… let him come to me, or to some discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word, and open his grief; that by the ministry of God’s holy Word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience, and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness.

It is a very rich statement about one aspect of pastoral ministry – but I found the bit about ‘ghostly counsel’ a little weird. I then went straight from lunch into a New Testament lecture all about Magic and Demons in Luke-Acts.
Moore College seems to get more like Hogwart’s every day…

Sunday: To change a life
Monday: Jesus is the Problem to our Solution
Tuesday: I bet all I have on Jesus
Wednesday: The Dancers
Thursday: Everything he touches comes alive
Friday: Rest and the Vale of Tears
Saturday: Mission Men/Women
Sunday: The Future of Mission

And here are some very average pictures taken during the Springwood Foundation Day festival

We all, with unveiled faces, are reflecting the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory; this is from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2Corinthians 3:18 HCSB)

But Jesus reminds us that we are still humble folk, and at the end of the week, particularly frail and weak and tired.
But it’s also a promise: that the seemingly foolish things we’ve done, the humiliation in the eyes of the world, the frustration of being unheard or misunderstood – it will all be reconciled:

so that in the coming ages he might display the immeasurable riches of his grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:7 HCSB)

We are confident of this future because:

He also raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavens, in Christ Jesus, (Ephesians 2:6 HCSB)

Which means that all our hopes for Mission week are based on Easter – a fact that was right in our faces all week. The main sign at the front of the Springwood Anglican Ministry Centre has this verse as its caption:

… if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is without foundation, and so is your faith…
But Christ has been raised from the dead.
(1Corinthians 15:14, 20 HCSB)

Read the rest of my Mission Diary

pic by Hussain Isa

Questions about Gender always pop up around Mission time, and not just about masculinity. I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had with friends over the past month around questions of gender and ministry.
The issues arise in 3 areas:

First, women are inadequately cared for in most Moore College Mission teams. There are usually 4-5 women on a team of 18-20, but most Churches like having both men and women involved in Church services or outreach activities. This means that women will usually be 3-4 times more busy on mission than men. In addition, it is often a female team member who is given responsibility for a large section of the children’s ministry – the busiest component of most missions. And then further, the kinds of roles that women will generally be given on mission won’t be as high-profile as those of the men. They won’t get the gig preaching on Sunday or at the large evangelistic event (unless it’s an all women event). Now, of course everyone will affirm that all ministry opportunities are equal, but that’s not always how it appears in practice or in team feed-back sessions. Often, at the end of a week of mission women have been overworked and under-appreciated, and frequently if they feel this, they only express it quietly, and to other women.

Second, mission tends to reopen the awkwardly settled question regarding the appropriateness of women teaching men. The members of the team send out little feelers to work out where everyone else stands, and even when we get this worked out, then we have the same process with the Church to which we are sent. It can be very awkward indeed if the Church and the Mission Team have different expectations about what women can do while on mission. It can be disastrous if communication breaks down. Again, it’s an issue on which men can be insensitive. How would you feel if you turn up on mission ready to lead a Bible Study or give a talk at Youth Group and then get pulled from the programme by the local minister when he discovers you are of the female persuasion? I don’t think many blokes would deal with that well.

Third, mission raises difficult questions about how our Churches are going about reaching out to men. Most Churches have more female members than male, it’s actually been this way since the Reformation, so don’t blame changes in society or Church leadership, at least not recent ones. But regardless of how long it’s been that way, we all know that it should be different. God wants all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth (1Tim 2:4).
There are interesting complications involved in both kinds of gender specific ministry.
For women, there are the incredible changes in the conception of femininity since the Second World War. Most of the events that are targeted at middle-aged women will be farcical to younger women – the classic example being the infamous gingerbread-house making event. The differences in experience, expectations, and self-understanding between someone of my wife’s generation, her mother, and her grandmother, should not be underestimated. Add to that the diversity introduced through the different experiences (or lack) of motherhood. It’s not easy to work out a generic brand of women’s ministry because ‘woman’ is not a generic brand.

Strangely, the situation is different for men. ‘Man’ is a generic brand. There has been a very stable concept of masculinity throughout the same period in which femininity has been fragmented. Of course, the two processes are mutually dependent. If you need proof look at representations of masculinity and femininity in advertising over the past 5 decades.
But while the brand has been stable, men themselves are very diverse in character, and have found significant challenges to their self-understanding through the changes in women’s roles. So, while many women struggle to know what ‘Woman’ stands for, most men have a good idea of what a ‘Man’ is, and most of us can play the part when we need, but beneath the stable mask of masculinity can reside a continual sense of not-quite-matching-up.
So, what makes a real man?

This post is already far too long, so I’ll only offer one thought: Christians often go astray in their thinking about gender because they assume we can know the true nature of gender, and particularly masculinity, through some appeal to ‘how things are’ – through proper observation of the world. It is evident in theologies of Gender which start in Genesis and largely skip straight to Paul’s letters. What happened to Jesus?
We shouldn’t assume that we can know ourselves from the created order any more than we can know God. And for precisely the reason that the two kinds of knowledge are completely interconnected. Knowing God, gives true knowledge of ourselves. The conditions under which theology is possible are also the conditions for genuine anthropology. And just like our sinful minds are darkened when it comes to knowledge of God and our hearts become factories of idols, so, we cannot have a true conception of our personhood, our gender, until it is revealed to us in Christ.
Natural theologies of Gender aren’t the foundation on which we can become genuinely missionary men and women.

Read the rest of my Mission Diary

Photo by freeparking

Resting trains us for eternity. To rest regularly, to sleep, to chill, to shoot the breeze, is an exercise in practical theology: we rest in the comfort of the sovereignty of God; we relax into the recognition of our own properly human dependence; we repose in the real knowledge that God is himself for us.
Isn’t that wonderful?
Isn’t God good?

The Sabbath is the ‘Lord’s Day’ not because we offer it to him in sacrifice, but because in yet another way he offers himself to us through it. And ‘the Sabbath was made for Man’ (Mark 2:27) because in the Sabbath the Lord of the Sabbath gifts us real knowledge and a genuine experience of ourselves.
So there is no more genuinely Christian missionary practice than having a day off, it is an acted-out prayer of praise to the One who is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine (Eph 3:20).

There is another side to this reflection however. As I was walking. the name “Valley of the Waters” reminded me of a verse in Psalm 84:

Happy are the people whose strength is in You, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a source of springwater; even the autumn rain will cover it with blessings. They go from strength to strength; each appears before God in Zion. (Psalms 84:5-7 HCSB)

It’s a good psalm for bushwalking in general (a heart set on pilgrimage), but right now I’m more interested in the reference to ‘the Valley of Baca’.
The King James Version translated this as “the vale of tears” following the ancient Greek Translation (‘vale’ is olde englishe for ‘valley’). Most modern English translations haven’t been confident of the original Hebrew meaning and have therefore left the name untranslated (Baca). I think however, the Greek Translator was onto something: As the pilgrims pass through the Valley of Tears, their weeping becomes a source of renewal and refreshment.
The Vale of Tears becomes an Oasis.

If you spend time talking to the older Saints they’ll tell you this truth time and again: It’s often been in the difficult times, when they’ve felt the pain of life under the sun, when they’ve wept before the Lord, in those times they’ve found greater comfort and deeper spiritual joy. The testimony of these pilgrims is that God has led them into the Vale of Tears and given them refreshment.

I guess the point of this ramble is that sometimes we keep the Sabbath with joy and celebration, we do the things we love. with the people we love. But sometimes we keep the Sabbath with tears and pain. The Sabbath was made for man, and sometimes there are different Sabbaths for different men. It’s part of the weird experience of life between the times, that we can encounter the Sabbath as an experience of either freedom or discipline, and sometimes both. It’s only on reaching our destination that this can be reconciled.
For now, having been rested, the Lord of the Sabbath calls us back to the track.

Read the rest of my Mission Diary

I’ve been on a mission team, either with Uni students or Moore College, every year now for the past 13 years. And every mission trip has involved ministry to Seniors. I’ve sung, preached, talked, and held hands with people in nursing homes all up and down the coast of New South Wales. It doesn’t get any easier, but nearly always it has been a beautiful experience: beautiful and unsettling.
It was so again yesterday when we visited Buckland Village with our team. The crowd had already been gathered when we arrived, about 20 people, nearly all with walking-frames parked by the wall. They were listening to a lady playing the piano. so I sat and listened with them as her music flowed. She was wonderful, she must have been astonishingly good when she was younger. But when the music stopped, I watched her struggle to get up from the piano stool, and then, with obvious pain, lower herself onto a chair for the rest of the session.

Older people embody our personal eschatology. Not the final point, obviously, but a stage through which many of us will pass. Yet often frailty and the accelerating power of death over a person’s body can be entirely absent from eschatological conceptions, whether secular or Christian. (By ‘eschatology’ I mean ‘the end toward which all things move’). Secular eschatology falls damningly silent after setting forth the glories of a well-supported retirement. Christian eschatology tends to skip a track between ‘Hale and Hearty Middle Age’ and ‘Bodily Resurrection’. I even wonder whether squeamishness about age contributes to the emphasis on more ‘Rapturous’ type eschatology in some Christian circles. After all, getting swept up into the air is far more glamorous than grinding out your final years in a nursing home.

Contrast that with Jesus, talking about his personal eschatology:

“I assure you: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces a large crop. (John 12:24 HCSB)

Now look at how Paul takes up this metaphor and works with it:

So it is with the resurrection of the dead:
Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power; sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body.
(1Corinthians 15:42-44 HCSB)

For the vast majority of us, the way to The Future lies through death. It will involve the loss of function, the loss of dignity, the loss of power. At the end, all you will have left is either the knowledge that you are dust, or that you are a seed (1Cor 15:47-48).
Dust or Seed, when you plant them it makes a difference. But you can’t avoid being planted.
Thus the Aged unsettle us.

But for the Christian, the more death seems to take, the more God works through this to restore the true image of his Son. In the Christian Aged, God’s power is made perfect in weakness because there is nothing more essentially human than to be utterly dependant upon God. Theirs is an inalienable dignity.
I remember watching my Grandma Joy die like this. (you can read about it here)
The more Death takes – the greater the frailty, the blindness, the pain – the more he does another’s work.

O Death, where is your victory?
O Death, where is your sting?

And thus the Aged are beautiful.
Sure, they can be crotchety and difficult, but the best kinds of beauty are difficult to appreciate at first. We must pray that God would give us Good Taste.

Later I talked with the lady at the piano and told her how much I enjoyed her playing. She told me that the morphine had stolen large chunks of her memory, and cataracts made it difficult for her to see the sheet music, so when she plays the music comes from her ears and her heart. That’s the kind of music that echoes the life which is welling up inside her, a little testimony to the One who, everything he touches comes alive.

Read the rest of my Mission Diary

Some of the blokes from the team had arranged to come back to the Church building to help the ladies pack up and they arrived early enough to catch the end of the dancing. The sudden presence of men at what had previously been an entirely female event apparently created little ripples of disturbance. The guys reported hearing the women whispering, ‘men’ when they were noticed.
It’s interesting isn’t it?
It’s entirely understandable as well, dancing makes you feel strangely vulnerable. I used to have these weird late-night dance parties with my housemates and we certainly wouldn’t have felt quite so free to try out our wicked stylings if there had been women around. (did I just overshare?)

The awkwardness which suddenly came over some of those women last night is a reminder that we are beings who find our identity in relationships. We mark out physical and temporal regions, we are bodies, we find ourselves in what surrounds. That’s why femininity is experienced differently by a room entirely full of women and by a room not-quite-entirely full of women. Often we only notice this when there is a sudden transition.
Christians understand that this conception of human identity is rooted in something true about the God who made us. The God we worship is One and Three. Completely whole and sufficient in himself, but also within himself perpetually in fellowship and love. Christian theologians in the early period of the Church conceived of this One and Threeness using the focal image of a group of dancers. The Cappadocian Fathers (Basil, Gregory, and Gregory) sought to give an account of how God could be ‘One God’ and yet equally, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. Cappadocia is a remote part of central Turkey, if you wander into enough Turkish Kebab shops you’ll eventually find a poster depicting Cappadocia on a wall somewhere. It’s famous for odd-looking rock formations and salt pans, and Christian theologians. I think the Turkish tourism agency must have been targeting Kebab shops in Australia at some stage.

The Cappadocian Fathers obviously didn’t mind a little Middle Eastern Feasting, and could probably jiggle it with the best. They noticed that as a dancer moves around a circle, following the patterns of the dance and the rhythms of the music, she continually pours herself into the space just vacated by another dancer. The dancers are continually giving and receiving each other into their positions, and her identity as a dancer is found through the relations, the dance, which she shares with all the others. It is not a fixed identity, it is movement and action. But neither is it random, a dance celebrates the individuality of each dancer through co-ordinated and ordered movement, through a particular form of being with others. This is our God, they are infinitely more than that, but he is One and Three, giving and loving forever.
We also are ‘ones’ and ‘many’ and we find ourselves in giving and loving.
We are a room full of women dancing.
And God is a dancer.

Read the rest of my Mission Diary

image by agsaran

Ed Frost is speaking about being “Real Men” under three headings: Blood, Sweat, and Tears. The idea is to take us through Jesus’ tears (weeping over Jerusalem’s sin and rejection); then Jesus’ sweat (the image of anguish and suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane); and Jesus’ shed blood on the Cross.
Jesus’ real humanity was expressed in these concrete, dirty, gut-wrenching experiences. That’s what it means to be a Real Man.

I was really struck by the chorus of Colin Buchanan’s song. It goes:

I bet all I have on Jesus,
I throw myself on him.
The one who died a real death, for real sin.
I bet all I have on Jesus,
And throughout eternity,
I’ll marvel at the real hope,
My Saviour won for me.

Isn’t it interesting that he’s used the language of gambling to describe what Christians have traditionally meant by ‘faith’?
It’s a potentially risky move, but he’s given us guidance to what he means by “bet all I have on Jesus” in the next line, “I throw myself on him”. The payoff is that “to bet the lot” is a concept which really works in our culture, where the concept “to have faith” really doesn’t. “Faith” basically always carries a religious, and increasingly, oppressive, set of connotations, it is often used in contexts where people are discouraged from doing due diligence before making a decision. In contrast, no one (sensible) “bets the lot” without making sure you’ve got really strong odds, without checking the sources and thinking about the consequences. The betting metaphor also has a great sense of all-in commitment. Once you’ve ‘put the house’ on something, you’ve got a serious interest in what happens next: you’re committed to actions that promote the outcome in which you’ve invested.
I think this is what lies behind Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
“Invest all your investments in heaven” (Matt 6:19)
He’s having a go at those who claim to be waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven but have all their assets invested in the status quo. Anyone like that has a deep-seated conflict of interest, “double-vision” (Matt 6:22-23) when it comes to prayer, to discipleship, to genuinely following Jesus. “You cannot be slaves of both God and money.” (Matt 6:24) Or as Colin (who, incidentally, is probably one of the most influential Bible teachers of our age) would put it:
“bet all you have on Jesus.”

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image by dennis

Last night we hosted a debate between a representative of the Australian Sceptics Association and a Christian minister from Sydney. It was an disappointing experience in many ways (honestly, most religious debates are).
When the Atheist Case is coherently, passionately, and sensitively argued it is a beautiful and compelling testimony. The best example I know is in the words of Ivan Karamazov from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (I’ve been reading it for the past few weeks). It is an atheism of despair and wounding, that wishes above all to hold God accountable for his non-existence. It is an atheism of inconsolable grief. And rightly so, for if God is dead then that which is most beautiful and wise has perished from the Universe and we are terribly alone. The Atheist who can suffer that wound and still love is worthy of my respect, even admiration. In the light of Jesus’ Resurrection, such a view is folly, an unimaginable tragedy, but it is nevertheless remarkable, and in its own strange way, a testimony to the Creator who set his image on humanity.
That’s the atheism of Camus’ The Plague.
Sadly, we heard nothing like that last night.
If fact, we didn’t hear Atheism at all, just Fundamentalist Scientism.
Idols always have to be constructed from materials that are good in themselves – gold, silver, wood.
And Idols need to represent ideals that are good in themselves – fertility, wealth, beauty.
It is precisely the same with Science. The lower-case ‘science’ is something profoundly good – a useful, powerful tool. But when ‘science’ becomes ‘Science’ – when an idol is constructed from these valuable materials – the result invariably has the same binary poles, the same classic traits, as all the various forms of primitive idolatry.
It is at once both pathetic and terrifying.
Fundamentalist Scientism cannot recognise the limits of science, and so, it either ungratefully borrows huge portions of its proclamation from other religions (particularly in the realm of ethics) and so becomes a pathetic parody of religion, or it utterly denies the existence of anything beyond those limits, and so is led inexorably towards Totalitarianism.
(In the hands of particularly silly Atheists, i.e. last night, it does both at once…
…Total Muppet)

Scientism is a false religion, a foolish idol, a human, all too human solution.
And Jesus came to be The Problem to our Solutions.

Read the rest of my Mission Diary

Last night my good friend Anthony preached a cracker sermon from Mark 9:14-32. He put his heart and soul into the words and as his love for Jesus shone through it was impossible not to be swept up along with him.

I preached at the 8am Service at Christ Church, Springwood – an old sandstone building on the Great Western Highway. Here’s part of my introduction:

Many great and terrible powers there are in the world today, but nothing is great like the power to change a man’s heart.
When bombs went off over the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima the terrible power of burning suns was unleashed upon people’s upturned faces, but in that power was proof that a greater power is needed to change men’s hearts.
When a man stood on the moon, or when he could first put a computer in his pocket, or when an African-American first stepped up to the podium as the President of the United States, we heard the rhetoric of change, we saw a power, maybe we thought we the power of change -
But time and again, though the powers change, though the dress of power changes, we see that what is in the hearts of men and women remain fundamentally the same. The same choices, the same fears, hopes, anxieties, loves, the same vices, the same track, the same parallel lines of life stretching away to the horizon…
What does it take to grasp those lines, to wrench them from their course?
What does it take to change the direction of a persons life?

Read the rest of my Mission Diary