I’d like to report that in the two weeks since GAFCON, I’ve been carefully going over my notes, digesting my observations, mulling over what I saw and heard, and preparing to deliver myself of some devastating post-conference insights. Of course, the reality is that I have been stumbling through a haze of jet lag and exhaustion, attempting to locate my wife and kids in the fog, and emerging into brief moments of clarity to stare with horror at the mountainous backlog on the desk.
Author Archives: Tony Payne
Smell the coffee
Up front, Sola Panel
A recent edition of our denominational newspaper here in Sydney featured an extended and very positive series of articles on the Fairtrade movement. Fairtrade is a ‘think global, act local’ sort of initiative which involves consumers in the West attempting to improve the lot of poor and exploited farmers in the third world by buying ‘Fairtrade’ products. By buying certified ‘Fairtrade’ coffee, for example, you ensure that a higher income flows to the cooperatives that produce it (usually 10% or so above the market price). The edition featured stories about Christians involved in the Fairtrade movement, and contained strong encouragement for churches to get involved—not only as a means of adding valuable momentum to the whole movement, but as a culturally attractive way of building links with our community and sharing the gospel. (more…)
Blast from the only slightly recent past
Resource Talk, Sola Panel
Have you ever had the experience of reading something you’d written a long time ago and being surprised to meet yourself again? It might be a letter you wrote to your grandmother that she kept and then returned to you (grandmothers do these things), or a diary you scribbled in as a teenager that your mother dragged out of the shoebox in the storeroom, or an impassioned essay you wrote at Uni which you discover as you’re cleaning out the filing cabinet.
GAFCON final day: Making a Statement!
The final GAFCON Conference Statement has been released, and is reproduced in full below.
To understand what this statement means, let me take you back to GAFCON on Friday, shortly after 12 noon. The main ballroom was packed, and Professor Stephen Noll was reading out the Draft of the GAFCON Conference Statement. The press had been excluded, and we had all been strictly warned not to divulge anything to anyone. Slowly and deliberately, Professor Noll began to read, as PowerPoint slides of the text flashed up on the screens. The tension was palpable.
GAFCON Day whatever-it-is: Acceleration
I’m at the ‘conferenced-out’ stage of being not quite sure what day it is. If not for the fact that Shabbat is very visibly coming into force around me, I otherwise would be hard pressed to tell that it is in fact Friday evening, and that GAFCON is accelerating towards a close.
GAFCON Day 4: Identity
What is a true blue Anglican? And what is the positive basis for Anglican unity and identity?
The workshop I’ve been attending on ‘Anglican Identity’ has been very stimulating on this crucial question, especially the addresses by Ashley Null and Andrew Shead on the common authority that Anglicanism rests upon.
GAFCON Day 3: What, where, why?
What is GAFCON in reality? A new alignment, a pressure group, or the beginnings of a breakaway church? What will happen as a result? Is there going to be a split? Are we about to witness the end of the Anglican Communion?
GAFCON Day 2: Finding Jesus
The buses left early for our trip (or pilgrimage, as it was styled) to the Mount of Olives. It offered a strange mix of experiences: joy at the extraordinary singing of the African choir, who led us in a brief prayer service on the mountain; fascination at seeing the places where Jesus walked and talked and prayed and was betrayed; eye-rolling distaste for how it all has been turned into a site for religious tourism and idolatry (the Franciscan church at Gethsemane being an extraordinary example of both); and above all, a strange blankness at not feeling even one little bit closer to Jesus through the whole experience.
GAFCON Day 1: A second Reformation?
It’s the Africans. Cascading down the hotel staircase in a riot of colour and noise and smiles, the bishops in vivid purple and their wives in even more gorgeous dresses, laughing and greeting each other, hugging, flowing on, in a joyful Christian river.
In the lobby at GAFCON
“Tell me again: why are you going to GAFCON?”
I guess I should have a stock answer by now, given how often the question has been put to me in the last month, including by my wife as we chatted at the airport.
Virtues we dislike
We shouldn’t be shocked when non-Christians find Christian virtues out of date, incomprehensible or just plain hateful. The natural person, Paul reminds us, “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him” (1 Cor 2:14).
Sola Sabbath
All this daily writing, posting and commenting is enormous fun, but after all of one month, I’m thinking it would be good to take Sundays off. Let’s just all go to church enjoy some propinquity. Back again tomorrow.
What does ‘social action’ look like?
Having promised three posts on ‘social action’, here at last is the final instalment (Read Part 1 and Part 2.)
Part 3 has been difficult to polish off—not only because we are getting to the rough terrain of practical wisdom, but also because it’s so easy to be self-deceived. Am I wanting to play down what social action means in reality because, for all my lofty talk about love, my heart is in fact cold, and I don’t want to have to put myself out for others? Or am I wanting to play up social action because, for all my lofty talk about proclamation being central, I don’t in fact want it to be central, and would rather do something else instead—something that seems both more immediately useful and more acceptable in the eyes of the world?
The last refuge of irony
They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Or is it satire?
Whichever it is, I know it’s not irony. Irony has a much better reputation. It’s the Honda Accord Euro of wit: classy, effective, understated. Things ‘drip’ with irony, like honey from the comb, or blood from a wound. But the strangest and most delicious aspect of irony is that it is usually invisible to the very the person speaking the words. When Caiaphas says that it would be better that one man should die for the people, rather than the whole nation perish, he does not realize the bittersweet truth he is uttering, although we as readers do.
Global warming and secular religion
No, I’m not trying to cause trouble. And let me say quite emphatically at the outset that I’m not trying to start a debate about global warming (at least at the moment). But I can’t help thinking that there is something deeper going on in the global warming brouhaha (I always enjoy using that word)—something more than science—something ideological, emotional or even religious.