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Category: Interviews »

Subject: Religion »

Christianity and multiculturalism

Jeannie Mok.

Jeannie Mok tells how she and her husband became involved in founding a congregation in Brisbane with a variety of language and ethnic groups.

Created:

2005

Date Added:

16 February 2006

Source:

Jeannie Mok interviewed by Andrew Jakubowicz for MMA

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

3.8 MB

Length:

2 min 19 s

Transcript

Then the church is the next bastion of colonialism that needs to be eliminated…

My parents were Catholic, and that's a cultural legacy, and it's not a personal thing. And my husband was Buddhist. And I think he realised that in fact that was the path he wanted to take, in terms of being Christian. And I think because of all the work that we were doing, and how people came and flocked around us, and all the help we were doing at the restaurant, that people came to us and said: can we use your restaurant – we had a lovely big licensed restaurant in Chinatown – can we use that as a meeting place for our church group? And we said: yes, fine, you're welcome to do that.

And slowly we got involved in that, and then my husband realised then that he had a true calling, which was then to pastor the flock that were.. whether we wanted them or not, they were there. And so he gave up the business and decided to become a pastor and it just grew. We now have a group of over 500 people, 600 people. We have a Latin - a Spanish group, a Latin American group - and we have a Spanish service. We've got a service where we've got Mandarin and Cantonese. We've got an English service. And we've got little groups – little Korean group starting up and.. It's that whole multicultural thing.

And then we realised, that if we were real proponents of multiculturalism and all that, it means - as in that respect and equality, and that no culture was dominant - that the Christian scene was lacking greatly in terms of being multicultural, that Christianity in Australia is a very waspish thing. And you look at that.