DAVID ADAMS reports…
Australian Muslims have been invited to come and chat with a group of Christians in a billboard campaign recently launched in Sydney.
The first poster in the campaign, which reads ‘Dear Aussie Muslims, glad you want to talk about Jesus. Love to chat more’ and directs readers to a website AussieChristians.com.au, was put up alongside the M4 motorway last week.
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BILLBOARD WITH A MESSAGE: AussieChristians poster beside the M4 in Sydney. “They have made a strong assertion about Jesus – that He is just a prophet – and we think Jesus is so much more than a prophet…We think somebody putting that kind of proposition out there which misrepresents Jesus, the Jesus of the Bible, needs to be answered.”– Malcolm Williams, director of Outreach Media, one of the groups behind AussieChristians |
Its appearance comes after a series of posters appeared on Sydney billboards which said Jesus was “a prophet of Islam” and invited people to visit the MyPeace website and call a toll free number to find out more about Islam. The group, whose public face has been Diaa Mohamed, has also announced it intends running an advertising campaign on 40 Sydney buses.
AussieChristians is a loose coalition of organisations and individuals which include The City Bible Forum – which exists to “explain the Bible to city workers” – and Outreach Media – which produces monthly posters to be placed on billboards outside churches.
Malcolm Williams, director of Outreach Media, says the Muslim billboard campaign required a response.
“They have made a strong assertion about Jesus – that He is just a prophet – and we think Jesus is so much more than a prophet…” he says. “We think somebody putting that kind of proposition out there which misrepresents Jesus, the Jesus of the Bible, needs to be answered.”
“So we want to respond to that but we want to do it in a really positive, friendly way. Because there are a lot of people who don’t know about Jesus, a lot of Muslims who haven’t read the Bible or considered that Jesus is the climax of the prophets, that all the prophets point to Jesus as the Great One.”
He says that while they could have “ignored” the Muslim poster campaign, it had presented “an opportunity to talk about Jesus”.
“It’s an opportunity to say some incredibly strong things about who Jesus is in the public space…because our Jesus has been challenged. I’d much rather be talking about the Jesus of Scriptures and His claims to be the Son of God and the culmination of the hope of the prophets than to be countering the atheists because I’m a bit tired of the new atheists – Dawkins, Hitchens…”
AussieChristians campaign will run for almost six weeks and feature five different messages. The future messages remain under wraps but Mr Williams says that the posters will all be about “Aussie Christians talking to Aussie Muslims about Jesus”.
While the initial campaign will cost $26,000, the group are now looking for an additional $75,000 to continue the program. Mr Williams says AussieChristians are also in discussions with Mr Mohamed and are keen to organise “a big debate”.
“That’s our goal, to build towards a big chat, as we’re calling it. We want to have a big chat and get as many Australians of whatever persuasion, religious persuasion, or non-persuasion to come along to hear the claims of Jesus.”
Several of the Islam posters have been vandalized since they appeared late in May but Mr Mohamed has reportedly said he is looking to replace them.
In an earlier discussion with John Dickson, carried out for the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX), Mr Mohamed says the purpose of the campaign was to “educate” non-Muslims and Australians about Islam and “demystify” the religion.
“This was really just to educate people that ‘Did you know Islam also believes in Christ?’ although the beliefs are far apart (from) our Christian brothers. But I thought what a better way to build bridges than build on a commonality that we both have,” he said in the interview.
~ www.aussiechristians.com.au. AussieChristians can be contacted at[email protected].
• To see John Dickson’s interview with Diaa Mohamed, see www.publicchristianity.org/Videos/jesus_a_prophet_of_islam.html
