Word: malarrpa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...doing church. As rural populations dwindle and the culture drifts away from organized religion, distance wields extra tyranny for the churches. At Kalgoorlie's twin town of Boulder, a group of black Baptist pastors has gathered for the first annual general meeting of the Malarrpa Ministries, an evangelical outreach that services the Aboriginal communities of Laverton, 400 km north of here, and Coonanna, 180 km east, and the town of Norseman, 190 km to the south. "God bless us through the heat, dust and flies," says Norseman deacon Les Schulz. A further 200 km south of Norseman is Esperance. Here...
...Boulder church, the Sunday congregation has gathered before what appears to be an above-ground swimming pool on stage. "Today Gloria is being born again," says Malarrpa's Rev. Peter Marumba. "The water is lovely and clean." And perhaps warmer than this former Apex Club hall filled with around 50 mainly Aboriginal believers. A group of children pass around a blanket with martial arts star Bruce Lee on it. Marumba invites his flock to test the water. "Put your hands in it," he says. As he tells it, such baptisms are at the heart of his church's faith...
...says. "Property has been destroyed. (There's been) no proper handing over, no proper overseeing." The same goes for Christianity, he believes. After the missionary societies began withdrawing from the area in the 1970s, "those people starved spiritually," he says. "Now we are trying to revive - that is what Malarrpa is all about." Three years ago, Marumba approached the Baptist Union of Western Australia for a $A75,000 loan to buy the old Apex hall, and last year Malarrpa ("true" in the local Wongatha language) was born...
| 1 |