Gospel ministry in our schools is incredibly important and strategic, and has changed many lives. But what does it mean for the gospel to do its work in a school? What sort of work does a school chaplain do? In addition, how does the ministry that takes place within our schools sit alongside, complement and relate to the broader ministry of the gospel that we’re used to seeing in our churches?
In this episode of the CCL podcast, Peter Orr chats to Peter Tong, chaplain at Barker College in Sydney, Australia, about what that ministry looks like, why school chaplaincy is important, and how we can support it.
Links referred to:
- Upcoming ethics workshop: “Neurodivergence and the Christian life” (Wed 7 May 7:30pm)
- Barker College
- CRU
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 32:02 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Tony Payne: Well, hello again. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living podcast. I’m Tony Payne. It’s 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 I’m really delighted to be doing so.
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 in to 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’s conversation with another Peter—Peter Tong—about the gospel in our schools. Peter Tong is the chaplain at Barker College, and the two Peters [Laughter] 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 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.
[Music]
Introduction
PO: 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. In this conversation, we’re going to talk about school chaplaincy, about what that looks like, and about ministry in an educational context more generally. Pete, welcome to the podcast.
Peter Tong: Thanks for having me, Pete, and hello to everyone listening!
PO: I wonder if we could start by just getting to know you. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your family, and how you came to know the Lord Jesus?
PT: Yeah. I’m married to Katelyn. We’ve got three kids: Chloe, Lily and Sam. I’ve been Anglican ministry for a little while now: I came through Moore College and then worked in Anglican parishes in Sydney. Then I moved into the school setting in about 2020.
Before that, I grew up in a family that came to church, Sunday school and youth group every week. It wasn’t unusual as a family to pray or to read the Bible together at different times. 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. I used a very simple formula: as I looked at the friends and people I knew, there were more people who believed in no God and very few people believed in God, so I thought, “Well, the majority must be right.”
I can remember lying in bed one night, looking out the window and thinking, “God, if you’re really there, can you make it rain right … now?” I was looking out the window and there was nothing: there certainly wasn’t any rain, but there wasn’t even a breath of wind in the trees—not a drop of water. I thought, “Well, if God was there, why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t he just do a little sign for me?”
In my mind at that time, that was actually a bit of a heartbreaking moment, because I thought that this God, who I’d heard about doing amazing things through the Old Testament in the Gospels through Jesus, must be made up, because he couldn’t do some rain outside my window.
But at the same time, I was heading to youth group on Friday nights, and we would do the very simple thing of opening up the Bible together. The youth leader would say, “Who’s read something this week?”, and then we’d go bit by bit through passages in the Bible.
A number of years later, things started to click and I realised that’s actually how God speaks with us. My faith grew: my faith grew through the Uni years. I started getting involved in my church, leading youth group, and teaching Sunday school and Kids Church. Ministry was on my heart from a very early phase. I then took steps in my mid-20s to train for ministry. Now here I am: a senior chaplain at Barker College.
Ministry in education
PO: 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 want to talk a little bit about that?
PT: 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. That was my first steps into a school ministry setting—which was brilliant, wonderful and exciting in one sense, but also terrifying, and I felt 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 nearby, and share ideas and the best resources.
I think it was during that time that God opened up my eyes and my heart to the potential of being in the world of the student—not by only sitting in 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—being shoulder-to-shoulder with colleagues who are working hard, week in and week out, and being in the lives of students: knowing them, growing up with them, gaining trust and respect from parents, and, in that context, sharing the love and gospel of Christ with them. I think that was my first taste.
As an assistant minister, like many across New South Wales, I was involved in Scripture in primary schools in the various churches that I was at. The open door that we had there to bring the Bible to people who otherwise wouldn’t know much about the Bible—it was just such a privilege to be part of that ministry. I think it’s always had a special place in my thinking about ministry and where I want to give my years in terms of my ministry time and ministry thinking.
School chaplaincy
PO: 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?
PT: Yeah. It’s a great question, and one I chat with other chaplains about a lot. I think the first thing to say is 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 to the school world. Of course, there will 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.
I think in the school context, the purpose of a particular school, and the culture, the contextual goals, aims and the values of that school can shape what Christian ministry or chaplaincy ministry would look like in that context. I’m at an Anglican school in Sydney, and we’re able to be pretty open about putting Jesus front and centre before the students, 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, staff and parents.
PO: Wonderful!
The chaplaincy program at Barker
PO: In terms of the structure, how do you structure the chaplaincy program at Barker?
PT: Yeah. At our school, we’ve got our core ministries, which involve our chapels, our Christian studies and CRU (formerly known as Crusaders). I think a lot of schools would have those three areas of ministry as their core focus.
We do chapels. Each grade gets a chapel once a week. We have chapels for staff at the start of terms. We have communion services on Wednesday mornings for staff. We also have Christian studies, which we do from pre-K right through to Year 12. We also have our lunchtime groups—some for all students together and other Bible studies that students can come do just for their year group, and Bible studies for staff as well. These are our core ministries: chapel, Christian studies and CRU.
We have some other ministries that we work on: we have ministry to parents: we have a parent prayer network: information goes out each month or so to help them partner with us in prayer, and we have in person prayer meetings. We have 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, so we’re embedded in those other campuses as well, bringing Christian ministry and chaplaincy to them. 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. 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 their camps and doing the various experiences that are part of their daily school life.
Refugee school
PO: Tell us a little bit more about the refugee school. That sounds like a fascinating new venture.
PT: Yeah. A couple of years ago, Barker welcomed a refugee who had fled from Afghanistan. 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 (High School Certificate), and so she started Year 11 and 12 with us. 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. We started to think about how we could create a more permanent school within a school for those who have left their homes, left their culture and left their language, and are now living here.
We have a campus that’s connected to our campus here at Hornsby. It’s 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 the of the 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 these never find their way into school life. So our work with our refugee campuses, service learning and other aspects about school life—we see these as a direct expression of our Christian heritage.
I think that’s part of my role and the chaplaincy team’s role as well: it’s to help people join the dots between some of the work we do as a school and the Christian connection to it. I find with a lot of parents, that’s one of the ways that they can reassess what Christianity is about. It’s a real open door to to gospel conversations when we say, “We will do these things as a school, and we’re linking it back to the compassion of Christ or the love of Jesus or a care for the outsider.” These are all Christian things.
Partnerships with local churches
PO: In terms of your relationship with local churches, what does that look like in practice?
PT: Yeah. We try and partner with local churches pretty intentionally. We don’t always get the balance right, but we recognise 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 end point in itself. We want our students to become members of their local church. We want them to be enfolded into youth groups. Come Year 12, they will leave school. But we want them to be part of a church that they can grow in 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? How do they fit together—at least theologically?
As we talk through that, we are glad to open up pathways for our students, and we 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 7, 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 they’re students who, their families might have been connected to a church once upon a time, but the connection has been lost, or they haven’t actually made it to youth group now that they’re in Year 7. That assignment is just a trigger point to get them going again.
We also find that in Year 7, 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. Then in Year 11, the complement to that is that they’ll visit an evening church.
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. 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? The churches are really eager to find out what that’s like. Our kids are pretty honest in their assessments. So these are formal ways in which we try and partner and direct our students into churches.
We’re blessed with some great facilities 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, for combined youth group nights, or to support multiple congregations gathering at once, and so on.
We also sometimes ask local youth ministers to come and speak at lunchtime groups or in chapel. We have a week in the year that we call “Faith Week” when we try and dial up our intentional evangelism across the school just a little bit. In that week, we call former students to return to share their faith and about how their faith has grown post-school—in class chapel and Christian studies. Usually as they do that, they’ll talk about their churches and they’ll try to connect students with their churches.
We also try and get all of our chaplaincy team involved in serving at 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, because you’ll grow in that context and that will actually help you to be a great chaplain or Christian studies teacher throughout the week with us.”
How to partner with churches well is an ongoing question, and it’s one I talk to a lot of other chaplains about. We’re trying to link in with local churches as much as we possibly can.
[Music]
Advertisement
TP: Hello, it’s Tony Payne here. 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. 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 theological rich, biblically centred way of thinking about our lives—bringing that outside of the College boundaries, and outside of the walls of the Colleges and the Christians of Sydney to bless the wider community with that thinking. 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. This year, I’ve 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 in a little bit more depth. 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 that I’d like us to try.
But the second thing I’d like to try a little bit differently this year is in our events. At our events, 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 working together to think through an issue from the point of view of the Bible. In other words, it’s a little bit more of a workshop and a little bit less of a talk.
So what I’m envisaging is that when you come to one of the new biblical ethics workshops that we’re going to run this year at CCL, the team will bring a whole stack of research, 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 will not only be a great way of digging into an issue perhaps a bit more satisfyingly and at more depth, but 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.
The first of these biblical ethics workshops that we’ve got planned is coming up on 7 May at 7:30pm here at Moore College. 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 in our 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 there’s someone in your family or immediate family or circle of friends or at church who is 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.
What we’re going to dig into on 7 May 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? How does it change the way we work as churches and minister the gospel with these issues?
It’s going to be a very helpful and interesting night. We’ve already got some plans as to who will contribute to the plans and some of the inputs. I hope you can join us on 7 May for the first of our ethics workshops for the Centre for Christian Living.
I look forward to seeing you there!
TP: And now let’s get back to our program.
School chaplaincy vs church ministry
PO: 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 the ones you did a few years ago?
PT: 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 versus the school setting—was our school chapels. I probably was lured in a little bit because the form is the closest. In our school chapel, we sing hymns, we have prayers, we have a Bible reading and we have a message. That’s the closest in form to what we would have done at church and youth group.
However, the more I’ve thought about it and reflected on it, chatted with other chaplains about it, and read about it, I think it’s actually the furthest away [Laughter] from what we would regularly do at church. I think the starting point is not, “What does it look like?”, but “Who is in the room?” Once you start to analyse 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.
Let’s say that church is a voluntary gathering of mostly believers with some non-believers there week by week. School chapel is the opposite of that: it’s a compulsory gathering of largely non-believers with some believers in there. I think really grappling with who is in the room 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 the Bible message, 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. We are grappling 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, lesson plans, assessments and reports. It all needs to fit 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 I’ve found through experience—and I think most chaplains would agree with this—that if you’re 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.
PO: Thanks, Pete! That’s really helpful.
Joys and challenges
PO: It sounds like a really encouraging ministry. But I’m sure there are challenges. What are some of the challenges, alongside some of the joys, that you’ve experienced in your role as a chaplain at Barker College?
Joys
PT: Yeah. 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 these 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. 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, compassion and claims, and I’m doing this with people who would in no other way choose on a Friday or a Sunday to come to church, and yet I have the privilege of being able to be in their world and do that with them. That is a joy that me and my team 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. In the church setting in a youth ministry, 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, in your sports team, 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 then. Or even pastoring adults: you’d pray for them through the week; on Sunday, you’d feed them in a way that allows them to draw on God’s word through the week and live out, speak up as Christian and grow as a Christian in their workplace. But here in my current role, that’s flipped a little bit. I get to see the Christians who are learning and growing to be Christians in a contested world.
It can be hard. It can be really hard. But I get to see them, and I see them grow. Sometimes for some students, it might be something really small, like telling their friend, “Today at lunchtime, I’m going to CRU.” That little comment might be done in 20 seconds. 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, 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.
For the colleagues who are members of lots of lots of churches in the local area, I see them live out their faith as Christians in a busy place, in what is sometimes a stressful place, in an exhausting place and in a community, and they are just, in very ordinary normal ways, being Christians in the world. I think as someone who was in church ministry for a long time, I never got to see that. I would hear about it, but I never got to see that. I’m finding that such a deep encouragement. So that’s some of the joys.
Challenges
PT: 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. But the challenge is what’s going on in their hearts. What is really happening as the word is preached week in, week out? That can sometimes be discouraging when you think, “Wow, so many kids are hearing the Word opened up, but they’re not really responding.” Then you hear a story of someone who, three years after school—eight years after school—when they got married—ten 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. The person who greeted me at the door was a former student from this school, and he greeted me with this giant smile on his face. I just could not get over my surprise at seeing this person not only at a church, but on a door welcoming. He greeted me with this warm handshake and said, “Sir, after school, I became a Christian. A friend invited me to church and it all clicked.”
The challenge is sometimes not seeing the fruit in the years that we have them. But we try we and pray and, as they leave school, commit them to God. 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 in the years that we have them.
I think maybe one other challenge that’s worth flagging is—I’ll put it in human terms, because it’s not a big gap, I guess, for God. In human terms, the challenge is the big cultural gap between a church and a church community, and the rest of Australian society. As I said, to God, it’s not a big gap. But humanly speaking, now that I often visit church with people who I’m taking from school, the radar goes up and the lens go up: what do first timers think about this? What do non-Christian hear in this jargon or in this Bible teaching? Messages—sermons—can be dense. Bible passages can be inaccessible at times. Our in-house language, the culture that is established sometimes—these things can be a big gap for non-Christians to jump over. As churches in our context in Sydney, I wonder if we expect a lot—and potentially too much—for the outsider to jump over that big gap and land with us. I wonder if there’s more we can do to just have a lens of the outsider all the time.
Maybe we have overdone the idea of the culture being against us. It does force us or bring us together as Christians. But I think my encouragement is to say, “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 let’s welcome them in all the things that we do.
Conclusion
PO: 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. Thank you very much for your Christian service and your time on the podcast today.
PT: Thanks, Pete! Pleasure chatting.
[Music]
TP: 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: 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.
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 podcast and our other resources. We always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch: you can email us at [email protected].
Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing, 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!
[Music]
Photo from Pixabay.
