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10/27/2009 Pornography - and what people search for on Google This Sunday night I'm doing a talk on pornography at the evening fellowship at ND. In preparation I've been looking around for some stats on pornography - and quite a lot of the stats available are somewhat old. However one way to get up-to-date data on people's interest in pornography (say) is to check how often it's searched for through Google. And Google Insights allows you to see what people are searching for over the past several years... Just type in the search terms you're interested in, and you get a graph showing you the relative ranking of those search terms over time! Unfortunately Windows Live Spaces won't let me embed the chart. So instead here is a screen grab of the graph where I'm tracking searches for 'sex', 'porn', 'Jesus' and 'Olympics' over the 2004-2009 period (click on the images for a larger version).  You can also isolate a particular country or even state - here for instance are the searches for those terms from Australia. Clearly Australians have an inordinate interest in sports!  Potentially a useful tool if you're looking for a quick graphic to introduce a topic! [ PS: any other search terms you can think of comparing? ] 10/18/2009 SALT 2009 retreat talks online! Back in August I spoke at SCCCA's SALT retreat up in Katoomba. This was a leader's retreat for Asian churches in Sydney, and I was asked to speak about reformed theology. And that's what I did - however I reckon it would have surprised a lot of people who thought they know what reformed theology is about...Many people think that reformed theology (or Calvinism) is all about predestination, the sovereignty of God in salvation, and TULIP. But at the retreat we saw that that's not really true - the heart of reformed theology is actually the glory of God! And these things are merely stepping stones towards the glory of God. In the first talk we look at this, and consider why it is that people focus so much on predestination, and why it's such a big deal that we are on about the glory of God!
In the second talk we move on to look at two broad kinds of Christianity - firstly a Christianity of duty and obedience. We contrasted this with a Christianity that is captivated by the glory of God, and saw what a massive difference this makes to the Christian life. We also saw how our Chinese background predisposes us in a big way towards a Chrsitianity of duty and obedience!
Then in the third talk we move on to talk about what all this means for ministry. We look at the content of our preaching and teaching - but also look at how being captivated by the glory of God completely transforms how we even go about doing ministry!
Unfortunately not all the talks were recorded. However you can get them as a PDF file from the SCCCA website at this page - click the blue arrow to begin the download! You may also need the outlines to make sense of the second talk - the PDF of the booklet can be found here.
[ PS: no updates for a while? I've been busy doing assignments and readings for an MA subject on Calvin at Moore College! ] 10/8/2009 Where do we need to plant Chinese churches? Where in Sydney do we need to plant Chinese churches? Which areas have lots of Chinese people - but are very thin on Chinese churches?In the past there was this map created with Google Maps, showing the 100+ Chinese churches in Sydney. That was made by Ernest Chiang (who is doing a church plant in Mortdale with CECA). And remember, that map used a very broad classification of Chinese churches. The different coloured pins, by the way, are meant to represent different areas. And we've also seen this map (to the right), which shows you the Chinese population density in different areas of Sydney. But wouldn't it be good if you could put the two together, to see where we need to plant? What I've done today is just that. I've overlaid them, with a bit of resizing and stretching and transparency... and that gets us the following map.  The usefulness of a map like this is probably immediately obvious for planning your future church plant. You can easily see areas of significant Chinese population density, yet with few Chinese churches (use the small hotmap above to identify significant areas). Here are some of those areas:
Be aware that some of the churches on this map are struggling, or are only focussing on one language or demographic, or have somewhat dodgy theology... And that some brand-new churches have been planted since Ernest made that map! [ PS: where would you plant a Chinese church? ] 10/6/2009 Chinese in Catholic (and other) schools in SydneyFrom graphs like this in previous posts, it's pretty clear that the primary school and high school age group is very significant for the future of ABC ministries. Well, what kind of educational institutions are ABCs in? How many of them are in Catholic (and other) schools? First off, here is a graph showing you where the Chinese and ABCs are in terms of educational institutions in Sydney. Note that the red bars (All students) maps to the scale on the right hand side. The green and blue bars (Chinese and ABCs) maps to the scale on the left hand side. I've put them on the same graph so you can see the relative proportions.  In case you want it, here is a table with that data.
From the stats on religion in a previous post, a number of people have asked about how many ABCs are actually in Catholic schools. This table tells you the answer: 2,075 are in Catholic primary schools, and 1,781 are in Catholic high schools. While the number of ABCs in Catholic schools is proportionally much less than the population as a whole, it's actually about right for the percentage of ABCs that are Catholics. You might have thought that there would be proportionally more ABCs going into Uni / tertiary education than the general population. So why does the blue bar look so low? That's because the age profile for ABCs is not flat - but heavily weighted towards primary and high schoolers (see this graph). It's not that there are less ABCs doing tertiary education - but there are much more school aged ABCs coming up through the education pipeline! Notice also the big green spike of Chinese people in Uni / Tertiary education - that's because of overseas students! Here is a map of Chinese kids (not necessarily ABCs) in Catholic infant and primary schools.  And here is a map of Chinese kids in Catholic secondary schools.  Here is a table with that information on Catholic primary and secondary schools. Note that these are kids of Chinese ancestry, not just ABCs.
[ PS: for more on Catholic ABCs see this post... ] 10/1/2009 Chinese transitoriness in Sydney (part 3): more on North and South In a previous post we raised the theory of Chinese people moving from the South of the city, to the North. What I've done here is divided up Sydney into North and South. In the graph below there is a list of Statistical Local Areas (SLAs) - and I have grouped the SLAs from 'Botany Bay' to 'Blacktown - South West' as being the South, and the SLAs from 'Hunter's Hill' to 'Wyong - South and West' as being the North. Admittedly this is not a perfect division (eg. this puts 'Penrith' and 'Blue Mountains' in the South), but it'll do as a rough guide. This bar graph then shows you the movements into each of these SLAs, divided up into whether they are coming from SLAs in the South (red) or the North (blue).  This is helpful in showing you whether the people moving into a certain SLA have mostly been from the South, or the North. But what is happening across Sydney as a whole? Is there a big movement from South to North, as they theory suggests? For this next graph I've tallied up all the movements of Chinese from the North and South, and whether they have gone to the North or South. This graph shows you the overall pattern of movements into and out of these two areas.  Here is a table summarising this movement data for the Chinese in Sydney.
What we see is that, on the whole, people from both North and South tend to stay in their area (10,325 Chinese who moved from the North stayed in the North, and 39,237 Chinese who moved from the South stayed in the South). In addition, the South saw more Chinese people moving about than the North (a total of 13,554 moving from the North, compared to a total of 46,012 moving from the South). However the picture is also skewed because the South also includes disproportionally more SLAs than the North. But what about across-the-harbour movements? When we look at people crossing over to different areas, there are less Chinese people moving from the North to the South (3,229) than there are Chinese people moving from the South to the North (6,775). In fact over this 2001-06 period there was a net movement of 3,546 Chinese people from the South to the North. So the theory is true - on the whole, Chinese people are moving from South to North. But this movement is not very large: 3,546 only represents about 7.7% of the total house movements in the South... [ PS: how many people in your church have moved across to the other side of Sydney over the past 5 years? how many have moved in? ] |
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