The Following extract from Mark’s book The Trouble with Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises sums up east quite well.
“Box Hill Central is Melbourne’s second-largest transport hub and is an incredibly multicultural area, primarily made up of Chinese but also of Vietnamese, Indian, Korean, Sudanese, Persian, Greek, Italian, and British migrants. An amazing variety of languages can be heard as one moves around the markets and shops.
We started with a group of young adults who decided to live in the area. We began, not by launching a souped-up attractive service or building a worship center, but by asking, “What will it look like when God’s reality comes in fullness to Box Hill?” What will our neighborhood look like? First, we spent time walking around our community praying, observing, and imagining our community redeemed. We knew that when God’s kingdom came in fullness, those who were marginalized would be honored, so we decided to reflect this honoring by aiding and befriending people who had moved into our area who were escaping from conflict in Africa.
We formed a youth group of African teenagers, playing soccer, being friends, and helping with homework. I remember feeling proud as a young couple from my community told me how they were approached by a drug user suffering from heroin addiction who was trying to sell them illegal stolen goods. Their response to God’s reality was to tell him that they could not buy his goods, but they decided to sit and eat with him, honoring him as an image-bearer of God. God’s future will be a time in which we connect to each other in perfect love, so we encouraged people to fight against the individualism and isolation of the hyperreal world. They then began to move closer to each other. In fact, some people in the community began sharing houses and some began to share their shopping.
We also realized that in the future God is going to usher in a time of justice that will break down the structures that keep people in poverty and oppression. We realized that God is going to remake the whole world, so we began as a community to support international campaigns for justice… We realized that it was our task as a community to embody celebration, so we began throwing parties and inviting people we knew just as Jesus threw a party to celebrate Matthew’s decision to follow him. We realized that God was active in our community, so when we started a worship service, we began to meet in homes, a local café, and a community space. Things are nowhere near perfect in our community-we have plenty of challenges-and they will never be perfect until Christ returns to usher in God’s reality in fullness.”
