GOD'S COUNTRY (SORT OF): THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO 3068

Charlie Gill
1 day ago
8 min read

By Charlie Gill

This feature was originally published in The Rotunda's December 2025 edition. The pdf is accessible via our home page.

Reverend Sándor-Csongor Nagy is used to the perfect Christmas. Growing up in a Hungarian family living in a small village in northwestern Transylvania, he’d wake up on December 25th to grey skies, snowdrifts and a true sense of religious occasion. His father was a pastor, and Sándor himself felt inclined to the clerical life from an early age.

“When I was ten years old, I had an accident. I played with a bow and arrow and it kicked back into my eye, and I almost died. I thought: ‘Why am I still alive? Maybe God has some plans for me.’”

And so Sándor knew that one day he was going to be the pastor of a church himself. What he didn’t know was that God’s plan would send him to a church on the other side of the world: North Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. In January this year, 31-year-old Sándor and his wife Csilla arrived at St Luke’s Church, the 115-year-old bluestone icon opposite the Fitzroy Bowls Club. The previous pastor had retired after 27 years, and Sándor was set to become the new face of the city’s Hungarian Reformed Church.

“It will be interesting to experience Christmas in summer,” Sándor told me during a tour of St Luke’s in November. “It’s a strange thing for us.”

Strange, too, to be a pastor in one of the most irreligious places on earth. As per the 2021 census, 65% of North Fitzroy’s residents have no religion—almost the most of any suburb in Australia—and as the population has become increasingly godless, members of the Hungarian Reformed Church have quietly gathered at St Luke’s to hear the word of the Lord in their native tongue. Sándor’s Sunday sermon, though, is not the only one available to the spiritually-curious in North Fitzroy. Despite its reputation for agnosticism, there are multiple thriving Christian communities scattered throughout 3068 and its surrounds.

Just across the Queens Parade divide is the imposing Church of St John the Baptist, a child of the Gothic Revival constructed from 1871 to 1907. In March next year, St John’s will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the laying and blessing of its foundation stone, and hopes to have both the archbishops of Melbourne and Perth in attendance. This would potentially constitute the inner north’s most significant divine visitation since the Dalai Lama stayed in Alfred Crescent in 1982 or Beyoncé posed in front of a Brunswick share house in 2013.

“We’re putting up a commemorative plaque on the entrance to the church, and that will be blessed, hopefully, by the Archbishop,” John Andrews, local historian and church archivist, tells me. “We’ll have Mass, followed by lunch and some entertainment, hopefully provided by the Vietnamese and the Irish."

St Joseph’s Church in Collingwood—which belongs to the same parish as St John’s— has become the home of Melbourne’s Vietnamese Catholic community. Naturally, the demographic make-up of the parish has radically changed throughout the decades. John explains:

“Just after World War Two, the parish was predominantly poor Irish. They moved out into better suburbs. Then the Italian community with post-war migration came. Likewise, many of them moved out. Then a lot of Greeks moved into North Fitzroy, but of course they weren’t Catholic, they were Greek Orthodox, so we started to lose part of our congregation. Then all the young professionals moved in…When you read reports from the Catholic newspaper back in the day, it would talk about events at St John’s with hundreds and hundreds of people. We have to have a 150th to get that many people there now.”

“People only know about God when they hit their thumb and they mention His name.”

And yet current trends—whether it be the male loneliness epidemic or the popularity of astrology among young women—suggest more and more people are yearning for spirituality and connection. Religion is well-placed to satisfy this need, but faith derived from ancient scripture can have difficulty adapting to the social mores of the 21st century. Some churches, though, seem to have worked it out: like Saint Mark’s Anglican Church, across the Alexandra Parade divide on the corner of George and Moor streets.

Saint Mark’s is one of the most progressive Anglican churches in Australia. For decades, unconditional empathy has been its modus operandi, from working with First Nations people to running an AIDS ministry in the 90s. Its support of the LGBTIQ+ community has drawn dismay from other Anglican churches, but as its current vicar Reverend Ken Goodger explains: “If people are criticising you, you must be doing something right.”

As Ken gives me a tour of the bluestone building, he expands on the church’s inclusive philosophy: “Jesus called those on the fringes of society. And I think the call of the church is to do that still. To be inclusive of people who aren’t powerful, aren’t privileged, and who perhaps are struggling in life.”

This call has also been heeded by a far more traditional church not too far away. On a Saturday morning—most definitely not a Sunday—I pop into the North Fitzroy Seventh-day Adventist Church, a charming little redbrick building opposite Edinburgh Gardens on Alfred Crescent, and meet retired doctor Sally Kemp. Her great-grandfather was a founding member of the church. We talk about the weekly soup-kitchen service it provides for homeless people.

“Most of them don’t have family, which is why they need someone who remembers their name. They sometimes ask me medical questions. I’m very fond of them.”

Seventh-day Adventists are known for their emphasis on health (so no alcohol), keen anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ, and belief their co-founder was a prophet: Ellen G. White, who actually came to North Fitzroy and preached here at the end of the 19th century. Sally, who started coming to the church half a century later in 1953, has noticed how the area around it has changed.

"When you look at all of the churches that are empty it makes me sad… I thought COVID would get people to think about God more, but it almost seemed to be the opposite.”

“It’s changed over my lifetime. We used to reach people with the Bible, but people don’t believe in the Bible now. We now have to reach people who are secular. You can’t assume that people know anything about God. They only know about God when they hit their thumb and they mention His name.”

A couple of years ago, the church wanted to book a room at the North Fitzroy library to run an outreach program, but ran into difficulty with someone from the council.

“They said to us we couldn’t use the library rooms because we might say bad things about gay or transgender people… It was interesting because we do have a couple of transgender people who come to the soup kitchen. They just assumed immediately we would hold a particular view.”

If you stroll down the road from the North Fitzroy Seventh-day Adventist Church, eventually you’ll reach the Fitzroy North Community Church on Reid Street (keep going and you’ll reach the North Fitzroy Arms; a walking tour of the changeability of this suburb’s name). While the S.D.A church aren’t drinkers, the F.N.C.C congregation are often nursing a collective hangover. They’re young. They’re hip. They’re not just in the inner-north, but of it.

“It was just open and curious and I could process some of my stuff that I needed to work through,” Shane tells me after a recent Sunday service. “It was safe enough for me to feel like I didn’t have to leave any parts of me behind to exist here.”

“I’ve seen horrific things happen inside churches, like all kinds of abuse, power being used badly, all kinds of stuff. And it really quickly shattered the illusion…But there’s some people who go like: ‘This has been a big part of my life. I still feel connected to the divine. I still feel connected to bits of the story. I still want to work out how to love your enemies.’”

"I still feel connected to bits of the story. I still want to work out how to love your enemies.’”

And so the church became home to the kind of Christian open about their complicated relationship with Christianity. Fifteen years ago, though, the 140-year-old congregation was slowly dying: propped up by people from the eastern suburbs who drove in to keep it going.

“Really good people, but they didn’t understand Fitzroy North. They were doing evangelism nights and were like: ‘We don’t know why no one’s coming.’ I think part of the transformation was as people from the community started coming in: the neurodivergent community, more queer community. As soon as you open that space up, you have to challenge and rethink how faith fits into that.”

Soon enough, F.N.C.C became, as Shane puts it, “inner-northy”. Perhaps, though, the church is defined as much by what the inner north isn’t as much as what it is. As beloved neighbourhood cafes close, stalwart supermarkets threaten to sell up to corporate conglomerates and locals’ pubs get bought out by large management groups, city-life is becoming increasingly hostile to community living.

“There’s an incredible freedom in being in the inner north, but at the same time there’s a vacuum as well,” says Shane. “Sometimes the fluidity of the inner north makes it really hard to find connections… What happens when you get sick, who’s turning up with a casserole?”

I asked Reverend Ken back at Saint Mark’s if there was something melancholic about the situation. Bejewelling the inner-city are beautiful buildings home to communities that foster connection in an increasingly disconnected world. And people walk straight past them.

“I don’t think there’s a sadness,” he said. “I think there’s an opportunity for the church to actually build genuine community.”

Just not this community. Most local churches are still frequented largely by people who drive in from the suburbs. Middle-class inner-city Melburnians are either highly critical of organised religion (“rightfully so”, as Ken says) or completely uninterested by it. Sally, from the Seventh-day Adventist church, has noticed less courtesy being paid to churches: one hot summer’s day, a drunken reveller in Edinburgh Gardens defecated out the front of the same building Ellen G. White once preached at.

“I was shocked. I thought there would be more respect for churches. Maybe it’s because of church members. Maybe we’ve let the Lord down,” says Sally.

And on lovely sunny evenings, their bins get filled to the brim with rubbish put there by the park-dwelling party-animals: “It’s really funny for a church that’s teetotaller, a whole lot of wine bottles in the bins.”

“We don’t really have a connection with the local population of this area.”

But who knows what the future holds?

“We have some younger people who’ve started coming,” Ken tells me. “Some come and don’t stay. Some come and do stay. But I have noticed that there are a number of younger people who will come and have a look… Does modern society actually give us any sense of meaning and purpose for life? People are reduced to consumers, and are saying that there’s more to life."

John from St John’s has also noticed a greater influx of young people recently.

“They’re obviously looking for meaning in life, aren’t they? If IT and disco aren’t providing the meaning, you’re going to have to start looking somewhere else.”

Meanwhile, back at St Luke’s, Sándor has settled into North Fitzroy. Csilla, an engineer, is struggling to find a job and misses her family, but they both like North Fitzroy and might just extend their two-year visa. They love Piedimonte’s. Their favourite restaurant is Citrus. It’s a nice area, but it isn’t God’s country, and so I ask Sándor what he thinks about the church being an island in a sea of faithlessness.

“It gives a lot of opportunity to have connection with these people. I think we should work more on this, because we don’t really have a connection with the local population of this area…That’s why we should also provide an English sermon. That’s how you could start a bigger community, greet them and be a welcoming community.”

So, if you’re keen for a little more spirituality this Christmas—sometime after presents, a little before lunch—pop in to St Luke’s opposite the bowls club. Sing a little hymn if you feel like it. Say a little prayer. And then get pissed afterwards.