Andrew Beddoe
Super-crunchy peanut butter, spread with a finger on a bread roll. If you haven't witnessed this, you've probably never had lunch with Andrew Beddoe. Like Liz, Andrew is about to leave us to go study at Moore College. But what brought him to La Gong in the first place?
Andrew had planned to do MTS at Cumberland College where he had studied Physiotherapy, but when the male staffworker resigned he was forced to think about other places to be trained. At Club 5 he met Richard Chin and Matthew Meek and became interested in the work of IBM which he had heard good things about. “Because I was interested in missionary work overseas, I wanted to get more experience in reading the Bible and sharing the gospel with people from other countries. When I met Matt, I was very impressed with his humility and godliness, and wanted to take the opportunity to learn from him and get that experience.”
When he arrived, he was surprised to find an extra cultural barrier that he hadn't expected: after trying to explain the same thing five times, in five different ways, and still receiving puzzled looks, Andrew worked out that the international students spoke English and he spoke Aussie. “I wondered whether I'd ever be able to share the gospel clearly with these people.”
But slowly he lost the Australian slang and Andrew says he's loved working with the international students because they are so keen to know and study God's word. “It's been exciting to see some of them become Christians and to be a part of that, and then see them grow and start to share the gospel with their friends.”
So what's different about explaining the gospel to international students? Andrew says the biggest thing is that you can't make any assumptions about what they know. There's a good chance that Australian students have heard of God as creator, of Adam and Eve, of Noah and the flood, of David and Goliath, and of Jesus but “if you have a clean slate and they know absolutely nothing about the Bible, where do you start?”
It turns out that 2 Ways to Live is a good place to start because it assumes nothing and teaches God as creator, man’s rebellion, God's judgment and then salvation through Jesus' death and resurrection. “Often we spend a lot of time just working through the first box: ‘Who is God?’, ‘How can we know that God exists?’ and ‘Hasn't science disproved God?’ With Australians, the questions are more likely to be ‘How do we know that Jesus really was God?’ or ‘How do we know that Jesus rose from the dead?’”
Though it was hard to understand at the time, Andrew has seen that coming to Wollongong instead of Cumberland has been of great benefit because he's been stretched in ways he wouldn't have been otherwise. As for next year, his biggest fear is of sharing a bathroom with ten other guys at Chappo House at Moore College.
Please pray for Andrew as he leads the Gunnedah summer mission in the holidays. Pray for him as he leaves behind the many friends he has been through so much with in Wollongong. Pray that he would continue to ‘die to self’ and serve others, not for his own glory, but for the glory of God.
Ben Beilharz
<< Liz Roediger | Return to the Index | Marina Ayoub >>