04/05/2021

Reimagining Outreach | Australia  

Last May, the team at Prison Fellowship Australia completed the production of The Prisoners Journey® | Indigenous Edition
TPJ
Graphic Designer: Paul Davies

For the last forty years, Prison Fellowship has been sharing the gospel with prisoners, ex-offenders, and their families. After twelve months of work, the team at Prison Fellowship Australia (PFA) are expanding their mission to the Indigenous men and women who are in the prison system. 

In a recent post on social media, PFA wrote: “We are re-imagining how to best share the wonderful news of Jesus with Aboriginal men, women, and young people in Australian prisons.” 

Glen Fairweather, the PFA General Manager, in a recent video told the supporting community of some sobering statistics. “Indigenous men are incarcerated at eleven times the rate of other Australians. For women, they are incarcerated at fifteen times the rate and for indigenous youth, it is twenty-five times the rate.” The team at PFA wants to ensure they are addressing this issue by sharing the hope of the gospel with them. 

“In line with our strategic direction,” Glen said, “we are excited to launch The Prisoners Journey®, Aboriginal Edition.” 

The course consists of eight sessions that will take the members through the gospel of Mark. In order to make it more accessible to Indigenous Australians, the team worked on modifying the English “in the direction of the features that are common to almost all Australian languages.” They also decided to use the Plain English Version of Scripture to make it more easily understood by those whose mother tongue is an Indigenous Australian language. The eight sessions aim to answer questions such as, ‘what is the good news?’, ‘who is Jesus?’, why did Jesus come to this world?’ and many others by looking closely at Jesus’ life. 

The team decided to produce this edition as they believe it will “help contextualise The Prisoners Journey® course for our aboriginal hearers and it will help our volunteers present the gospel in a really clear way. […] A course that will share the gospel message with real clarity inside prison walls.” 

You can find out more about their ministry here: Prison Fellowship Australia   

Other collaborators: 
Prison Fellowship International 
Wycliffe Bible Translators
Summer Institution of Linguistics Australia
Bible League International / Australia 

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