I'm sure there are challenges.
So what are some of the challenges alongside some of the joys that you've experienced in your role as a chaplain at Barker College?
Yeah, I think I'll start with some of the joys.
I can remember when I was working as a minister in a church, we would spend so long praying.
For visitors to come.
We'd spend ages thinking, what does the non-Christian think about this passage or this topic?
How do we get them to bridge the gap and come to us?
But in the role I'm currently in, I'm in that world.
I'm in their world and I'm living and breathing the sorts of things that they think about and talk about, and there's a real joy to that because.
I can open up bits of the Bible that people have never heard of.
I can talk about Jesus and show them aspects of his life and character, things that he taught about his divinity and compassion and claims.
And I'm doing this with people who.
Would in no other way choose on a Friday or Sunday to come to church, and yet I
have the privilege of being able to be in their world and to do that with them.
So that is a joy that me and the team with me get to experience on a daily basis.
I think we also get to see the joy of Christians learning to live out their faith in a contested world.
This brings such encouragement to me and the other staff with us.
I can remember in the church setting in a youth ministry, you know, you pray for the kids who come on Friday, and a lot of
the talks are about how can you live out your faith as a Christian in the playground or in your sports team, or in your school
setting, or at the parties on Friday night, but you wouldn't see them again until the next week and you'd check in with them.
Or even pastoring adults, you'd pray for them through the week.
You try and feed them in a way on a Sunday that allows them to draw on God's word through the weekend.
Live out, speak up as a Christian.
Grow as a Christian in their workplace.
But here in my current role, that's flipped a little bit and I get to see the Christians who are learning.
Growing to be Christians in a contested world.
And it can be hard.
It can be really hard, but I get to see them and I see them grow.
And sometimes for some students it might be something just so small, like telling their friend, oh, today at lunchtime I'm going to crew.
It might be done in 20 seconds, that little comment, but sometimes for that student, that is an enormous leap in their faith.
It might be a student getting up in chapel in front of their grade and advertising something that's going on.
Again, I. It's done in three minutes.
But for that student, they have now raised their flag as a Christian in their grade for the next couple of years to come.
Huge moments as people live out their faith in a contested world.
And for the colleagues who are members of lots and lots of churches in the local area.
And I see them live out their faith as Christians in a busy place in sometimes a stressful place, in an exhausting place in a community.
And they are just in very ordinary, normal ways.
Being Christians in the world.
I think as someone who is in church ministry for a long time, I never got to see that.
I would hear about it, but I never gotta see that.
And I'm finding that such a deep encouragement.
So that's some of the Joys. Challenges:
I think we can overdo the challenges a little bit.
The challenges for school ministry are probably the same for church ministry.
You can feel like there's lots of opposition, and sometimes there is, but sometimes it's more apathy than direct opposition.
For our kids, they're reasonably polite and they can master the idea of being there in the room.
The challenge is what's going on in their hearts?
What is really happening as the word is preached week in, week out.
And that can sometimes be discouraging when you think, wow, so many kids are hearing the word opened up, but they're not really responding.
I. And then you hear a story of someone who three years after school, eight years after school, when they
got married, 10 years after school, that's when they started to take the Christian faith more seriously.
I went to one of these church visits two years ago.
I went to a local church and I was there looking after about 20 or so year, 11 kids.
And the person that greeted me at the door was a former student from this school, and he greeted me with this giant smile on
his face, and I just could not get over my surprise at seeing this person now, not only at a church, but on a door welcoming.
Hmm.
He just greeted me with this warm handshake and said, sir, after school I've become a Christian.
A friend invited me to church and it all clicked.
So the challenge is sometimes not seeing the fruit in the years that we have them, but we try and pray and as they leave school, commit them to God.
And that's a challenge sometimes to trust that God will, in his timing, work in the
hearts and minds of those who come through the school and the years that we have them.
Hmm.
I think maybe one other challenge that's worth flagging is, I'll put it in
human terms 'cause it's not a big gap, I guess, for God, but in human terms.
Between a church and a church community and the rest of Australian society, you know, as big speaking.
Now that I often visit church with people that I'm taking from school, the radar goes up and the lens goes up.
Well, what do first timers think about this?
What do non-Christians hear in this jargon or in this Bible?
Teaching and messages.
Sermons, I say, can be dense.
Bible passages can be inaccessible at times.
Our in-house language.
Sometimes the culture that is just established, these things can be big gap for non-Christians to jump over.
And I wonder if as churches, in our context in Sydney, I wonder if we expect a lot, potentially too much.
For the outsider to jump over that big gap and land with us.
And I wonder if there's more we can do to just have a lens of the outsider all the time and maybe we have
overdone the idea of the culture being against us and it kind of does force us or bring us together as Christians.
I think my encouragement is so let's keep opening up the door and be aware of people who are in there all the time
who have zero background in theology, bible literacy, Christian singing, and yet we're praying for them to come.
Let's try and welcome them, not just with a welcome up the front, but welcome them in all the things
that we do.
Thanks, Pete.
So helpful to have those reflections, hear the experience of what school chaplaincy is like, but also your wider perspective, particularly on
seeing outsiders come into church.
So thank you very much for your Christian service and your time on the podcast today.
Thanks, Pete.
Pleasure chatting.
Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College.
For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website:
that's ccl.moore.edu au, where you'll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode, all
the way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we've published through the Centre.
And while you're there on the website,
we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
We'd also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our
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Please get in touch.
You can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team
here at Moore College, for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this
podcast, to James West for the music, and to you dear listeners, for joining us each week.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Tony Payne.
Bye for now.