This sermon was preached on the occasion of the commissioning of Tom Grayden (“The Tommissioning”) as a Non-Placement Pastor, and Chaplain at The University of Melbourne Southbank Campus
The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few. Ask, then, the Lord of the harvest to send labourers out into his harvest. Luke 10:2
I will begin with an Interesting and Engaging Fact. 11% of Uniting Church Members are 90 years or older, which is more than ten times the proportion for Australia as a whole of 0.8%.
There is a glass-half-full gloss on this: churchgoing is evidently astonishingly good for your health!
But, on the other hand, it is illustrative of a significant challenge facing the church, which is that we have largely lost touch with the younger generation. While I’m sure it is perfectly possible for older people to understand younger people, it would always require work. And in a context where younger people are simply missing, it is going to take some serious focus.
I’m sure I have regaled many of you with the story of how Tom’s chaplaincy came about. If so, please bear with me while I tell the story again.
It all began, from my perspective at least, at a meeting of inner-city ministers and others with a heart for student ministry, and the gradually dawning realisation that our conversation about what young people do or do not want was never going to get anywhere because the youngest people in the room were in their fifties. The idea was floated, by Craig Thomson, minster at Mark the Evangelist, if I recall correctly, that we should just hire a young person or two to go and find out.
As I walked out of the building, it occurred to me to wonder whether Tom might be up for some sort of peer-level chaplaincy and action research type thing. And the more he and I talked about it, the stronger the realisation grew that, not only would he be into it, but the Conservatorium would actually be a great place to do chaplaincy. For a start, unlike students doing a BA who are apparently mainly to be found at home, essentially watching extremely expensive YouTube videos, conservatorium students are actually on the premises rehearsing and playing. Which is a great place to start with a kind of ministry of presence sort of thing. Add to that it was a high-performance sort of situation – like the Australian Institute of Sport, only with less support – and then add Tom’s excellent relationships with the students and staff of the institution. It sounded like a goer.
So we set up an action-research project to investigate the possibilities of chaplaincy at the Southbank campus of the University of Melbourne, and, in conversation with the group of ministers with chaplaincy on their hearts who I mentioned earlier, came to the conclusion that there was indeed a good opportunity for chaplaincy there, and so, with significant support from the congregation of Mark the Evangelist, we find ourselves today, commissioning Tom into this role.
The question, though, is what is this role? More specifically, alongside his role in providing a pastoral presence at the Con, what is the specifically theological labour in the very specific harvest to which Tom is being called?
We live in a strange time. It feels like the closing of one historical era – the era of the “rules based international order”, the era when liberal democracy seemed like the only rational way forward, the era of the end of history. And, of course, we have to factor in climate change, whatever AI will bring, the crisis of atomisation, and a million other things. We now have to ask ourselves: what happens after the end of history?
Maybe it feels like a long bow to draw, but I think these mega-trends are concentrated in the experience of young people.
Let me explain.
The Berlin Wall fell in my first year at university and we all just kind of assumed that we needn’t worry too much about jobs and so on, because we were the lucky beneficiaries of a kindly history. There would be no more need for war, because the basic competition between the three great systems of the twentieth century – fascism, communism, and liberal democracy had been comprehensively won by democracy.
But what does it mean to be a young person when you find it hard to believe that you will ever own a house, or get married, or be in a position have a family? A world in which the financial and geopolitical order which underwrote eighty or so years of comparative peace is being shaken to its foundations?
What does it mean to grow up in a world which is defined by precarity and the deep political division? Where the best-selling self-help books are called things like “the subtle art of not giving a whatever” ?
I began with a statistic, so here is another one, even more confronting. In 2023 around 15% of Australians were experiencing loneliness. That’s bad enough, but for people between 15 and 24 it is even worse, with 25% experiencing loneliness.
Did you know that loneliness is as bad for you as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day? And it doesn’t even make you look cool while you’re doing it.
What does it mean to be a young person in this atomised world of loneliness?
Scripture tells us that Jesus, observing the crowds who were hanging on his every word and action, had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
What does the Gospel look like for a generation growing up in the contemporary world? What does the Good News about Jesus Christ mean to people who are assailed on all sides by bad news, where the crisis of the world comes under the covers with you at night as you doom-scroll, too wired and too tired to sleep?
Here is the Gospel at its simplest.
Jesus said: I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead I have called you friends, for everything I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
We are all called into friendship with Jesus, and, thus, with one another.
Whee! - Experiencing the Gospel
Friendship is a rich, contested, word. But this is what I take from it: it means to be someone who is on the side of your best self. Who wants good things for you. Who will encourage you in your quest for the beautiful, the true, and the good. And who will in turn allow you to encourage their best selves.
Those of us who went to Synod last week will recall the Bible Studies led by John Flett, a missiologist working for Pilgrim College here in Melbourne. He told us the story of Bishop Azariah, the first Tamil bishop of what would become the Church of South India. He went to the great Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910, the precursor to our contemporary ecumenical movement, and delivered a very memorable speech about exactly our topic of friendship. He thanked the missionaries for the great sacrifices they had made for his countrymen, people who had sacrificed their livelihoods, families, and even their lives, to bring the Gospel to India.
But, he said, you still lack something. What we need is friendship - a relationship of reciprocity and mutuality between Indians and missionaries.
Because, as John put it, friendship is the basic Christian spiritual practice. Friendship with one another. Friendship with God.
Not because we have tracked God down and fully defined and understood the Divine, pinned down like a butterfly in a display case.
Nor because we have done anything to deserve it. But because, in Jesus, God comes to us in friendship and reaches out in friendship to the whole world.
Yeah! – Anticipating the Consequences
This, then, is, ultimately, Tom’s job. The labour to which we discern that the Lord of the Harvest is calling him for this particular season. The specifically theological labour to which he is called is to be a witness to the good news about the friendship of Jesus Christ through his friendship with people at the Con.
Which definitely includes being a pastoral presence – a listening ear, a friend who might be in a position to offer help or to know when to refer on. Not to pretend to be someone with all the answers, but to enter into relationships of mutuality and reciprocity.
But Tom is not just there on his own account, a solo practitioner of spiritual care. He is also there enacting the Uniting Church’s intention of friendship, which also includes being part of a learning conversation, to help us to of bridge the gap between church and world. To help us to be transformed in ways which turn our face towards the world.
But it is not just Tom who has work to do. We all have our part to play in being labourers in God’s harvest. God calls each of us, individually and by name, to practice friendship, the basic Christian spiritual practice, and to play our part in the ministry of reconciliation, given to us by the God who calls us into God’s friendship.
To the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity,
three persons and one God,
be all glory and praise, dominion and power,
now and forever.
Amen.
