Before shooting his latest video series, Faith Runs Deep, Karl Faase had no idea that a pillar of our nation’s historic foundations had been laid in a famously small city or that many of the most important people in our nation’s history were devoted Presbyterians. Goods.
In researching the stories that reveal the Christian heart of our culture and how they shaped this nation, Faase came across Bourke’s incredible story in NSW.
“I grew up in western NSW, and with all the ‘back of Bourke’ stuff, you get the impression that not much is happening. ” Bourke is remarkable, and Bourke’s history is incredible,” he says.
For the new 12-episode series, Faase and his producer wife Jane toured the country in a black Holden Ute, visiting regional NSW, Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania in search of the ‘stories that matter’, which encapsulate Australia’s values. And in regional NSW, they found that many key history makers were Evangelical Presbyterians.
“So we’re going to Bourke. We take the ute out of the end of Warrego Road, and there is a place called Toorale station, which is now a national park and home to Toorale station, which Samuel McCaughey owned in the late 1800s.
“It had three million acres and ias probably the largest sheep station in Australia, maybe even the world. For a year, they sheared 250,000 sheep. He was this remarkable man who started irrigation systems, and he introduced mechanical shears, electric shears, but both created a shave.”
Amazingly, not only was McCaughey a devoted Presbyterian, but so was WG Spence, the man who founded the Shearers’ Union in one of Bourke’s many pubs.
“The trade union movement had very deep Christian Protestant Evangelical roots. The ALP did that too.”
In an interview with Paul Roe, the Outback historian, Faase finds that a confrontation between these two blocs was as close as Australia came to civil war.
“Across the river, 800 shearers were protesting the grazers coming in. On the other side, you had Samuel McCaughey and the ranchers trying to run businesses that made money,” he says.
“The interesting thing about WG Spence is that he is also a Presbyterian. And WG Spence, who founded the miners’ union, started the shearers’ union, started the AKU, was a Bible-believing, Sabbath-keeping, teetotaler, lay preacher, Bible school warden Protestant Christian from Victoria.
“And you suddenly realize as you unfold these stories that not just McCaughey, but people like Thomas Holt, who started AMP, and Fairfax, who started the newspaper family conglomerate, were Christian… I didn’t realize until I went to places like Bourke that the union movement had deep Christian Protestant Evangelical roots. So did the ALP. And in Bourke, those two things collided.”
Karl and Jane Faase with historian Stuart Piggin, one of 46 people they interviewed for Faith Runs Deep.
Traveling across a vast geographical spread of Australia and discovering its rich history was the pinnacle for Faase in creating this latest series, which he sees as an evangelical tool and a way to give audiences a new perspective on Australia’s history. To give.
“A real keyword for us is that stories matter. When we come together as humans, you don’t just philosophize about life, we tell stories, but stories aren’t just there to entertain people; stories contain our values. And so we tell stories because the stories we tell shape our history. They talk about our values ​​and what is important now. And they give us a trajectory into the future.”
“These stories are central to who we are as a nation.”
Unfortunately, he notes that the stories people are telling now in the market of ideas about the Christian church are not good.
“I recently said in a lecture that we have failed the natives of our generation. As we saw in the Royal Commission into the Institutional Sexual Abuse of Children, we have abandoned children. We are abandoning the vulnerable because of the whole gay marriage LGBTI community and failing in the community,” he says.
“So essentially, we need to remind people of a new set of stories. And it’s not that we’re making them up. It’s that we’re being reminded of what happened. These stories are central to who we are as a nation.”
False says that a group of people overrepresented as guests in this series are Aboriginal people. And one episode is devoted entirely to the indigenous people of this nation.
“The church is seen as complicit or active in the stolen generation. And that’s a terrible story, but if you go back to the first 50 years of Australia’s history, you would have had a hard time finding anyone who saw a future for or tried to build a lot for the indigenous people of this country.
“Most people don’t know – again, I was unaware of this – but Robert Kenney, who has written a book called The Lamb Enters the Dreaming, said that the people of the Enlightenment didn’t know, and they, not secularists. He said the only people who cared about them were persistent Christian missionaries. They were the only people who cared about them. The great-great-grandson of Nathaniel Pepper, who was the first Christian to be baptized at the Anglican Church in Victoria, says Aboriginal people would have been wiped out without Christian missionaries in Victoria.
“That’s not to say that people like Samuel Marsden had a bad attitude, and there’s a little more to that story too. And certainly, during the stolen generation, we were complicit when we should have been actively supporting the indigenous people.
“But people like John Gribble in Warangesda near Darlington Point on the Murrumbidgee, Lancelot Threlkeld in Lake Macquarie, and many others were Christian missionaries who gave their lives to give the indigenous people not only the gospel but a future. And so those are the stories we need to rediscover and tell. We don’t make them up, and we don’t try to erase the bad side. We try to balance it with a bigger picture.”
Other fascinating insights showing the deep and lasting impact of Christians on Australia include:
Unionist WG Spence, NSW’s first Prime Minister James McGowan, and Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher were all Sunday School Inspectors before entering politics and were all Labor Party people. In the NSW elections in 1890, 21 of the 35 Labor Party representatives who voted were Protestant Evangelical Christians. In 1911, 96 percent of people in the first census said they were Christian. That hardly changed until 1970, when only 5 percent said they had no religion. Governor Lachlan Macquarie emancipated 5,050 convicts compared to his predecessor Bligh who liberated only two. He did this because, as a Christian, he believed that if God gives us a second chance, we should do the same for the convicts. Richard Bourke started the Church Act of 1836, which gave each community with an assembled group of Christians a thousand pounds to build a church. That is why many rural towns have Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Wesleyan Methodist churches of the same era on opposite corners. Unfortunately, many of these are now being sold.
In addition to historical stories, each of Faith Runs Deep’s 26-minute episodes features an important level of someone who came to faith remarkably.
“Whether it’s a Vietnamese drug dealer in Cabramatta, a bull rider in Kingaroy, an indigenous footballer from Dubbo, or a Melbourne artist who came to faith in a London prison, all these remarkable stories are in the series. So every episode has someone coming to faith, and it’s about how Jesus changes lives.”
The new series will be available on Australia’s Christian Channel later this year but will primarily be used in churches and small groups nationwide. False says a major church in Brisbane and one in South Australia will use it throughout their church from June-July.
Please also collaborates with regional churches. He recently did an event in Mudgee with singer-songwriter Colin Buchanan where about half a dozen people responded to the gospel. That church will now run a six-week course where people will watch Faith Runs Deep. Events are coming up with churches working together in Bendigo and Tamworth, and more events are planned for next year.
When I compliment him on the momentum building, he says, “We’ve got a long way to go – we’re just getting started!”.
Trailer Faith Runs Deep Series from Olive Tree Media on Vimeo.
