danny’s space

A few of us went to Ashfield station in the morning to hand out leaflets containing a short Christmas quiz, with the idea of getting people to see how little they actually knew about Christmas. I was unfortunately too tired to go but heard encouraging reports from the people that did - about how people were genuinely interested and how for some it seemed to be the highlight of an otherwise routine day.

After a quick debrief and team meeting, the doorknocking started. We went around in guy/girl pairs to the parish around St John’s Ashfield, letting people know about the Christmas events that the church was holding. Doorknocking was obviously a pretty scary thing to do, but after the first few houses it got slightly easier. Quite a valuable suggestion came from Katay in our morning briefing, which was to use the question “So, have you had much to do with church things in the past?” to let people talk about their experiences after the initial pamphlet plug.

Dee and I doorknocked together in the streets around the church, and met some pretty interesting characters. We were invited into the first house we visited, and had a lengthy chat to a devout Buddhist guy who turned out to be a lecturer of music at Sydney Uni. Lo and behold, just as I loaded the USyd webpage just then, his picture appeared on the front page holding some kind of wind instrument. We chatted about his beliefs and Christian beliefs, and it was a great learning experience for everyone. It was a nice introduction to the day of doorknocking as well, having a friendly face to talk to, and Dee even got to do a short gospel presentation to the professor.

We kept doorknocking along the streets, being greeted with various responses ranging from polite rejections from Catholics to indignant refusals. But thankfully most people were quite polite about not wanting to talk with us, but we weren’t able to get into many decent conversations. I think that is one of the biggest concerns I have with doorknocking - that is, not knowing how to keep conversations going or not being able to think on the spot fast enough to do so. It probably comes with practice, and it definitely helps to have a partner there to bounce off.

Closer to lunch, we approached this house that looked and smelt a bit strange, like incense. As we walked down the driveway to find the front door, we were approached by some nice people who spoke to us through the kitchen window and asked for a pamphlet about Christmas services. Then a monk approached silently and engaged us in quite a lengthy, heated conversation about his and our beliefs. Turned out that the building was a shrine where followers of Ramakrishna worshipped, believing that all religions lead to the same god. We argued many things for the sake of Christianity, including how the different religions (eg Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity) were essentially exclusive and could not all be right. He seemed to think that everyone was God and we just had to think hard enough and get reincarnated enough times for us to ‘get to God’. Needless to say it was quite a fruitless conversation - what chance did two university students have of convincing a monk that his way was wrong? We left it to God to work in these people to clarify their understanding.

We got to lunch late. Lunch was a delicious selection of sandwiches and whatnot lovingly prepared by some of the parishoners. After lunch, we lazed around the parish hall and had a bit of a rest, before hitting the streets once again for an afternoon of doorknocking. Half of the team continued to prepare for the kids club that was to be held that afternoon, based on the chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. The afternoon of doorknocking was less eventful, with many apartment complexes which we were unable to enter.

We did however get to a few houses where the people who answered the door were unable to speak English, but could speak Mandarin. I really need to learn how to speak gospel Mandarin. My broken Mandarin came in handy here but it wasn’t really that effective in communicating what we normally said in English, so I gave Sara’s mum a call to find out how to say some basic phrases in Mando, like ‘investigate’ and ‘Christianity’ and ‘church’.

Dinner followed a debrief, followed then by a seminar given by Katay on time management. St John’s Ashfield runs the seminars as a community service and also as a pre-evangelistic tool to bring people into the church, and it was encouraging to see that some fish did bite thanks to God’s providence. I was told by Grant to meet a nice Chinese lady called Grace, who had been going to St John’s for a few weeks and who was at the Wednesday parenting seminar. So after talking to a guy called Adam who was a local and went to a non-denominational church nearby, I stuck myself into a conversation Grace was having with Jan and Megan and introduced myself. She’s a great lady, so keen to speak English with us. Her English was great considering she had only been in the country for a few weeks and had only learnt the language for a couple of years prior to that. Turned out that she had popped into St John’s a few weeks back and said “I want to read Holy Bible and sing holy songs”. How fantastic!

After the seminar and mingling, it was time to wind down. Before winding down I was talking to Sara on the phone and walking around in the graveyard area that was outside the hall - the church grounds includes the hall, a pre-school, a graveyard, and the church building. Some neighbours must have found this weird, because suddenly I saw this car driving into the church grounds with headlights blasting and side-pointing roof lights illuminating the trees. Then I saw the typical ensignas of a police car, and the car pulled up beside me while I was on the phone and blinded me with its lights. The officer inside asked if everything was okay, I said it was, that we were camping in the church hall, and that seemed to satisfy him and his partner and they drove off. Scary stuff.