Scripture Union evacuates beach teams, Hillsong raises money, and A Rocha explores the biblical response to the blaze.
Every summer, hundreds of young Australians devote two weeks to running Christian programs for families on the beaches of New South Wales and Victoria.
But cataclysmic fires in southeastern Australia have interrupted the efforts of Scripture Union teams in the nation’s most populous states.
Scripture Union has served in the Victoria beach town of Mallacoota for more than 30 years, Chris Mulherin, one of the team leaders, told Eternity News.
“If we didn’t get out, we would be seen to be reckless, even though most of the team—in fact, I think it’s true to say all the team—would prefer to stay, because they’ve got these strong connections with local youth, many of whom have lost homes, and connections with the town,” he said.
But Mulherin and company headed back to Melbourne after Victoria’s premier designated the area as a state of disaster.
Meanwhile, Scripture Union evacuated eight teams serving on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state.
The Australian bushfires have torched more than 24 million acres and spread across all six states. A New York Times article described the scale as “an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia.” The fires have also killed at least 25 people and hundreds of millions of animals and destroyed thousands of buildings, including at least one church.
The board of directors of A Rocha Australia, part of an international Christian conservation group, acknowledged that the fires had affected them personally, through assisting the evacuated or working with other conservation groups.
“We ...
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