Heaving lifting for The Lost

Themes: Random

The October edition of Southern Cross (Sydney’s Anglican Newspaper) arrived yesterday – the cover story is a rev up for Connect 09 (the diocesan mission focus next year). The headline reads “C09: Hard Work Begins Now” and the byline, “As this month’s Sydney Diocesan Synod gears up for 2009′s Connect campaign, your church will be asked to start the real heavy lifting for the lost.” [italics mine].
Ouch! Probably should have thought that through before sending it out into the most pugilistic and theologically alert Anglican Diocese in the world. The problem is with the words ‘start’ and ‘real’. Surely Jesus started (and perfected) the real heavy lifting for the lost? And he didn’t use a Renta-Crane from Coates Hire – nice bit of product placement.
It’s pretty clear what is intended by the text, and normally I’d let stuff like that go through to the keeper. But Anglicans love getting the words right. It would be a shame to deprive them of a bun fight when they leave perfectly good buns just lying around.

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Church may profit from doom – smh.com.au

Themes: Random

Church may profit from doom – National – smh.com.au

I love the complete lack of awareness that the person who formulated the headline had of the content of the article.
More to the point, are the Uniting Church admitting defeat? The temptation for hardline evangelicals will be to point to this story as evidence of the failure of Uniting Church liberalism. Are all those empty buildings as stories of failed ministry?
Or are they the only ones who have got something crucially right? The strength of evangelicalism can so easily be domesticated.

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Wing and a Prayer

Themes: Random

We’re on holidays in Byron Bay! A poetical destination – quite a lot of the streets near where we are staying are named after poets. This is weird because after having worked constantly for several days on an essay the only thing I felt like reading was poetry. Poetry requires a different, less violent, mode of reading. I’ve been slowly working through an anthology edited by Harold Bloom and I’m up to a section on George Herbert. Herbert was one of the handful of genuinely great English devotional poets. This is a sonnet called ‘Prayer’ that I read on the aeroplane:

PRAYER the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;
Engine against the Almightie, sinners’ tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-day’s-world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

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The Bradman of History or The Don of Faith?

Themes: Random

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Don Bradman.
Recently, critical scholars have begun to question the historical reliability to some of our sources for the life of The Don – a few have even gone so far as to suggest that he may never have really existed. Other’s have piously suggested that we can never go beyond the presentation of The Don through the sport’s journalism and commentary of later ages, we are left with an unbridgeable gap between the Bradman of History and The Don of Faith.

Certainly, there appears to be a layer of ‘myth’ superimposed over the historical framework of his life, batting, and wickets. The modern cricketer finds it incredible to conceive of the young Bradman hitting golf balls against a rain-water tank with a cricket stump. Yet, I think we may agree that there is a firm historical foundation for the traditional life of The Don.

However, far more than in the mere historical details – his birth in Cootamundra (an obscure region of NSW); upbringing in Bowral; persecution by the Poms during the ‘Bodyline’ Series; and famously, the triumph of the ‘Invincibles’ Series – the truth of The Don lies in what he means for us.

The real and enduring power of The Don lies in his ability to bring us together, to triumph against those who had formerly held us in servitude, to expose their emptiness and futility, and to demonstrate a new way of being Australian.

The evidence of this is in our lives.

Yep, the virtues of The Don are basically the only thing I ever agreed with John Howard about. Check out the cartoon by Nicholson.

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A mechanism for fixing the Anglican Communion

Themes: Random

From an article by Matt Kennedy on Stand Firm.

Who said Evangelicals aren’t funny?

Bishop Wright is absolutely correct about the state of the American provinces and the nature of the heresies promoted which makes what he writes below so incredibly cold-hearted.
“The point is this: global Anglicanism has never had, and still does not have, ANY mechanisms for enabling anyone, Canterbury or anyone else, to ‘intervene’ in another province.”

There is no “mechanism” enabling anyone to intervene?

Souls are being lost.

There is no “mechanism”?

There is a rather large mechanism that many in the Global South have discovered. It is called an airplane. You board it.

Go Matt!

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Viva la Vida

Themes: Random

I’m listening to Coldplay’s new album Viva la Vida. I think it’s probably their best album to date – nothing that will blow your mind, just slightly-more-thoughtful-than-usual pop music. Though, they do have a way of dropping very good lines in their lyrics:

Just because I’m losing,
doesn’t mean that I’m lost.

I could see Jesus wearing that on a T-Shirt.

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