Life & Faith

Tim Costello, Australia’s favourite social justice advocate, looks back on a storied, surprising life. --- “I don’t think you ever understand your faith until you’re out of your own culture and have to see it through other cultural lenses … The Italian Baptists all voted communist. They believed the Christian Democrats, with the Mafia, with even the Catholic church, would never clean up corruption in Italy. Only a communist government would. And I just knew God was in heaven, Bob Menzies was in the lodge, and we Christians only voted Liberal, or conservative.”  The title of Tim Costello’s just-released memoir, A Lot with a Little, reflects his sense that the doors that have opened to him across his life have been more than he deserved. As a Baptist minister and lawyer, erstwhile mayor of St Kilda, and for many years CEO of World Vision Australia, his journey reflects his understanding that Christian faith is not a respectable, middle-class thing.  “So much of the Bible forces us to ask the questions of, who h