Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology and the Raw. I'm here with my friend Mark Sayers. Mark is a senior leader of red church in Melbourne, Australia.

He's passionate about spiritual renewal and the future of the church. He's written a ton of books, including strange, strange days, the disappearing church and reappearing church and he's working on another book at the moment that should be out next year.

In this episode, we talk about vaccines and stuff. Okay, I didn't even plan on going here. I didn't plan. I didn't have a mom to talk with the vaccine, but we started talking about the pandemic and the different responses between Australia and America.

And this dude has is so well read. He's so thoughtful. He's so level headed in so many ways. And so once he started talking about the pandemic and vaccines and stuff, I just kept asking more questions because I was like, this guy is just, yeah, he's super smart. And some of you might not like this episode.

Well, let me be specific. If you're anti vaccine or express significant vaccine hesitancy, you probably will not like or agree with what Mark says, which is all the more reason why you should listen to it.

You don't need to agree. You need to absorb, listen, process, pushback, do your own fact checking and so on. I enjoyed the conversation. And then we end up getting into.

What's the church supposed to look like? What's the role of the church on the other side of pandemic? Is there another, is there another side of the pandemic? Or are we entering into the new norm? And again, Mark has lots of interesting well thought out thoughts on that question.

So welcome back to the show of the second time.

All right. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of the Belgian ROM here with Mark Sayers back by popular demand.

I've had a lot of people briefs out to me and say, hey, you get Mark back on, especially since Mark last time he talked was pretty pandemic. And so a lot has happened last couple of years. So thanks so much for being willing to come back on the podcast.

Oh, my absolutely question. And I'll just, I'm going to, I'm just going to go ahead and say it just for my audience, because they're not going to have a clue. But we've been talking for about 20 minutes.

And I guess I didn't hit record. So I just stopped Mark mid thought it is. So yeah, we've already had this discussion, but we're not to have it over again for the audience, because it's, yeah, it's just everything you're shameless. So enlightening. So let's start.

Go back to tell us about the pandemic in Australia and kind of the different governmental response to that. I know, you know, we see stuff on the news and our news outlets are so just

tailored to what people want to see and there they become such an echo chamber. So, you know, people have probably an idea of what is going on Australia that's probably more tailored to what the news outlet once you to see versus what's actually going on.

So can you give us a snapshot to how Australia or in particular Melbourne where you live has handled the pandemic.

Yeah, well, I think yeah, you have this issue that sometimes there's this fantasy view of Australia where you had the crocodile and the crocodile hunter, you know, whovenous, you know, Australia people is going to live out in the bush somewhere and, you know, wrestle snakes or something.

So I think that's now changed to now Australia is the great totalitarian, you know, communist pandemic land in some viewers minds.

But yeah, like so Australia took in some ways you could say more of an Asian approach, obviously there's a lot of diversity in Asia responses, but even how China in some of those countries have responded Vietnam to to the pandemic.

And so we cut off from the rest of the world and we pursued for the particularly probably the first half of the pandemic of COVID zero. So if there are cases like everything down until it gets the zero open up, go about things as normal, but with the borders shut.

So it's really hard to get in and out of Australia that you've got a quarantine. And then when there was an outbreak, you'd have quite sort of strict measures in terms of curfews and stuff like this, the given numbers right down.

And that worked well for a lot of a lot of the time, but then when Delta came just in the last few months, that's been a bit more difficult, but we're at a rapid vaccination.

Sort of rate to the moment. I think we're the fastest vaccinating jurisdiction in the world's currently and we're going to sort of hit 90s and stuff like that.

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