David Millikan
Wednesday, 11 February 2026
I was at Fuller Theological Seminary in Los Angeles in the 1970s and things were going well. I had completed the requirements for a PhD. I was teaching two courses. My wife Kay was exhibiting in a serious gallery in Burbank and had recently received an invitation from the Governor’s Annual Art Show to exhibit. And we were wondering if we would return to Australia; it seemed like hard work. Before I left Australia I had candidated for the Methodist ministry, which was now the Uniting Church. If I returned I would be required to complete the ordination process, meaning more theological and pastoral training. Kay was wanting to teach art and find a gallery to sell her own.
This decision hung heavily over us. We decided to drive north to the Sierra Nevada mountain range for a couple of days of walking and camping in one of the most beautiful places in the US. A local friend and I climbed Carson’s peak and sat on the edge, stunned by the view. Snow-capped mountains behind us and the western plains of California ahead reaching out to the Pacific. It was a bewitching moment. I thought: ‘There is nothing like the grandeur of this in Australia. What am I going back to?’
Before we left Melbourne, Kay’s father paid for us to fly a single-prop Cessnar from Melbourne to Lightning Ridge and north to Alice Springs at 1300 feet. After arriving one afternoon we climbed the MacDonald Ranges above Emily’s Gap and watched the sun setting over the paralysingly vast landscape due west of Alice Springs. It is a view that reduces one to silence. I knew this was a vision that no English person could know who was never more than 75 miles from the sea. You cannot go to the Australian landscape with a critical mind. It was breathtaking.
As I gazed out from Carson’s Peak, that moment came back, the vision of the declining sun over the endless red dirt, the spindly white trunked gums, and the spinifex flooded my mind. It began to come clear that we had to go home. The US was living out the biblical injunction to multiply and fill the earth as the lords of creation. The Australian landscape did not allow such pretensions. It diminished human arrogance. In its place it offered a unique spiritual depth.
So we decided to return. At that point I got wind of an initiative coming from Scripture Union and the Intervarsity Fellowship (IVF), now the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES). I met businessman and first Zadok chair Alan Kerr in Century City LA and he explained what they had in mind. What I knew was this: IVF and Scripture Union were looking to set up something along the lines of Francis and Edith Schaeffer’s L’Abri in Switzerland. They were prepared to open their mailing lists and they wanted it in Canberra. They would underwrite expenses for two years.
The Whitlam government had come like a storm through Australian culture. The assumed role of churches in public life was paid scant attention. For many Christians it was alarming to see declared atheists playing with our morals. Removing sales tax on the contraceptive pill, introducing no-fault divorce, and attempting to decriminalise abortion, troubled the churches. Many Christians felt unprepared to deal with the ethical and theological issues involved, and there was no help available. The level of theological discussion in parishes was at a low ebb. It remains one of the failures of Australian churches they have turned their churches into intellectual kindergartens.
The proposed centre was not seen as a lobby group. That was the function of the denominations. The centre was to be a handmaiden to the churches, lay run and distant from theological controversies which troubled ecumenical endeavours. There was also some wariness of the L’Abri model, and we had no intent to set up a community like they had.
Finding a name for the centre was hard work. It seemed to me there were two ways we could go. We could have a name which told the world what we did, like The Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, or we could choose an anonymous name and give it meaning, like Kodak, Xerox and the like. We chose Zadok, partly because we were exhausted by the arguments, but also because it was the name of an Old Testament priest who stood at the edge of religion and politics in Israel.
The Revd Dr David Millikan is a Uniting Church Minister of the Word, founding Director of the Zadok Centre for Christianity & Society in 1976, producer of the award-winning The Sunburnt Soul, director of documentaries, and former Head of ABC Religious Broadcasting 1986-91.
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