Australian evangelist John Smith looks at the malaise of a nation and asks what do you do when a country has lost its soul.

John Smith

Australia will never acquire a national identity until enough individual "Australians acquire an identity of their own." So said Patrick White in a speech to the Symposium on Nuclear Warfare. I live in a country with one of the worst sets of social statistics in the world. Values and spirituality are certainly on the decline.

Even among some thinkers who are a long way from the traditional Christian view, there is the feeling that something is terribly wrong. A few years ago Australia had a visit from the man said to be the guru of stress management. He maintained, as a pure secularist, that the greatest factor in the breakdown of the human heart and mind in the Western world was not work, but the lack of central meaning in life.

The human spirit is not able to live effectively and healthily if it does not have something beyond itself for which to live. When I was in high school, we had a favourite experiment. The teacher would take an old four-gallon kerosene tin, put a bit of water in it, drive out the majority of the air by steaming it over a Bunsen burner, then screw on the lid. We'd watch as the tin self-destructed inwards.

There were two factors involved. The one we always talked about was the external air pressure pushing on the tin. But equally important was the partial vacuum created inside. Internally there was nothing to counter the pressure of the external forces. The diseases of despair and loss of self worth and identity in our society have little to do, I believe, with the external pressures of this world.

True, we live at a fast pace. But we also have many life-support systems unavailable to previous generations. In my grandfather's day, a cough could well spell the beginnings of something fatal; now it's a fairly ordinary thing, treated with tablets.

Yet despite these life support systems, we seem less satisfied, less certain about the meaning of life, less able to relate to one another in depth. The joy of life has gone out for many, many Australians. Over my desk I have a little medallion, picked up in Israel. It's a stylised picture of the burning bush in front of which Moses knelt and took off his sandals when he felt the presence of God.

Around this medallion, in English and Hebrew, are written these simple words: "And the bush was not consumed." I have that over my desk because burn out seems to be the worst disease for youth workers, school teachers and other people involved at the coal face of human need in our nation.

It is a constant reminder that if I collapse emotionally and spiritually, it will not be because I work too hard, but because somewhere along the line I failed to have that sense of meaning and purpose in life without which no human being can be fully alive.

I believe that the weakness of the church in Australia is that while we, like Christ, understand ministering to broken people, unlike Christ we are not astute at analysing the causes of the brokenness. Jesus went deeper than the Left or Right does. The Left and Right both have comments about the structure of society, and each ought to shut up once in a while and listen to the other, because there are truths on both sides.

But the real truth comes out of a profound word of Jesus: "What good is it for man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36). What's the use of having a magnificent independent Australian spirit and a good Gross National Product if the very soul of the nation is gone? If there is no foundation for hope? If all scientific rationalism leaves us with is the concept that a human being is simply a strange, fascinating animal in a cosmic zoo, no more significant, as Philip Adams has said, than a dinosaur or a dodo, and destined to go the same way? How can you build morality, relationships or hope on a foundation that says we are really nothing but a meaningless gathering of atoms, behind which there is no face of benevolence or love, no cosmic purpose, no ultimate meaning?

I believe Australians have to face those words of Jesus. If we don't, we will continue to see the collapsing of the kerosene can.