A black and white view across La Perouse Bay on a gloomy evening, the sea vast and incomprehensible, the shoreline harsh. The old photo on Professor Philip Mitchell’s wall in his office at the School of Psychiatry, Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney, reflects something of the experience of being depressed. The future seems bleak, dark, vast and unreachable; the situation seems hopeless; loneliness presses in.
Tag Archives: Featured full-text
Factotum #12: Increasing your ministry
Everyday Ministry
I want to put a flea in your ear. Some of you will hate me; it’s irritating and distracting to have a flea in your ear. You can’t quite concentrate on the immediate tasks before you.
Factotum #11: Models for men’s groups
Everyday Ministry
Speaker at men’s function: You really must be aiming to lead your family spiritually. Get the Bible out after dinner, and work through a passage with your wife and kids. Make every effort to teach them the things of God.
Peretti: What’s the story?
Review
Walking out of the lounge room on Wednesday nights last year, I always performed a ritual of huge significance: the issuing of instructions to record the latest escapades of Mulder and Scully as they probe the unknown in The X-Files. As for many Australians, this show, with its extra-terrestrials, UFOs, supernatural occurrences, stories of the mysterious, the psychic and the bizarre has become required watching for me. Even though I have no time for the conspiracy theories and stories portrayed and implied, I’m addicted. There is something about this genre which captivates me.
Christ vs culture
Everyday Ministry
When I first became a Christian and went to a Protestant church, I noticed two things: one was that the church buildings were very small compared to Catholic churches, and the other was that everyone was different to me: they were in the main Anglo-saxon. Over the last 15 years, I have spent time in six churches, and our church buildings are still too small, and most of the people inside them are still Anglo-saxon.
Factotum #4: Praying in small groups
Everyday Ministry
Factotum #3: One-to-one prayer and Bible reading
Everyday Ministry
Factotum #2: Consumer Friendly Evangelism
Everyday Ministry
A few weeks ago, I was evangelized in my front garden. There I was on a balmy Sunday evening quietly cultivating a few weeds when it was done to me. I was presented with the gospel of environmental salvation. It was very appropriate really, being Sunday and my hands creating new life in mother earth. But I hated it. I always recoil from evangelists, even this very pleasant Greenie. The only way I could cope was to tell him I too was an evangelist and to show off the battle scars from our common despised vocation.
A Christian Upbringing
Life
“Being brought up in a Christian home is hard on a child.”
I have heard variations on this comment at various times and it has set me thinking. In fact, I have begun to feel somewhat bitter towards my parents, who gave me a thoroughly Christian upbringing.
Problems with ‘the call’
Everyday Ministry
It was a happy day for Art and Zelda when they attended the special missionary meeting held at their church. It was there that they first felt specially called by God to go into missionary service. From that time on, they began to speak to others, especially those with a burden for missions, about missionary work and where they might be able to serve. Gradually their sense of call became focused on a particular country, and they found their way to a missionary society which could help them obey that call.
An evangelistic dream
Pastoral Ministry
To reach people in every culture in the world, a church must be established in every culture to communicate the gospel and nurture those who become Christians. All methods of evangelism have their place, but God’s primary method of evangelizing a community is by planting a biblically functioning church to reach that area with the gospel.
Teaching children about God
Everyday Ministry
Wouldn’t it be great if someone said to you as a parent, “Do this, this and this and you will have mature, well adjusted children who are Christians as well!”? One of the things we long for as parents, is to know that if we do something, then we will be assured of the correct response by our children. Unfortunately, children aren’t like that, not even in the same family. Not only is this true in regard to their behaviour, but particularly so in their responses to our teaching about God. We long to see our children as Christians, taking the claims of Jesus for themselves, living godly lives and calling on God as their Father in Heaven. But we cannot orchestrate this development.
Should we write ‘Christian’ fiction?
Review
Wisdom Hunter
By Randall Arthur
I like computers. Eight years ago I bought one on which to write talks and to catalogue books and articles. Four computers later, I have disks full of talks, and have finally begun to catalogue my library. Like many computer users, I have tried out a few of the thousands and thousands of public domain or ‘shareware’ programs that are available for computer users. Basically, these programs are written by people with various degrees of expertise who then circulate their program in the public domain. If you like what they’ve done and would like to use it on a regular basis, you pay a reasonable registration fee and receive a manual and any upgrades that might be forthcoming.