Diversity Dinner Night : A Glimpse of Heaven

Date: 6th March 2026

I recently attended the Diversity Dinner night at the Pan Pacific, where Christians from over 40 different nations came together as one united Body in Perth, Western Australia.

We were encouraged to wear our own traditional dresses to the dinner, so I wore my Chinese Cheongsam.

My friends I met from Australia, South Sudan, Burundi and so forth. I am seated 3 seats from the right.

The night started off with a Welcome to Country by an Aboriginal Christian family  (Rodney, Joshua and Canaan Rivers).

I confess that, in the past, when I was in secular spaces and heard the Welcome to Country, it felt very much like empty lip-service. It felt like something the instituition had mandated us to sit through. Or, even worse, it even felt patronizing towards the Aboriginal Community. It was like the Australian government was implicitly saying "Here, we'll throw you a bone by doing your Welcome to Country, but in reality, we have all the power".

However, in comparison, at this Diversity Dinner night, the Welcome to Country was authentic and powerful. The Aboriginal Christian family explained the Genesis Creation account in the Bible as part of their Welcome to Country, and submitted everything under God.

Here are some excerpts of the speech below:

"It's amazing that He (the Holy Spirit) made something beautiful out of nothing... this is God's Welcome to Country. All glory and honour and praise to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The Divine Creator and Owner of our Country. Always was and always will be... we see them (the Elders) as God's custodians of this great land... May God continue to bless this Great Southland of the Holy Spirit.

You can watch the full Welcome to Country below:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/2c3ec5_d4170df3423d45299c7ca4114cb8a7f6/480p/mp4/file.mp4

The Aboriginal Christian's Welcome to Country, Diversity Dinner Night 2026

I think it was an amazing reminder that Australia doesn't belong to Caucasians or Aboriginals - it belongs to the God of the Bible. He made the land and He was there first. He is real, and He wants us to live in peace with one another.

I personally do not believe that any country should ever have two competiting flags. And we argue over what day the national day should be every single year. To quote Jesus Christ: "A Kingdom divided cannot stand!". Yet Australia has this within it's government.

The Bible declares that unless we have a reconciled relationship to the Creator, through the Cross, we cannot be able to have a reconciled relationship with one another. Perhaps in a divided nation such as Australia, this divine message of reconciliation is what we need.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 

2 Corinthians 5:18-19

And then after the Welcome to Country, we all worshiped our Lord together. It was like looking at a glimpse of heaven. The scene and atmosphere in the room reminded me of the verse below from the book of Revelation:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands,

Revelation 7:9

We worshipped our God in the various languages He created. We sang to Christ in Chinese, Indonesian, Dzongkha, Farsi (Persian) and so forth.

For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

It was a fantastic and memorable night, one I will not be forgetting any time soon.

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