A deep and abiding passion to see our churches grow is a very dangerous thing. That may seem an odd observation to make, but it is a critical one. If we run with a passion to grow things without at… (more…)
This article is an edited transcript of a talk given by Phil Colgan at the 2014 Nexus conference in Sydney, written up and edited by Sam Freney. Personal references throughout are therefore applicable to Phil, not Sam. In my… (more…)
Tony Payne talks with Phillip Jensen about the history of The Briefing—how it began, what its aims have been, and where we stand now. ~ Tony Payne: Phillip, The Briefing was really your idea. You drew together the resources to… (more…)
I suppose it’s like looking at old baby photos, but over the past month or so I’ve been browsing through some of the classic early articles in The Briefing. I chuckled over some of the ‘Lead Balloons’ we ran in… (more…)
This article is an edited transcript of an address given at the 2014 Nexus conference in Sydney. ~ And when [Paul] had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all. And there was much weeping on the… (more…)
“What do you do for work?” is one of the most common questions that we ask when we meet someone new. For most of us, work is right at the heart of how we see ourselves and how we explain… (more…)
Okay, so we Australian footballing types (that is, men) need to improve our sexual behaviour by learning to respect women. But it makes you wonder whether the non-footballing types (that is, women) also need to respect other non-footballing types. Would that improve their sexual behaviour too?
I was part of a group a few weeks ago where a wonderful, faithful, godly older pastor told us about something that had happened in his church. During an important public meeting, a man had risen to his feet and started shouting abuse at the pastor. It was a tirade full of invective and malice and hatred. How would you respond?
T David Gordon
P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg, 2009.
Do you find yourself getting frustrated with the way your minister preaches?
The thing about western individualism is it is just so individualistic. If I remember my ethics properly, there is an underlying ‘ethical egoism’—that is, ‘I’ (the ‘ego’ in ‘ego-ism’) make my moral decisions on the basis of what is best for me.
Apparently, if Australian men (with footballers as the focus and pinnacle of that group) learned to respect women, then they would have better sexual behaviour. I’m not sure of the connection between those two things myself, but, as I mentioned in the last post, it is certainly difficult to object to.
But perhaps there is another way out of my confusion. Rather than objecting to it, why not adopt it, and then demand some of the same treatment?
I became a Christian at the age of 15.
When I began to go to church, we used the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and prayed the prayers from it each Sunday.
I don’t know what happened in Christchurch. I have never watched The Footy Show. And I missed the interviews on the television.
But I did hear a lot of conversations in the weeks after the latest football ‘kiss-and-tell’, both on talkback radio, in the press and (amazingly enough) even in real life.
It struck me as rather odd that the feminist lot seemed to expand it to all Australian men (of whom the footballer is apparently a subclass) needing to learn to respect women.
Song words used to be fixed in our hymnbooks or on overhead transparencies. If you wanted to modernize “Thou o’er death hast won” or paraphrase how God is “ineffably sublime”, you had to petition your denomination for a whole new publication. Today, everyone can publish whatever and whenever they like. We cut and paste lyrics into pew bulletins and, increasingly, into the latest data projection package.
With this shift into self-publishing, we seem to have decided that all lyrics are public domain. At least, where I come from, if you don’t like the theology of something, you simply change the offending word or phrase as easily as you might change its font or colour. We want to be a little bit Hillsong, but baulk at singing to “the darling of heaven”. We adore the popular triumphalism of ‘In Christ Alone’, but are hesitant to commend its theology that on the cross “Glory died”. We subtly cross the line from being a publisher to being a co-writer with the professionals.
I just read A Book You’ll Actually Read On Church Leadership by Mark Driscoll. Here are six things I loved about it:
It’s not often that I agree with Bob Carr, the former Labour Premier of New South Wales. He’s a pro-abortion, pro-embryonic stem cell research and small ‘l’ liberal. (Why do so many small ‘l’ liberals join the Labour party? BTW, I really don’t need this question answered.) But I think in ‘Rights charter like a dead parrot’, he gets it spot on.
The weekend before last, I spent a wonderful time away with the folk at Christchurch Currumbin up on the beautiful Gold Coast. It was an enormously encouraging time as we looked together at what the Bible has to say about the resurrection. On the Friday night, the meeting leader exhorted us to love each other:
You’re about to spend a weekend together. You’ll eat together, sleep in rooms separated by not-so-thick walls, share bathrooms together and be with each other 24/7. This isn’t like chatting after church on Sunday. This is going to mean learning to be gracious and patient with each other.
Well, they were certainly very gracious and patient with each other (and with me, which is remarkable indeed). But it made me wonder: what is the secret to living together in the same space without biting each others’ heads off?
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about contextualization—not so much the contextualization of language (‘charms’ and ‘calms’ and so on), but the contextualization of lifestyle: becoming “all things to all people” (as in 1 Corinthians 9:22).
My thoughts were sparked by an evening we spent with our next door neighbours recently. As Dave and I were clearing things away at the end of the night, I reflected on the evening and the way that I’d approached it.
Before our guests arrived, I had chosen an outfit that approximated the style of clothes my neighbour wears, I made an extra-gourmet salad and I bought a couple of fancy cheeses. Over dinner and afterwards, I spent a lot of time talking about mortgages and extensions and consumer products. I had also talked a lot about work—the work I used to do (before kids)—in an instinctive effort to establish the kind of education and career credentials that might be taken more seriously than my current job as a full-time mum. And finally (this is the killer one!) I found myself squirming in my seat, wanting to change the subject, when they asked my four-year-old daughter what her favourite thing in the world was, and she answered, “Jesus”.
All this got me wondering what’s the difference between contextualization (or whatever word you want to use to describe doing what it says in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23) and chameleonization (or whatever word you use to describe not doing what it says in Matthew 5:13-16)?
We were looking at Luke 6 in church the other day, and it got me thinking about hypocrites. More particularly, am I one?
The old gag suggests that I am: “The church is not full of hypocrites—there’s always room for one more!”
On this understanding, hypocrisy is an unavoidable description of the normal Christian life. We all say one thing, but do another. We preach against lying, and yet find ourselves telling porkies. We rail against greed and materialism, and then chat about it all the way home in our Audi A4.
