Multicultural Ministry Priorities
- Multicultural Ministry Group (MMG): The Multicultural Ministry Group is the oversight group for the Multicultural Ministry of the BUV. The purpose of the MMG is to support and strengthen the Multicultural churches, pastors and leaders and to take up specific issues on their behalf. The MMG is the group of Baptist pastors and church leaders who are praying and working together to provide resources, advice, consultations, support and encouragement for both the Anglo-Australian and migrant-ethnic local churches. MMG meets monthly
- MMG Members contact details (Link)
- TransFormation Course: The TransFormation training course provides leadership training for people from a NES background both pastors and lay people from our migrant ethnic churches. It is a joint program of the BUV and Whitley College and involves one day Saturday a month for 3 years. Last November the first twenty-six people graduated. (Link)
- Multicultural Nights 3 times a year The celebrations are great ways of learning about diversity of the Baptist Union. (Link)
- The 4th Annual Multicultural Conference
- 2005 – 2010 BUV Multicultural Ministry Strategic Document: the Executive Council has adopted a five year strategic document (Link)
- BUV Assemblies: We are actively seeking ways to include the multicultural churches thorough workshops with very positive results: At the last November Assembly we ran a workshop ‘Welcoming cultural differences’. The October 2006 Assembly included a Multicultural Ministry Elective (details available here).
- Duty of Care seminars: the issues of Duty of Care have been explored in ways that make sense for non-English speaking churches. The video tapes are available.
- The Baptist Witness: ‘a story from multicultural church’ each month
- School
of Ministry at Whitley College (26 – 28 June 2006): 'Multicultural Faith: Multicultural Church'. It is to explore a biblical vision of how our faith relates to people of all cultural backgrounds and how traditional Aussie churches can relate to and include people from many other cultures. The speakers will be: Dr Daniel Carro is an outstanding Baptist pastor, preacher and teacher from Argentina. He now teaches in Washington DC. Dr Timothy Lee is Professor of Missions in the Korean Baptist Theological Seminary and University. This is the first time such a theme is being explored in the School of Ministry
- Refugee Airfare Loan scheme (RALS): The RALS was started up by the Baptist Union of Victoria in response to the growing need of refugees in off-shore refugee camps to fund their own airfares to come to Australia. Most sponsors, themselves ex-refugees and recent arrivals to Australia, lack the financial means to raise or borrow the funds needed for the airfares to reunite their families here. RALS provides interest-free loans of up to 90% of the total airfare cost, with a flexible repayment period of up to 1 ½ years. All repayments go back into a revolving pool of funds to be available for the next loan. RALS is managed by a team of volunteer committee members, who are responsible for fund-raising, assessing loan applications and monitoring repayments.
Since its inception in June 2004, RALS has enabled 45 refugee families (69 adults and 125 children) to make their way to a new life and home in Australia. The generous donations of $43421 and interest-free loans of $66210 received from the BUV churches. The families have consisted of, mostly from South Sudan as well as the Karen ethnic community in Burma. (Link)
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