August 4, 2017 Show with Scott Clements on “It’s Happened Before: Has America Repeated Australian History? (Lessons to be Learned from the Decline of Australia from Right to Left)”

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this fourth day of August 2017, and hopefully we are going to be joined by a first-time guest today.

I don't know if he's having problems with his phone, but he said he was trying to get through, and I don't know what is going on here, but our number is, if you're listening there, actually I'm not going to give our number.

I'll have everybody in the world calling me, but we are supposed to be joined by Scott Clements, and Scott Clements is hopefully going to be providing an interesting story here. We are going to be hopefully discussing, It's Happened Before, Has America Repeated Australian History? Lessons to be Learned from the Decline of Australia from Right to Left, and Scott Clements is an Australian lay preacher.

He is a church planter of the Kuma Reform Bible Church of Kuma, South Wales, Australia, and he actually contacted me this morning and said to me, hey, would you ever care to do a discussion on how America has mirrored, in some ways, the decline of Australia from right to left, and since it just so happened that I providentially was without a guest today, I took Scott up on his offer, and I don't know if he's going to be joining us.

I think that he may be having phone problems joining us from Australia. This is a first time that I can recall such a thing happening, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to a station break, and if we are not joined by Scott Clements when we return from the break, we will come up with another idea.

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Welcome back, and I think that we have been joined by Scott Clements. Are you there, Scott?

Yeah, Chris. How are you?

Well, thank you. Thankfully, it's not a telemarketer that we have on the line here.

I get calls from those guys sometimes from America, too.

Well, thankfully, God apparently wanted us to have this interview, since we've been able to rectify the situation here with the phone lines. And as I was mentioning earlier, we have as our guest today, Scott Clements, Australian lay preacher, a church planter of the Kuma Reform Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales, Australia.

And we're going to be discussing the theme, It's Happened Before, Has America Repeated Australian History? Lessons to be Learned from the Decline of Australia from Right to Left. And it is my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Scott Clements.

Hi, great to be here.

And in the studio with me is my co-host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor.

And it's good to be here. And it's good to have you on, Scott, because I was just trying to figure out what I was going to get to do for the rest of the two hours, what Chris was going to have me do, you know, unexpected.

So you came in right on time.

He's allowing you to speak. He's turned your microphone up again.

Well, it as it turns out, Reverend Buzz Taylor is actually an Australia file.

Yes.

Or an Aussie file. I don't know how you would say it. But he is a boomerang enthusiast, not only knows how to throw a boomerang competitively, but actually makes boomerangs.

Yeah, I've made and sold many, many boomerangs. And so I've always been very intrigued with Australia because of that. I love kangaroos. And it's just a place I've always wanted to go, but I've never been there.

So let me tell you, you don't love kangaroos after they've destroyed your automobile.

Oh, I can imagine. Yeah.

When it comes to crossing the road, they're suicidal. They're like kamikaze pilots.

Oh, kind of like deer and elk and everything up here. Yeah.

By the way, you... To boomerang, the only time I ever threw a boomerang, I was a young fella that was at primary school and it did come back, but it didn't come straight back to me. It came back past my left hand shoulder and hit the kid behind me in the head.

Yeah. Well, I used to compete with them. The Buffalo, where I grew up, Buffalo Museum of Science used to have workshops on boomerangs, the little sport boomerangs. And so I got involved with them back then.

And I never traveled with it. We've had people travel to Buffalo to compete, but it was a lot of fun. It was a very fun hobby. And it's just kind of cool to make something that behaves in such a mysterious way.

Well, obviously much more fun than talking about it. Anyway, Scott, I guess...

I can see you've never thrown a boomerang before. Just one more thing, though, that I need to assure everybody in the world that's listening. They do come back if you throw them right. It's okay.

Yeah, they do come back.

Yes, yes.

And this young man that was hit in the head behind you by your boomerang, I guess that would have been a great opportunity to ask him if he believed in the sovereignty of God.

I was not a Christian at that point. I was for punishment and I was wondering how many times I was going to be hit with the...

Well, I want to hear something about not only where you're from in New South Wales, Australia, but also about your story of conversion before we even get to the subject at hand. First of all, tell us about Kuma, New South Wales.

Is that near the bush or is that in a city area or what is that area like?

You would definitely call it rural. The map of New South Wales. On the east coast of Australia, you'd find Sydney pretty much in the dead center of that east coast of New South Wales. If you went southwest from Sydney, around 350 miles perhaps, you would find Kuma.

Kuma is Canberra, Australia's capital. It's about 60 miles away. Kuma is the gateway to the Snowy Mountains or the capital of the Snowy Mountains. Australia has a small alpine region and probably 20 or 30 miles from those mountain ranges, which get snow every winter.

Oh, by the way, something I forgot to mention. You didn't hear this because you had not yet connected with us, but I played at the very beginning of the program, Down Under by Men at Work, a bit of a clip of that song.

Can you believe it? Although my co-host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor, is an Ozzie-phile, he had never in his life heard that song. Can you believe this?

That just got played to death when I was young.

That's why I was surprised he never heard it, because it was played to death. But anyway, tell us something about the religion of your youth, if any, and how the Sovereign Lord got a hold of you and providentially drew you to himself and saved you.

Kept sure phenomenally angry as a baby. I think larger than my grandmother, more than anything else. But they themselves had no Christian. Very much an empty ceremony. The primary schools and tried to teach me from the very start, didn't do so.

If you get, I was an atheist.

So how did our Lord providentially introduce you to true Christianity and lead you to himself?

Well, you see, I met a girl.

That's always a good way for it to start.

Yes, yes. A very, what I'm trying to think of, gracious nature, a lovely person. And I was smitten and wanted to, I wanted to date her. I wanted to go out with her. And she was willing to see me on a social basis, just, you know, we were not dating as such.

But the third week that, or the third weekend after I'd met her, we'd had a meal, we'd walked their dogs along the beach the following weekend. The third weekend on Sunday morning, she telephoned me at 10 past nine and said, we're going to church and I'm picking you up in 15 minutes.

Be ready. And she hung up. And she did turn up at my door and did, I was pretty annoyed about it, to be honest. I didn't want to go to church, but I was probably the nicest girl I'd ever met. And she dragged me along to church and there I sat, a very unhappy boy, didn't sing.

I stood up and everyone stood up. I sat down and everyone sat down. She drove me back to where I lived. She said, and what did you think of that? And I kind of exploded at her. I said, that was a load of rubbish.

Because I don't even understand why you'd want to be there. She said, have you ever read the Bible? And I said, no. Funny thing is, in the back of my mind, I'd always wanted to know what was in the Bible, just as I'd never, you know, I was curious to know what it said.

And she said to me, okay, if I give you a Bible, would you read that Bible? And I said, yeah, I will. And so she gave me a Bible. And I set myself the target for reading two chapters every morning and two chapters every evening, starting at Genesis and working your way forward.

So when did the light go on and you finally fell to your knees and called out to Christ.

In repentance and faith? It took months. I don't know if you've been in that, but I started to ask myself and Samuel, and I was deeply upset. So I wanted him to be the faultless hero. And he sinned with Bathsheba and had Uriah put to death.

And I was deeply upset with that. And I remember asking myself, why does this even bother you? The other thing that I'd have to say, if someone ever comes to the Bible as a novice, not knowing any scripture, and just reads the Old Testament, there are two things that become crystal, usually walk hand in hand.

And God hates sexual uncleanness. If I had a religion, my religion was heavy metal, particularly the band Iron Maiden. And I lived in a house full of memorabilia and stuff, the Iron Maiden. And also, I won't say too much about it, but as many men of my age who consider themselves big atheists and single, I had a cupboard full of pornography.

And so around the unit, he says, you know, if there is a God, He really is not happy with me. And then anyway, long story short, then, continuing to read on through the Bible, I got to Psalm 91. And Psalm 91, towards the end of the Psalm, when God starts to speak, and He says, call upon me.

And I remember it was a Saturday night, I was home alone, and I read that one. It was as though there was nothing else. He will call upon me, and I will answer upon God. I had to call upon God. And I did fall to my knees at the side of the bed, and I started to pray.

Great, praise God. Well, were you, eventually led to a specific.

Congregation where you became a member before you ever came around to planting the church where you are a member now, the church?

Go ahead. With that girl, I started to attend the church that she started. I know you had that denomination in the USA. Yeah, although today, there's a lot broader spectrum of people under.

That umbrella than there was years ago. But the old school, classic Church of Christ, the Campbellites, were those that might appear very much like your average evangelical church, but they believed in the necessity of baptism by immersion for salvation, for the forgiveness of sins.

Correct, yeah. And strictly a cappella, although there is a division among them,.

Some use music. Yeah, well, here in Australia, you're a baptismal regeneration, although baptism is certainly important in their operation. They're congregational. I'd call them like evangelical and Arminian.

Earlier, they do have, certainly did have a band playing Servant, the girl who gave me the Bible. And naivety, I assumed that everybody was like me, and not necessarily, you know, I sort of found some things out.

But I knew reading forward in the Bible, no one could come to the Son unless he was drawn by the Father. To me, that made perfect sense. I remember reading the chapter and sort of sitting back and thinking, okay, so that's what happened to me.

So that really worked, and I couldn't have defended the position. Yeah, well,.

It is interesting that I've told this story on the air before, but years ago when I worked for WMCA 570 AM radio in New Jersey, I had been approached by an elderly Jewish journalist who wanted to buy two hours of time from me, airtime, to have a debate with a fundamentalist Baptist.

And I sold him the airtime. And when I was listening to the program live, the Jewish journalist, who by the way, identified himself as a student of the New Testament, even though he did not believe in the claims of Jesus Christ, nor in the gospel of Jesus Christ, he considered himself an expert on the New Testament.

He had read it a hundred times or more over. And he actually said to the fundamentalist Baptist during the debate, so let me get this straight. You believe that before the foundations of the world, God chose a certain people to save them and save them alone, bypassing all others, and that all others will go to hell because they have not been chosen by God before the foundation of the world to receive eternal life.

And the fundamentalist Baptist said, oh, no, no, no, no, no. You don't know me very well. I'm not a Calvinist. You're talking about Calvinism. And this Jewish journalist said, what's that? He said, well, Calvinism is what you're talking about.

You're describing unconditional election. I don't believe in that. And he goes, what? I don't know what this Calvinism stuff is. I'm talking about your Bible, the New Testament. This man just came to the conclusion that that's what Christians in general, if not all Christians, at least serious ones who took the Bible to be an inerrant scripture.

He believed that we all thought that God unconditionally elected a certain group of people before the foundations of the world. Why not?

Well, you've got to do all sorts of verbal gymnastics.

So what eventually led you into a more biblically sound church?

Oh, that, I, you know, there was a prison. I was ignorant, and unfortunately, the person I asked was as ignorant as I, and they said, oh, look, I think...

Well, if only that were true, there would have been thousands of covenanters that were never martyred. But anyway...

And yet, you know, the only Anglican churches that I knew were in... I didn't even bother looking into them. I did many, many years, to be honest. My wife and I sort of came to reformed convictions and bumbled through a few churches that were not at all reformed and couldn't work out why it was all going wrong.

You know, I mean, interestingly, it's sort of the thing that made it plain to me in the way that I finally worked out that it was all going wrong was when I read Arnold Dalymore's two-volume... Yeah, that's supposed to be one of the best, for certain.

Oh, yeah. You know, and that's sort of how I came to that book was, to me, it's kind of providential. I mean, I found a book in a friend's house called Why Revival Parries by Leonard Ravenhill, and I had no idea of who anyone was, but I read his book, and in his book he spoke of two people, David Brainerd and Jonathan Edwards.

And the next time I was at the Christian book on special in a table in the middle of the bookshop, the diary of David Brainerd, edited it and read it, and I certainly did pick it up, buy it, take it home and read it.

Almost life-changing in itself to me, but by the banner of truth. And, you know, I read the whole banner of truth for me. Next time I go to the bookshop, if it's banner of truth, I'm buying it. Bookshop, and I found a whole lot of books, and I had no idea that I was buying.

I bought the two volumes, Dalymore's two-volume works of Jonathan Edwards, a Murray book that I could find, Revival and Revivalism, and digested it. I'm on and picked up a biography of wits. I read through the two volumes, Dalymore's explanation of the...

I finally realized what was going wrong for my wife and I. We're trying to fellowship.

Church Planting, Reformed Convictions, and the Launch of Cooma Reformed Bible Church

So, how eventually did you come about to be one of the planters of the Kuma Reformed Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales, Australia?

Um, I mean, it's a corner of Australia. I'll run the numbers by 85 ,000 population, and this incumbent set of, you know, church preaching the Gospels. Now, I won't go into all the details, but it just...

Great. And if anybody wants to find out more about the Kuma Reformed Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales, Australia, they could go to the sermon audio website, sermonaudio .com, sermonaudio .com, and I'm assuming if you just type in the word Kuma, C-O-O-M-A, that your church will come up, and probably the only church that would come up, I'm assuming.

Yes, yes, definitely the only one from Kuma.

Well, we are going to be discussing, when we come back from the break, it's happened before, has America repeated Australian history, lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left?

If you have a question that you would like to ask of my guest, Scott Clements, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the good old USA.

And if you are asking about a question or an issue that is personal and private, that compels you to remain anonymous, we will give you that liberty to remain anonymous. But other than that, if it's just a general question about theology, doctrine, history, about the subject, in regard to the subject we have at hand today, the lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left, please at least give us your...

Left to right, you mean?

Excuse me?

Left to, oh yeah, right to left, sorry.

Yeah, I know you are from the land down under, so maybe everything is reversed.

Some things go in the opposite direction here.

But if you are just asking about that, please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence. So don't go away, we will be right back up rolling right after these messages from our sponsors.

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Welcome back, this is Chris Arns, and if you just.

Tuned us in, our guest today is Scott Clements, Australian lay preacher and a church planter of the Kuma Reformed Bible Church of Kuma, New South Wales in Australia. We are talking about It Happened Before, Has America Repeated Australian History? Lessons to be Learned from the Decline of Australia from Right to Left.

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. And before I even go into the subject, how did you come to discover Iron Sharpens Iron Radio?

Because I know that you have listened for quite a while and on a rare occasion have took the time to write a question.

Oh, I think I heard about it when James White on The Dividing Line mentioned that you were restarting Iron Sharpens Iron, whenever that was, it must have been two or three years ago now.

2015 is when we relaunched it. We started it originally in New York in 2005, 2006.

Yes. Well, I'd never heard of it before 2015, but James White on The Dividing Line mentioned it a few times and gave it a recommendation and that was enough to get me interested and.

I've been listening ever since. Well, I really appreciate that. And right now it's about 6 .30 in the morning in Australia on Saturday, the 5th of August, correct? That's correct. I'm a day ahead of you.

Well, I thank you for being up so early to.

Conduct the interview. I was going to say I'm always awake at this hour.

Okay. Well, tell us something about the theological climate of Australia that may be too broad of a question because here in America, the theology may be largely reflective of a particular city and a particular state and there's really a wide range of a theological atmosphere depending upon where you live or visit here in the United States.

But what can you tell us about Australia in the 21st century, what you are familiar with anyway, what's surrounding you? And other places you may have visited within your own continent.

An American would find that Australia is larger than the USA. We don't really have anything like a Bible Belt, although we do certainly have some areas that you would say the churches are better than in other areas, a much lower key thing here in Australia.

Just general, the Sydney metropolitan area where the Sydney Anglicans, the Diocese of Sydney is, I mean, they are a very evangelical diocese, very much a Reformed diocese, you know, not that anyone could claim to be perfect, but they are certainly there and certainly in many parts of Sydney, the Northwest Bible Belt, jokingly, although every Bible Belt you don't get anything like, you know, over 50 church attendance in those areas, but certainly there are more church attenders there than other parts of Sydney.

And to the north of New South Wales, it would probably be far more Christian than many other parts of the nation. But generally speaking, you know, you're looking at a continental landmass that's pretty much the same as the continental USA, but our population is only 20 million people.

Once you get outside of the cities, you know, people are few and far between in many ways, the towns are far, and within those towns, there are many, many, Australia, on the decline here, cultural Christianity has been very much.

Abandoned, it was abandoned. And what would be some of the competing religions outside of.

Christianity that are in existence there in Australia? You know, we have Islamic immigration into it, and they are quite happy to propagate their religion. Also, you'd find, you know, the other ranges.

Well, you came up with the theme today, in regard to it's happened before,.

Has America repeated Australian history. Lessons to be learned from the decline of Australia from right to left? Tell us about specifically, what Australia was like before the decline that you.

Describe. Well, if you go back to 1950s, rates in Australia for the whole population was something like 44%. In other words, Christianity, Australia is a Christian nation, you come through to 1980, and church attendance rates had dropped to 24%.

And the generation, and when you speak in that way, there are obviously Australia, the generation that turned away from the church, you know, they basically, they were taken to church, they got away from the church, they swallowed the beetles, and you know, and they wanted nothing to do with established religion, full stop.

By the way, I heard that in Australia, if you actually swallow a beetle, you could choke to death very easily, because of the size of the beetles. Sorry about that. All right. Yes, I know what you're talking about.

When you say that there was a very high rate of church attendance, what would have been the dominant denomination or church that you're talking about? Definitely Anglicanism. Now, would the Anglicans be, I know that the Sydney or Australia Anglicans, at least today, are very Protestant, they're Calvinistic, they're low church.

Would that be the dominant type of Anglican you're talking about, or would it be the Oxford movement, Romish, very high church and Catholic Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics, basically?

Unfortunately, outside of the Sydney diocese is a mixed bunch. I actually honestly was speaking to an Evangelical Anglican minister Wednesday, and he said to me, you know, and we were just talking about one thing or another, he said, you know, outside the Armidale diocese there are ministers, which is a whole lot of solid theology and solid church.

So, the timeline seems to be very reflective of what has occurred here in the United States of America, but there seems to have had a greater impact by the left upon Australia than has occurred even here.

I mean, obviously leftism has infiltrated every sphere of life here in the United States, and we are on the brink of being a socialist nation, but you are actually already impacted by socialism in a far greater way than we are, correct?

Yeah, I would say so. You know, a man named Frost became the Prime Minister of Australia, he won an election, and a politician with the marriage law, and he crossed the country with.

Those three. Oh yeah. And as far as like socialized medicine and things like that, what is your personal experience with that? Because sometimes I hear, especially when I'm hearing from people in the UK, there's an interesting phenomenon with the UK.

I don't know if you have had the same experience with people that you have had dialogue with from the United Kingdom, but there are some elements of the leftist socialist governments in the UK that even some theologically conservative Christians, who might even believe identically with me in regard to my being a Reformed Baptist and so on, that they seem to be not at all troubled by that, and they even are in favor of things like gun control.

They view America as being, you know, a nation of gun crazed people who just can't wait to shoot anything moving that looks suspicious. Go ahead if you could.

Yeah, well, Australia, the mid -80s, Australia very much saw a child of Great Britain shopping with my grandparents. They were looking for a new color TV, and they were specifically looking for brand that was made in Britain, and they would not buy any other brand than the brand that was made in Britain, of Inferior.

If you're playing in the sandpit, you'll probably find that they're playing with each other and talking in mock American accents. That's, oh it's true, that's the influence of American. So when they're playing, they're talking in American accents.

I remember one of my sons, particularly, I used to get, I keep saying to him, drop.

Well, going back to the question as far as your personal opinion about how you think socialized medicine and things like that are helping or hurting the society,.

What are basically your own thoughts on that? I'm definitely in the unpopular minority in Australia. I don't think that it's a good thing, and I don't think society, any time you create from the government and that this thing that you're supposedly getting for free from the government is your natural born right, you are encouraging nothing other than irresponsibility.

System is, it's needed when it's needed. Anyone can afford it. They pay on top of their taxes for private health care they need from the privately owned hospitals. We're going to be.

A break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for our guest, Scott Clements, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA, and of course you may remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter that you are asking about, and God willing we will be right back right after these messages with Scott Clements, so do not go away.