It’s a challenging time for international students. Australia’s international borders remain closed. Many international students who are still in Sydney have not seen their families, hugged their parents, confided face-to-face with their lifelong friends for up to eighteen months. As the COVID pandemic continues, students continue to struggle with mental health, financial resources and emotional needs as they study far from home.

So it’s a challenging time for euFOCUS, as we seek to love and share God’s love in Jesus with Sydney Uni’s international students. Like most FOCUS ministries across the country, we’ve met very few new international students commencing courses on campus. Fewer students have been involved.

But God has been at work, through His gracious provision of a richly diverse team of staff and students to serve in euFOCUS. Malaysian student Cheryl has stepped up to lead an evangelistic Bible study group in this final year of a busy Pharmacy degree, spending time and energy to bring God’s Word about Jesus to two fellow international students in a loving community. Australian-Korean student Tim has served joyfully and sacrificially to make our Thursday night Come Home dinner meetings a place of hearing God’s Word and loving one another. And they’ve been led with loving perseverance and humble faith by Senior Students Henry (Hong Kong) and Bek (Australian-Korean).

God has been at work, through His gracious provision of a richly diverse team of staff and students to serve in euFOCUS.

To partner with them, God’s provided Howies (Ministry Trainees) and Senior Staff from various Chinese, Australian-Chinese and Australian cultural backgrounds. It’s been a joy and privilege to see God using our diverse gifts and perspectives to bring His Word of life to bear in international students’ lives, forming Christ in them and us. More stories of that to come in the future, but for now here are some reflections on some of the ways we’ve been productively challenged by this diversity from Karen (euFOCUS Senior Staffworker since 2011).

As a cross cultural ministry and a team with people from different cultures, we often need to talk about difference in culture to enable us to understand and serve alongside each other. We’ve recently been challenged with how to manage varying ideas of time in our ministry. Here is an explanation from some training by an organisation called ‘Thriving Turtles’ I’ve been looking at recently.

Time Orientation

Why can’t people queue up? Do you get frustrated when you go to the post office or a shop and people cut in front of you – or worse still just mob the counter? Chances are you are experiencing a different concept of time! Some cultures see time as a fixed straight line. These cultures are called “monochronic” (“mono” meaning “one”, and “chronic” meaning “time”). Other cultures see time as an unlimited flexible resource and the best way to do things is to do many things at once. These cultures are called “polychronic” (“poly” meaning “many”).

As we meet new euFOCUS Senior Staffworker Chim Ho, in the next article, we’ll see how God’s been using some of these differences regarding time orientation to enable euFOCUS to grow students in God’s love in Jesus.

Please praise God with us for His faithful provision in challenging times. Please pray that God would unite us in His love to keep using all the diverse gifts He’s given us to keep making and growing disciple-making disciples of Jesus.

Ben Lim & Karen Sowden

EU Senior Staff, euFOCUS