The Archbishop and Jesus

Sunday 6 November 2005 6:00PM

The Most Reverend Peter Jensen, Archbishop of the Sydney Anglican Church, is giving this year's Boyer Lectures, titled The Future of Jesus.


But how do you talk about Jesus to an unbelieving public? In this interview, Dr Jensen describes the challenge of speaking to an audience that has drifted away from Christianity. He also explains why he doesn't regard himself as a religious man, and why he finds it hard to like the institutional church. We also encounter one of the future directions of Christian worship, the young rock band Christian City Youth.


Rachael Kohn: Singing about Jesus in their lives, Nikki Fletcher and Daniel Korocz, are part of the new wave of Christian youth who are passionate about Jesus.

Hello, and welcome to The Future of Jesus on The Spirit of Things. I'm Rachael Kohn, and you're tuned to ABC Radio National.

The Christian City Youth Band is not just a music phenomenon, they're communicating Jesus through music to lots of young people. And they might be where the future of Jesus lies. Nikki and Daniel join me later in the program.

Jesus' future may be assured in the independent churches, but in other churches in the West it's an open question. One of the highlights of Radio National's listening year is the annual Boyer Lecture series, given by a distinguished Australian.

This year, the Archbishop of the Sydney Anglican Diocese, the Most Reverend Peter Jensen was handed the mantle. It's only the second time since its inauguration in 1959 that the Boyer Lectures will be given by a man of the church and that a specifically religious topic will be addressed.

For six weeks, beginning next Sunday at 5pm, Dr Jensen will be addressing The Future of Jesus. And unlike the young people who'll join me later, he's not as optimistic about Jesus' popularity in the West.

After reading the lectures, I went to St Andrews House to talk to him about some of the spiritual issues he raises.

Rachael Kohn: Archbishop Peter Jensen, welcome to The Spirit of Things.

Dr Peter Jensen: Thank you very much, and hello to all your listeners.

Rachael Kohn: What was your reaction when you were invited to give the Boyer Lectures?

Dr Peter Jensen: Presuming you want the truth, I was bowled over and rendered almost speechless. I think being asked to give the Boyers is as high an honour as our country can give anyone, and I was not expecting it, was, as I say, hugely honoured by it, and it will surprise my friends to hear, rendered speechless.

Rachael Kohn: Well you managed to overcome that, fortunately. But really, you must have wondered what sort of note to strike, given that the ABC has a reputation for being a secular collective, as a kind of reflection of society as a whole.

Dr Peter Jensen: Yes, and no. I don't accept that view of the ABC, because I know among other things The Religion Report exists and the Religion Department exists, and the ABC has various voices. On the other hand, yes of course it did make me think about what to talk about, and I took soundings and advice, and it was some time before I came to the view that I'd talk about Jesus.

Rachael Kohn: Well how did you settle on Jesus rather than the church or Christianity in general?

Dr Peter Jensen: In the end, I wanted to talk about the thing that really was the most important thing of all to me. The Boyer lecturer is able to talk about anything that he or she wishes, and so I could talk about gardening or fishing or something like that. However, I thought Well, the best thing to do is to talk about what I'm really, really passionate about, and it's not the church even, or Christianity, it is Jesus. And so I thought I'd better talk about him.

Now the danger is of course that talking about Jesus, he is far, far greater than we are, and therefore to talk about him really you are in great danger of making a complete fool of yourself. Well I've accepted that that is the danger, but I still think if I can get others to be interested in him, then that really will fulfil the aim.

Rachael Kohn: You've said in a few places that Jesus really is your passion, and is the most important person in your life. When and how did that happen to you?

Dr Peter Jensen: Rachael, that goes back to my teenage years. I was born in a family which was basically a churchgoing, or at least a church sending family, and went to church as a child, and then as a teenager, but it was not personal, and it may well be that like many others, I may well have drifted away from church, but in 1959, our church became strongly involved in the crusade run in that year by Mr Billy Graham, in Sydney. And in going to his meetings, the very first meeting I went to, his sermon was so arresting, the Bible spoke to me in a very powerful and strong way, I now say by the power of the holy spirit, and my faith, which was conventional, became what I'd say personal. That afternoon, I think it was April 1959, was the turning point of my life.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think a lot of people today focus a great deal on the church and have sort of missed Jesus? He's been sort of eclipsed by debating about the church?

Dr Peter Jensen: Yes that has been the difficulty right through Christian history, and particularly in the time when Christianity became very popular, and became more or less co-terminus with society.

Infant baptism didn't help here I think, people simply joined the church as one joins society, and the question of a personal faith often hardly arose. Now there may have been faith, there may have been some significant faith there, but not personal, and it was often attached to the teaching of the church. Sometimes I think the teaching of the church did that, the church itself taught more about itself than it taught about Jesus, and suggested that the route to Jesus lay through the church and its ordinances, the sacraments and so forth.

Rachael Kohn: I suppose some of your critics would say that you have been concerned with preserving a certain type of church.

Dr Peter Jensen: I'm not sure what they would mean by that since perhaps it would be ignorance on their part, that they would say it.

Rachael Kohn: Well perhaps things like changing the liturgy, perhaps not ordaining women, a certain kind of church whereas others might focus on Jesus, they might say you have been interested in preserving a certain type of church.

Dr Peter Jensen: Yes, your two illustrations are interesting. The first was changing the liturgy, which of course is not preserving a certain type of church; I am known more as a radical in many ways than a conservative in these matters, because a deeply conservative theological person can afford to be radical. And the radical nature of my sort of Christianity involves changing church.

When our diocese several years ago accepted the idea of being on a mission footing, so to speak, one of the rules we set ourselves was to change everything that needed changing, in order to reach modern Australia. And one of the key things we needed to change was the church experience. I'm happy to see church on a Wednesday night with three people meeting in the open air, still seeking to serve Jesus, that's the essential part of it, but without any clergy, I'm known rather I think as being rather radical in these areas rather than conservative.

Rachael Kohn: But certain radical steps you wouldn't take, such as ordaining women, or ordaining gays for example.

Dr Peter Jensen: I don't know, I don't regard these as radical, I regard them as innovatory in Christian history, it's true, and again I'd say yes, I'm certainly pleased to be known as someone who has a conservative theological centre, which just happens to link me in I think with 99% of the world's Christians, and virtually 100% of Christians who have ever lived.

So I'm not sure that this is something that's really as significant as some critics might make out.

Rachael Kohn: Well Jesus has certainly had to compete with a lot of things in the modern world, and one of them would be a big trend to see him as a man, as a teacher, not as the Lord.

Dr Peter Jensen: Yes, and that's a very useful trend, because the glorification of Jesus, the sort of stained-glass Jesus, has not been a very helpful picture.

One of the things that we need to say as clearly as possible is that he was indeed truly man, that he slept and that he ate and that, it's interesting in the gospels, one or two times it talks about him having a special friend, or friends, an intimate group within his disciples. It says he met a young man once and his heart went out to him.

In other words, he had a full range of ordinary human instincts and emotions, he was thoroughly human and as I always say, I guess he had nappy rash and he may well have had bad teeth, who can tell. He is a thoroughly human person because in my belief, Jesus is still of course, having been resurrected, alive and well, and he remains human.

Now the distinctive thing about him however, according to the Biblical record is that he was both human and divine, and it's finding out how we may see his divinity in his humanity, and his humanity in his divinity which is something that's extraordinarily important if we're talking about Jesus. But the move that you talk about is a great one, very helpful I'd say. Unless it's connected with 'he's only human'. That's a problem.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, well certainly Biblical scholarship has gone in that direction; there are quite a few scholars who refer to the miraculous as really mythology. That being the trend of modern Biblical teaching, how did you manage to hold on to your faith?

Dr Peter Jensen: First of all I'd say it's the trend of some modern Biblical scholarship, by no means all. Perhaps if we did an actual head count around the world we'd discover that the majority of very serious Biblical scholars were quite comfortable with the supernatural as such, the miraculous as such, and things like the resurrection. So we need to be careful there.

Yes of course there is a great number who question these things, but it's not by any means such a vast movement that we have to think that it's the winning movement. As far as I'm concerned, my greatest test of faith I think came in my second year of theological study, and I felt for some time that I might have to renounce my faith, to lose it under the impact of those critical studies to which you refer. And it was a period of some months and of testing, of going down to the foundations again, of asking questions, of trying to bring historical criticism to bear, that persuaded me on those grounds, that we were dealing with reality and not with fraud.

Questions are a very helpful way of being a Christian and from time to time, my faith, as is everyone's faith, is strongly tested, and from time to time I look again and say, Well, is the whole thing wrong? That's just natural, and it's a good thing for us, it's a helpful thing for us, and as long as we don't live in a state of suspended animation, I welcome the testing of faith.

Rachael Kohn: What do you think of the remarks of G.P. Taylor, the Anglican vicar turned bestselling children's author, who thinks the church killed off Jesus by turning him into a bearded eunuch, in fact Taylor likes to use colourful language and he says 'The lukewarm made Jesus puke'. Do you have some sympathy with that view?

Dr Peter Jensen: Sure. My particular bete noir I have to say is late 19th century stained glass windows. The pre-Raphaelite pictures of Jesus are awful, they seem to have captured the market, the idea that Jesus was a long-haired sort of hippy type person is the one that comes to people's minds. And in many ways this has come out of the church's perceptions. That's why I want people to go back and read the Gospels for themselves, to break the stereotype, and to listen carefully.

If Jesus spoke like that, well then what sort of man was he? He was an extraordinary person, and I think we need to hear his genuine, rough accent again, to break the stereotype.

Rachael Kohn: Well Jesus is not always easy to have a firm picture of. The four Gospels have slightly different versions of him. Which of the Gospels speaks to you most powerfully about Jesus?

Dr Peter Jensen: I think the answer to that is Luke, strangely. Luke's the longest. It's a difficult question because they all, the four pictures, are all needed. Yes they do speak with different voices, I don't doubt that, and John speaks with the most different voice of all, and is in a class of its own. So I couldn't possibly imagine a world without all four pictures.

But if I had to, if I was forced to choose and go to a desert island with one, I should think it would be Luke, who records on his own, some of the most extraordinary parables for example, and some of the greatest moments of the Gospel. I think Luke. If I was going to say to anyone, Read at least one Gospel, I'd say Luke.

Rachael Kohn: I guess it's the strong, almost muscular Jesus which we've seen recently in the Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ, and that sort of clearly-drawn Jesus is very easy to connect to I guess, particularly for young people, because it's so clearly drawn. Did the film capture the essence of Jesus for you?

Dr Peter Jensen: I wouldn't go and see the film. Would you like me to say why?

Rachael Kohn: Yes, I would.

Dr Peter Jensen: It's rather personal. I love Jesus, and the idea of going and seeing an actor portraying him brutalised would be to my mind, something like going and seeing an actor portraying my father being shot. I couldn't quite see why I would want to do that. Secondly, I think the film was historically inaccurate at various points, it was rather catholicising, I am told, a rather catholicising view of the death of Jesus, and I don't think that's helpful. And then thirdly, it's interesting that there is no portrait of Jesus, there's no actual portrait of what he looked like, and there's not even a word portrait of what he looked like.

And I have to say I have some hesitations about us too readily portraying Jesus, whether it's the Hollywood Jesus, because of the danger of us attaching our thoughts to a picture which turns out to be only partially true. Now that's a personal attitude, and I know that many differ from me. Many of my friends went and saw the movie without any of the feelings that I've described. So I'm giving you my personal reaction and I realise there'd be others who have a quite different view of the movie.

Rachael Kohn: The Sydney Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, giving some pretty sound reasons why he didn't appreciate Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. Dr Jensen is giving this year's Boyer Lectures, beginning next Sunday at 5pm, here on ABC Radio National. And in this preview on The Spirit of Things, we're talking about The Future of Jesus.

Later on, we'll hear from a couple of singer-songwriters from one of the hottest young bands on the Christian rock scene.

Rachael Kohn: The Boyer Lectures are as you've named them on The Future of Jesus, and I wonder whether this popular culture appropriation of Jesus, is going to be his future.

Dr Peter Jensen: My first fear is that Jesus may be forgotten in some parts of the world. I don't think he will be forgotten overall, after all, his religion is still a very successful one, and in parts of the world, people are becoming Christians at an astounding rate. But I do fear that in some parts of the West, we may forget him. And there will be no popular appropriation of Jesus, because he will not be known.

It does mean of course that we will be cut off from a huge amount of our artistic and literary culture, but that's one of the prices we pay for extinguishing the knowledge of Jesus. Now where he is going to be known, you're right, I think I suspect that people will try to come to terms with him and take those bits of him which they find helpful to them in their daily lives, and for some that will be his teaching and so forth. What I am trying to do is to get them, however to - it's not just Jesus, it's the Bible, you see, the Bible has shaped Western culture, because it's delivered Jesus to us.

So I'm trying to bring Jesus and the Bible back together again, and I think when they actually have an encounter with the Jesus of the Bible, they'll discover it's not just any old human teacher from back then.

When he died (this is in Luke of course) he was crucified, an absolutely excruciating death of course, he says 'Father forgive them, they know not what they do'. And someone has said that if Socrates died like a philosopher, then Jesus died like a god. And it is in that moment of abject humiliation that we see a man who lived like God, so to speak, we see God shining out from someone being crucified. Now I think even in folk religion and popular religion, as people come to look at him, they will sense, I think, the presence of God in him.

Rachael Kohn: Dr Jensen, in the Boyer Lectures you talk about Jesus, the man of miracles, and I wonder if there can be much hope for a miracle worker in a culture that is so bent on self-help philosophies, and self-made success. Are we overly confident in ourselves?

Dr Peter Jensen: Yes, though there is something else I would like to challenge first, or observe first. It's astonishing, isn't it, that you refer to our culture rightly, but at a popular level miracles are immensely welcomed. There are huge numbers of people who actually believe in miracles, or who believe in the supernatural, at least believe in the stars. The so-called scientific world view has not won through and taken over the whole of the culture in which we are living.

People sense that there is a beyond, there is another way of looking at the world, there is a way in which the supernatural interacts with the natural world. I don't think the alleged warfare between science and Christianity is at all true, let me say that. Nonetheless, if you merely took the so-called scientific world view as a philosophy, you would be I think in our society, in a minority. So the idea of Jesus, the one who does miracles, I think is not going to be as difficult as some people imagine it will be.

Rachael Kohn: Well I actually would challenge you there. I think that perhaps supernatural is alive and well, but maybe magic, which is something you control, is more easy to accept than a miracle, which happens by the grace of God. Maybe that's much harder to sell, as it were.

Dr Peter Jensen: I agree with you entirely. See the difference between faith and superstition is not the inner feeling, superstition is faith in the untrue, or faith where you are attempting to manipulate the supernatural, what you've just called magic. Rightly so.

Magic can be defined as my will be done; Christianity is defined as thy will be done. That's the difference. But as far as the experience, the inner experience of faith, and the inner experience of superstition, exactly the same, it's the object of our faith that makes the difference. All I'm trying to say is that I think there's an awful lot of superstition and magical thinking about.

At one level it therefore leaves us open to the truth exhibited by the resurrection, that this material world in which we live is not a closed continuum, that it can be broken into by the God who has made it all, and that the world of death and destruction and decay and the grave, is actually not the true world. Those who've committed themselves to that view of the world have committed themselves to hopelessness.

What Jesus and his resurrection shows is that outside that closed world, there is a God prepared to break into our world and give us a new world. That seems like good news to me and I think magic and magical thinking is a grasping after that great truth.

Rachael Kohn: In the Boyer Lectures, you come out very critical of individualism as a threat to Christianity, on a par with Marxism. And certainly at the extremes, one can see that. But doesn't individualism owe a lot to Protestant Christianity, which wrested the individual from the collective tradition and placed him, or her, before God. Christianity depends on individual voluntary conversion, and that depends on a society of individuals, does it not?

Dr Peter Jensen: Yes, it does, I think that's a fair point, and if I'm critical of individualism, therefore, see I think that Protestantism to which you refer, to my mind rests on the Bible itself, and the infinite preciousness of the individual, and that we don't just simply make the collective, the God to be worshipped.

If I am to defend my position I would therefore have to say that it is the taking of what Protestantism and the Bible itself has delivered to us, and the distortion of that is that of which I am very critical. And I've illustrated it in the lectures by discussion in Judith Brett's book on the Liberal party in which she points out at the beginning of the 20th century the Liberal party was a philosophy of individualism, but what it meant by individualism was that the individual took responsibility for herself, or himself. And then served others, under the impact of the spirit of Jesus. Whereas in the late 20th century the philosophy hasn't changed, but the whole atmosphere of the culture has changed. So that individualism lacks the sense of service of others.

Now where individualism lacks the sense of service of others, it is, I think I'd rather live in a collective State. No, that might be exaggerating when I think of Europe under Marxism, but certainly it's a very dangerous spiritual situation for our nation. Yes, it may be a legacy of Protestantism, but if so, it's a distortion of Protestantism and it's a very ugly thing.

Rachael Kohn: There's a strong message in your lectures that the demise of Jesus in Western consciousness, is not only a matter of personal salvation alone, but of Western civilisation itself. But you also say that Western civilisation is founded on the Bible, it has its deep structure in the Bible. So is it possible to uphold the central values such as mercy and justice, without really knowing where they come from?

Dr Peter Jensen: Oh yes. All sorts of things that we do, it's interesting in a society like ours, there are all sorts of things that we are committed to which we unwittingly are committed to, but they come from the Bible.

An African friend of mine for example, said to me, we were driving somewhere down near Manly, and there was a little incident in the traffic, and someone stopped to let someone else do something. He said, 'That's Christian'. I said, 'What on earth are you talking about?' He said, 'In a society in which Christianity has not been a shaping force, you would not find people driving like that'. Now I don't know whether he was actually specifically correct, but he is generally correct.

There's a huge number of things in which all unwittingly, people in our society take Christianity for granted. Now these things are so deep, so pervasive, they can't be changed, and won't be changed in a single generation. But over 100 years or 200 years, if we suppress the knowledge of Jesus and the Bible, a new civilisation will be born, a new way of looking at the world, I believe it will be retrograde, that we will commit ourselves to what patterns and ways of life which we will find very unhelpful as human beings.

Rachael Kohn: Jesus is often invoked as the model of forgiveness, and acceptance, but he also announced that those who aren't with me are against me. Many post-Christians would say this ethic has caused unnecessary antagonism to other religions, to other peoples.

Dr Peter Jensen: Well they might. Yes, I'm glad to hear you quote that, because there's a huge number of things in the - I think reading the Gospels is like seeing a very rugged terrain. It contains many boulders and sharp rocks, many things on which we bruise ourselves. Many things to confront us and affront us, because the Bible is one of those texts which now in a sense, comes to us from outside our culture.

Yes it is foundational to our culture but in the present situation it comes in a sense outside our culture, it doesn't reflect us, it reflects something else, and the sayings of Jesus specifically do, and I think we need a good dose of that. We need to free ourselves from some of the romantic notions that people have about life in this world. We're becoming more and more romantic because we live so comfortably here in Australia, so very comfortably, we think that this is the natural way humans live. And the truth of the fact is that all around the world people do not live like this.

We are so used to religion being benign we think that religion is by definition benign. Well we used to think that. And this is not true. So what Jesus does is instead of just being a mere sort of figure who endorses all the thoughts we may have, he is a very confrontative figure, and the quotation that you've given me is typical of the way in which he confronts us.

Rachael Kohn: Well you cite the French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, who said 'Jesus is the centre of all, the object of all, whoever knows not him, knows nothing aright, either of the world or of himself'. Do you agree with him?

Dr Peter Jensen: Yes, I do.

Rachael Kohn: So that means that essentially to know the world aright and to know yourself aright, you must be a Christian?

Dr Peter Jensen: You must know Jesus and hear his strong word. Yes, I think Pascal who of course is one of the founders of modern statistics, one of the most extraordinarily able intellectuals of all time, who found God himself in an extraordinary experience. I think he has put his finger after much thought, on the truth. I think that, not because I enjoy thinking that, or think I'm right, or something like that, I think that because in the end, there is only one who is both God and man. And if it is true that he is God and man, then what Pascal says follows.

Rachael Kohn: When it comes to growth, the Anglican church lags behind some of the independent churches, churches like say Christian City Church, and Hillsong, which are hugely successful with young people. Isn't the future of Jesus with them?

Dr Peter Jensen: No, I don't believe so for a minute. Yes, they have their successes. Mind you, there's an awful lot of Pentecostal churches that are small, struggling and often disappear. We see something of the picture here in seeing those big ones, and I'm glad of their success, of course. But for every one like that, there are dozens that aren't like that, that are struggling, and then too, amongst the Anglican churches, we too have our large churches.

What we are standing for is as I said, a trust in God's word in the Bible and in Jesus, the Jesus described in the Bible, what people call conservative, but I don't know why they say that particularly, it's Biblical. And we have found as many of the Pentecostals have found, that preaching the Jesus of the Bible is attractive, even in the modern world, and we find ourselves, our churches are growing and we too have many young people. Our theological college is full to bursting, if that's what this is about.

There is a fundamental distinction that exists between Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism which is what I represent, and that is that the locus of authority in Pentecostalism is on the experience, and the locus of authority in Evangelicalism is on the Bible. Now don't get me wrong, the Pentecostals have the Bible and Evangelicals have experience. I'm talking about the basics, when you get down to the basics. And I don't believe that an experientially-based religion is going to be able to carry the Gospel, the Biblical Gospel with its intellectual demands, into the next 50 years.

I'm putting my money, if I may use that expression, on Biblically based religion. So I quite agree that many of the Pentecostals of course love the Bible, and to that extent too, they too will be blessed by God.

Rachael Kohn: Archbishop Peter Jensen, you've said in the Boyer Lectures that you don't consider yourself a religious man, an extraordinary admission; what do you mean by that?

Dr Peter Jensen: When I think of religion, I often think of people dressed up in funny gear, and going into rituals, and wearing strange things, being intensely interested in churchy matters, and being pretty good at prayer I suppose. When I think of myself, I'm thinking of a person who has a relationship with Jesus, and I think relationship rather than religion.

I find prayer pretty hard myself, I don't find living the Christian life an easy one, and I certainly don't think I want to go to church every day. When I go to conferences where they have church every day, I have to say I find it very difficult. I love going to church and being with my church family, that's different. But I'm not a natural churchgoer, if I can put it like that. So that's why I say, yes, I'm a person with relationships, I'm not sure I'm a person with a religion.

Rachael Kohn: Faith, not religion, that's the credo of Dr Peter Jensen, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. He's giving this year's Boyer Lectures on the Future of Jesus, and he hopes to provoke public debate. And I'm quite sure that some of his remarks will, if not with people of other faith, then certainly within the Christian camp.

The Boyer Lectures begin next Sunday after the news at 5pm, here on ABC Radio National.

The theology of the Sydney Anglican Diocese is evangelical, it's also been called Calvinist, referring back to the 16th century reformer, John Calvin. It's a complex history of ideas.

But when you front up to the Christian City Church at Oxford Falls, it's not the theology that hits you, it's the intimacy. In the words of Pastor Phil Pringle, worship is about connecting, connecting to Jesus. And what better way to do that than through music. Here's 'No Longer I' by the Christian City Youth Band, including singer-songwriters Nikki Fletcher and Daniel Korocz.


Dan Korocz: 'No Longer I' is pretty much about not living for yourself, and there's a scripture in Galatians 2:20 it says I've been crucified with Christ, no longer I live, but Christ that lives in me, and it's about living a life, about God and other people.

Rachael Kohn: The lyric also says Christ lives in me. How does Christ live in you?

Nikki Fletcher: I would consider myself a disciple of Christ, I'm one that follows Christ, Jesus Christ who came and walked on this earth 2,000 years ago and stars in the Bible. And we believe that he died for our sins, he died on a cross, and for the salvation of mankind, and so for me, I have given my life to Jesus, so that I may have salvation. But to do that, it's a daily walk with him, and I then become transformed, it's no longer I that lives, but it's Christ that lives in me.

So the Nikki Fletcher that has lived all these years, daily comes before Jesus Christ and says Jesus, I can't walk this thing called life alone, I don't get it without you. And then Jesus enters my heart and my life, and I follow the word of God, that's the other thing you know, that's how we come to know Jesus is through the word of God, the Bible, which is a big fat book full of a whole lot of little books, and we believe that that is God breathed and from heaven, and it transforms our world every day as we read it.

Dan Korocz: It's not a religion, but it's just having a relationship with Jesus and every day just having that relationship, just like you do with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, you know you have relationship with Jesus that's what it means to me, and daily I'm praying and reading my Bible.

Rachael Kohn: Does Dan ever struggle with Jesus inside him?

Dan Korocz: Oh yes, like definitely, like because Dan wants to live, but then Christ wants to live also, so you know, they're like fighting each other, you know. But that's why you've got to - it's a daily walk with Jesus because you know, you're like you're dying to yourself daily. I've got to daily like shut myself down, I'm like OK it's not about me, it's about Christ in me, and I've got to keep on telling myself that.

Rachael Kohn: How did you come to Christ first?

Dan Korocz: I've grown up in a Christian family my whole life, so I've always - I went to Christian schools, I've always been around church, around Christians, but it's funny, it's probably only up until maybe I'm 21 now and maybe when I was 15, 16, that I actually got really passionate and actually encountered Jesus for the first time.

Rachael Kohn: In what setting?

Dan Korocz: Probably pretty much as coming to church and I used to go to another church besides this church, and it was a lot smaller and it was nothing like this church today. It wasn't really relevant, very sort of old-fashioned, or laid-back, and I came here probably about 8, 9 years ago and totally blown away about all the people here, they were so relevant I could totally relate to them, and it's pretty much the people that I met here is what brought me to Jesus.

Rachael Kohn: Was the music important to you? Is that what moved you? Is that what made you think it was relevant?

Dan Korocz: Yes, definitely, like that was a huge part of it, but I think even more than that, it was the people, and seeing Jesus in other people's lives, that's what connected me to Jesus first.

Rachael Kohn: Nikki, did you always think you were going to sing your faith?

Nikki Fletcher: No, I didn't always think that I was going to sing, but I grew up in church, same sort of story as Dan, and always was surrounded by Christianity, and was aware of God and felt that I always knew God existed and was real, but I never thought that I would end up sort of doing 24/7, I thought that you know, I would have a career in music and do albums and you know, be a Delta Goodrem or something like that you know. So I didn't always think that I'd be doing it.

Rachael Kohn: How did it happen, how did a budding singer become a worship leader?

Nikki Fletcher: Well I grew up in church and then when I was probably 18, I actually made a decision for myself outside of my parents that, this was what I wanted to live for in my life.

I believed in Jesus, I believed in church, and what church was about, and so I made a decision in one of our services to follow Christ and be a disciple. After that, I think I got asked to sing in one service, and just one thing led to another until I was singing in all the services, and leading and writing worship songs and then about two years after that when I was about 20 or 21, I knew that this is what God had in store for my life, and I knew that I was meant to write songs about God, and minister to people through the church, and so I've never looked back and gone Oh well I think I might one day have a career in music, even if one day I stop singing about God, I know that my role is here in the church and in ministry. It's a different path that I've taken.

Rachael Kohn: As you say, it's 24/7. Can you tell me how do you write your songs?

Nikki Fletcher: Well the songs that we write, Dan and myself here, are for our service and for the people in our church, predominantly, that's our first reason for writing our songs.

We have what naturally comes out, so we'll sit down, we'll sing and there it is, it all kind of comes out and then we'll package it, so it works for the service. As it would be if I was writing for a record company or an artist and I wrote well here's what's in my heart, blah-blah-blah, there it all comes out and the artist said Yes, but it doesn't really fit my album, I need the songs to be shorter I need more hooks, whatever. It's the same kind of thing with church, it all comes out of my spirit and then you know we'll work it, and the pastor of the church will often listen to it and go Oh, it's not kind of the vibe that we're wanting, or whatever. So that's the kind of process.

I mean there's probably a whole team of songwriters here probably about 10, 12 songwriters that write and we write with the intention of our church in our church services. But firstly, it comes from your spirit, you know, whatever's in your heart is sort of what comes out.

Rachael Kohn: But you're something of a preacher. I mean you're communicating the word to the congregation, so do you find your lead or your hook, if I can use that term, from the Bible, from Bible passages, like 'No Longer I'?

Dan Korocz: With all my songwriting, I pretty much get all my songs, I read my Bible and pray, I can pretty much kind of do that, and whatever I read in the Bible, something stands out to me, I'll write a song out of that, and I do think worship leading is like preaching, you're up there, you're prophesying into people's lives, you know like when I sing it's no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me and prophesying into other kids' lives, other people's lives.

Nikki Fletcher: So if I was going to write a song which is probably what I spend a lot of my spare time doing because it's just something that I love to do, a lot of the time I spend reading the word of God, reading the Bible, and praying and often there'll be something that's going on in my world which comes out in song, as I sit down and write, so for example this song which I'm working on at the moment, is called My Soul Delights, and it comes from Psalm 23 which David wrote.

It's very famous, which is 'The Lord is My Shepherd, I shall not want. He restores my soul', and so I've just been meditating on that, 'He restores my soul, and he leads me, he guides me,', all that sort of stuff, and so that's sort of come out in song, but slightly, you know, my interpretation of it, so the chorus goes (SINGS).

So that's the kind of thing, and then I'll get a you know, just keep singing, get another chord progression (DEMONSTRATES) So for that section like I came up with 'My soul delights', it's another Psalm, but then so that the congregation could sing it, and it's for them, it's not just for me, 'My soul delights, of your glory we will sing, My soul delights as we worship our king', so it's as we worship, so that like, I'm picturing the congregation. 'I'll worship and sing', 'We worship', do you know what I mean, rather than me just going 'I worship you lord my king', or whatever, it's sort of for them, so that's kind of how it works for us.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh. It sounds like you've got a hit there. At least with the congregation. In fact how does the congregation respond to your songs?

Dan Korocz: There are times when they don't respond well. We've had to ditch songs, but generally I think we're getting better, it's something you learn as a songwriter and a worship leader, you're actually writing songs for a congregation, and you're not writing songs just for yourself, so at times you know, you've got to write songs that really easy and really catchy, but there have been times when people have - we've had to ditch songs and times when people have loved them straight away.

Rachael Kohn: When we're talking about the congregation here, how many people are we talking about?

Nikki Fletcher: We have a whole lot of youth services and we have a whole lot of church services on the weekend starting on Friday night.

Rachael Kohn: Well how do they differ? What's a youth service as opposed to a church service?

Nikki Fletcher: So out youth is aimed at people from the age of 11 to 25 and then our main church services are aimed at 18 year olds up to whatever.

Families and older people, and in those services different services have more specific audiences, like for example an 8am service on a Sunday morning is very family orientated, it's a bit of a shorter service, and the music's a little bit quieter, you know, we wouldn't get up with the whole rock band and get a mosh pit happening on an 8am service, but then a 6pm service on a Sunday night includes the youth aspect as well as some younger families and you know, middle-aged people or whatever, so it kind of crosses the borders.

Our Friday night services are, we have a junior high, senior high and a young adult service, and so we have three different services all running in different buildings, and they all kind of target that exact - because I think you find these days that generations are very short and small and so what's relevant to a 11 or 12 year old is completely irrelevant to an 18 year old. So to shove them all in the same room and expect to throw the same thing at them and get the same response just doesn't work any more. So we have the three different programs and they have very similar music in that area.

Rachael Kohn: But it sounds like you'd have to have a lot of different bands.

Nikki Fletcher: Yes, we do. And so we have a live worship band in every service that we do, including our prayer meetings on Tuesday nights, even our staff meeting on a Wednesday morning we have full band, and we do music and everything.

Rachael Kohn: So essentially, you're going to have a church in the future that's filled with people who can sing and play guitar and keyboard and everything.

Dan Korocz: Great. Definitely.

Nikki Fletcher: That's what we need, like in our main church services we probably have 100 people, and some of them are absolutely brilliant musicians that do sessions all over Australia and stuff, and then we have the beginners starting out in Year 7 coming in and going 'Can we learn guitar? We want to be in part of the band', and it's sort of our job to find these people, get them plugged in and have them there for the long term, because that's what our church is doing now, like we have the music in every service, so if we didn't have any worship team, if we didn't have any band, me and Dan would be learning to play everything at once.

Dan Korocz: We've got a creative arts college here as well, like any age group you can come here and you can be trained in whatever instrument, or even dance or media, you can get trained in that area, and serve the church.

Rachael Kohn: The creative artistic way of connecting to Jesus, at the Christian City Church in Oxford Falls, Sydney. Nikki Fletcher and Daniel Korocz are two of the key members of the Sydney-based band Christian City Youth. And maybe they're where at least one future of Jesus lies. Who's to say any one church has a monopoly on Jesus. the Christian City Church and its collection of rock bands are pretty busy organising a huge event in the SuperDome featuring the visiting Black American preacher, T.D. Jakes, with a special appearance by Guy Sebastian.

To find out more about the Christian City Church music and events as well as this year's Boyer Lectures by the Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, just visit our website.

Production today was by me and Geoff Wood, with technical wizardry provided by John Jacobs.

Next week discover how another part of the spiritual universe lives, the Theosophists. Started 130 years ago, Theosophy still believes that spiritual truth is ever evolving and never exclusive.

That's Theosophy, next week on The Spirit of Things with me, Rachael Kohn.

And I'll leave you now with more from my guests Nikki Fletcher and Daniel Korocz.



Christian City Youth
No Longer I
CD details: Christian City Church

Further Information

Boyer Lectures
The Boyer Lectures have been delivered by prominent Australians, selected by the ABC Board, for over 40 years.
2005 Boyer Lectures: The Future of Jesus
Details of Dr Jensen's Boyer Lecture series from the website of the Sydney Anglicans.
Anglican Church Diocese of Sydney
Christian City Church, Oxford Falls
The rock band Christian City Youth performs at youth services for the Christian City Church.


Dr Rachael Kohn
Geoff Wood / Dr Rachael Kohn