Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast, equipping the next generation of believers,

pastors, and church leaders to shape life and ministry around the gospel.

On today's episode, you'll hear a panel discussion led by Sarah Zoustra from TGC's

2024 Women's Conference.

Okay, so here's how we're going to organize our time.

I'm going to ask each of these panelists about the spiritual context of her country, what

she sees God doing and the biggest opportunities that she sees. And then I'm going to ask her to

get really practical and to share a ministry or two that worked really well or maybe one that

didn't work, right, so that we can learn like, hey, what are you doing over there? Is that

working? Could that work in our context? Normally with panels, we'd bounce around quite a bit.

This one I'm going to try and stay with each woman at a time so that we remember what

country we're in and don't get confused about what part of the world that we're in.

So, Sarah, I'm going to start with you in Australia.

And I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about spiritually what is it like there.

Sure.

So Australia is now post-Christian. In the 1970s,

as high as 60% of people in some states went to church. Now it's less than 10% who regularly

attend reformed evangelical churches. Christianity got a bad reputation from some poor actions that were taken by people in the church

and weren't handled particularly well. And Christians are also perceived as intolerant and

a bit backward, unfortunately. In the 2021 census, 43% of Australians indicated that they identify as Christian. However, 39% indicated

that they have no religion. And that's the highest that it's ever been. This was the first

time that most Australians didn't identify as Christian. So in as recent as 2016, it was 52%.

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