A New Counterculture for Newtown
Editor’s Note: How to Reach the West Again is Timothy Keller and City to City’s book on starting a new missionary encounter with Western culture. We invited ministers from around the world to respond to, extend, and engage that vision.
King Street winds through Newtown (one of the least religious, most “progressive” urban areas in Sydney, Australia) like a river giving life to all sorts of communities and endeavours. People come to drink and gain life from the area. Newtown, for some, is a place proximate to life—not far from work in the city and never far from food and fun.
King Street gives the area a buzz. It gives Newtown’s people a sense of electric vibrancy, even when they aren’t out participating in it. Creatives are drawn to the energy of the area, treating it like a muse. You work part-time to live here so you can get your creative skills flowing on the side. For some, it is the cheaper alternative to the pricy East Suburbs of Sydney, without forsaking closeness to everything that makes them feel alive.
There is a season in everyone's life when they should live near a nerve centre like Newtown. As a place of life, Newtown is a beacon of certain values. It displays—and teaches—the values at the forefront of Sydney’s culture. And at times, they are in direct opposition to the popular or politically-correct views of our city’s majority.
“I DESERVE TO BE ACCEPTED.”
Newtown is the place where broken people come to be redefined. Perhaps people treated them poorly or they felt a wider sense of cultural rejection: minorities, asylum-seekers, LGBT+. Whatever the cause, they come to Newtown and connect to these causes through symbols: dress, media, alternative diets, and the like. Here, you can gain the acceptance you know you deserve.
Newtown runs toward the people (and the values) that wider society rejects. The unconditional acceptance you find in Newtown is a rejection of the cultural boxes created by the mainstream—a decision to recreate the norms. There is a moral obligation to allow someone to be their weird self. In fact, one of our slogans is “Keep Newtown Weird.” This leads to a surface-level joy, community, and acceptance.
But it’s more than that. At a deeper level, Newtown is a centre of left-wing reaction to pop-culture. In concert with the acceptance of “the weird,” there is a longing to form a critical mass that will subvert the overall values of Sydney. It is a collective movement that gains energy and life from the area.
“I NEED CONNECTION.”
Newtown’s buzz fills some of the longing for relationship in many people’s hearts. People live in small apartments and cramped rooms, but the parks, pubs, and streets are filled with others. Living in the glow of King Street seems to offer some relief from the loneliness of the suburbs.
These are the stories of our community. While people deny any transcendence associated with Christianity, they remain open to almost anything else. While living in their own morality, they call things that are not sin, “sin,” and things that are sin, “not sin.” Most are professionals and single—either divorced or never married. They have not witnessed the radical nature of the Christian sex ethic. They haven’t experienced the church acting as a true family. In fact, when they look to the church, they don’t see a refuge to combat loneliness or a community that offers belonging or meaning. They see camps and political parties that wield power and tend to their own.
When we look at the need for a Christian critique of our culture and a post-Christian evangelistic dynamic, my fellow leaders and I need to present ourselves as a beacon of hope to the residents of Newtown—another “alternative” lifestyle to the one that has rejected and marginalized them. In his book The Last Things, David Hohne writes,
“Therefore the church’s chief means of political resistance in the world is the rhythm of remembrance and anticipation. That is, the church maintains her own polity, with its various disciplines, as a counter-testimony against the state, in submission to the resurrected and enthroned Messiah of God in whose Spirit she is constituted. The church lives patiently yet expectantly in the world, towards the revelation of the true sovereign of the world, who will redeem her from the powers that work against her—both within and without. At the Messiah’s return the Lord Jesus will prosecute the justice of God and establish an everlasting reign of righteousness and peace. Again, as Paul encourages the church in Rome, ‘Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can oppression or distress or persecution or hunger or destitution or danger or sword? ...No, in all these things we prevail completely through him who loved us’ (Romans 8:35–37). The hope of the church for deliverance from the trials of life in the Middle rests on the victory of the Father through his royal and eternal Son in the power of his Spirit against the evil one and his minions.”
About the Authors
Roger Bray is the Coaching Catalyst for City for City Asia Pacific and Director of Coaching Australia. Roger recently concluded his ministry at Newtown Erskineville Anglican Church in Sydney Australia where he oversaw four congregations. Having been in ministry for the last 35 years, Roger has had lots of opportunities to be involved in planting, repotting churches and walking alongside those in Church leadership.
Roger is married to Jane, a social worker who is involved in Parakaleo, a program that supports pastor’s wives. They have two married children and one grandchild.
Matt Aroney is the acting rector at Newtown Erskineville Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia. He is married to Kass, and the two have a daughter, Lucy. He recently completed an MTh in the theology of Kierkegaard and developed a faith and work fellowship, Citizens.