Articles
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- Written by: Administrator
- Category: Weekly Reflections
Where is the hope?
Is there really any hope for an ageing church? Mainline denominations, like ours, have been in decline for a long time. But we are still here. So maybe we will just keep on going. Like many of us still in the church. We just keep on going.
But we know that we individuals won't just keep on going. We will all die. And before that some of us will start to wear out, and some will spend some time at the end of our lives in some kind of care.
And many of our churches won't just keep on going either. Many are wearing out. Many can no longer maintain their buildings. Many can no longer maintain a full-time paid ministry.
Increasingly central church administrations are worried about a huge and looming maintenance bill hanging over their church properties. Increasingly new ordinands are not entering full time paid ministry.
Where does hope lie? Or is there no real hope. Is it better to plan for a comfortable demise. Perhaps by combining parishes, sharing clergy, and otherwise arranging to keep going the services and organisations that we find most helpful.
That is in fact the common approach most churches have. Many of us would say that is not what we want. But it is what we do. One of the reasons is that we don't know what else to do.
Or if we have some idea of what to do, we don't think we have the ability to do it. This is because the usual hope (apart from divine miracles) is to look to increasing the number of young people - "the future of the church".
However the solution does not lie with young people. It lies with the old people.
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- Category: Weekly Reflections
Scary
What is the most daring thing you have done? I jumped out of a plane once at 12,000 feet without a parachute - and with a big bloke strapped to my back.
For those of us who are married, marriage was probably the most daring thing we have done. We committed everything we had to another person with no guarantees except their word. Yes, we got a piece of paper, but no redress if things went wrong. No back up plan.
Everything depended on trusting the other person to keep their word. And us being faithful to our word.
Exactly like following Christ.
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The Great Exodus
Do you remember the time when Jesus was speaking with Moses and Elijah on the mountain. They were three mountain men. Jesus liked climbing up mountains. Moses and Elijah both climbed the same mountain at different times (do you remember which mountain it was?).
The three mountain men also had another thing in common. They were all Great Rescuers of God's people. On the occasion when the three of them got together they had an audience of three who would become agents of the Great Rescue that Jesus set going (although poor James didn't have a very long innings).
Luke tells us what they were talking about. How fascinating to be able to read a report of this amazing chat. And what were they talking about? Jesus' Exodus that he was about to bring to fulfilment at Jerusalem (Lk 9.31 our English translations use the word "departure").
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Is church for grown ups?
Is church for grown ups? Well, of course. If there were no grown ups the children wouldn't know what to grow up to be like. But how grown up is a grown up?
Sometimes anyone over the age of about 25 wishes they were still children. Not so much responsibility. More being looked after. Less irksome duties to be done (possibly). More fun.
However not many of us really wish to go back to the regimen of school and homework and uniforms and being told what to do all the time.
But being a grown up in church is very challenging. In most organised churches the expectation is that the members will follow fairly well established patterns of belief, behaviour, and belonging. Experience tells us that most people like it like that. Once one gets to know the guidelines: what is OK to do and what is not OK to do, life can be pretty straightforward.
But it does resemble the pattern of the school. It is not only church and school where this kind of institutional behaviour is seen. Most work places are like this.
But is it grown up behaviour?
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- Category: Book Reviews
Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia. Emma Kowal. Berghahn 2015. ISBN 9781782386049
This Review was first published in Essentials Autumn 2016
Emma Kowal describes herself as a 'native ethnographer', by which she means an anthropologist studying her own kind. Her own kind in this book are “White anti-racists”, a term she defines carefully. By 'White' she doesn't necessarily refer to skin colour, rather it applies to those who “willingly and unwillingly, knowingly and unknowingly, participate in the racialised societal structure that positions them as 'White' and accordingly grants them privileges associated with the dominant Australian culture.” (11). 'Anti-racist' is defined from an anthropological perspective as “a culture, discourse and identity”.
Kowal is studying a group of health workers like herself (she worked in the Northern Territory as a doctor and is now Associate Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University). These are 'White anti-racists' who are trying to do good in Indigenous communities, and who want to be distinguished from past attempts by colonial settlers such as missionaries and the Assimilationists. Her own experience of working in the field led her to see that there was deep questioning as to whether they were actually doing anything to 'close the gap'. Was it just another colonial enterprise? One of the workers she tells about critiques herself by saying, “nearly every health promotion message she advocates conflicts with the social practices of the Aboriginal people she works with.” (7).
There is a gap between the promises of liberal multiculturalism and the experiences of Whites who seek to help the Indigenous minorities. That is where many of those most committed to do good are trapped. Why are they trapped? Partly because of the way they understand themselves.
Read more: Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia. Emma Kowal.
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Inventing the Universe: Why we can't stop talking about science, faith and God. Alister McGrath. Hodder and Stoughton. 2015. ISBN 9781444798463
This Review was first published in Essentials Autumn 2016
The “war” between science and religion has moved on, and this book is an attempt to move it further on, into a discussion that can be mutually respectful and enriching. McGrath traces his own transition from a fully assured teenage atheist to a convinced Christian. Part of this testimony involves a recurring and unflattering comparison between the Anti-theist group and his teenage over-simplified atheism. McGrath engages respectfully with a number of dialogue partners on various sides of the debate, including Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Mary Midgley and Roger Scruton. One of his aims is to correct outdated perceptions of the conflict between science and religion (it is a recently invented myth), although his chief opponent is the New Atheism which he claims is not traditional atheism, but actually Anti-theism.
The main idea is that science has limitations, as does religion.
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The Power to Save: A History of the Gospel in China. Bob Davey. EP Books, 2011. ISBN 9780852347430
A New History of Christianity in China. Daniel H Bays. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. ISBN 9781405159555
A History of Christianity in Asia Volume II 1500-1900. Samuel Hugh Moffett. Orbis Books 2005. ISBN 9781570757013
This Review was first published in Essentials Spring 2015
China continues to be in the news for many reasons. Not least because of the growth of the Christian church there. A growth symbolised perhaps by Amity Press which, by the time of the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury in June 2015, had printed 135,602,476 copies of the Bible.
The existence of Amity Press is a remarkable political, religious and spiritual reality. The story of The Heavenly Man is perhaps better known to modern western Christians. Some will also know of the work of Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission. And of other famous names such as Watchman Nee and Gladys Aylward. Beyond that not much is known.
Unfortunately. The story of the gospel in China goes back to Nestorian times. Around 1625, in the west of Xi'an a three metre high marble stele was unearthed. In Chinese characters and Syriac a Christian monk named Jingjing, writing in 781, tells of the history of Nestorian Christianity in China which started back in 635. It seems the gospel came via the Old Silk Road.
- Noel Pearson: A Rightful Place. Race, recognition and a more complete commonwealth; Tom Lawson: The Last Man. A British Genocide in Tasmania; Bain Attwood: Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History.
- Gary Haugen & Victor Boutros: The Locust Effect. Why the end of poverty requires the end of violence.
- Simon Chan: Grassroots Asian Theology. Thinking the Faith from the Ground Up.
- Grant Lock: Shoot Me First. A cattleman in Taliban Country. Twenty-four years in the hotspots of Pakistan and Afghanistan