Camping with Others

Themes: Memory, Society

I never really understood the attraction of camping in a caravan park. When I was a kid my family would go camping every year for two weeks from Boxing Day. We’d pack the Kombie full to the roof (which is even more impressive when you know that the middle seats were taken out). Then Dad and one of us kids would hop in while everyone else piled into our other car (Mitsubishi Nimbus, most gutless people-mover ever invented). All set, we’d head up into the Snowy Mountains to pitch our tents beside the Goobragandra River. It’s only about an hour trip but for me it was a journey across the borders of society and into the wilderness. For the entire time we camped we wouldn’t see another soul – except perhaps friends from Church that would drop by and camp with us for a while.

I loved those times. I was a little hermit right throughout my early teenage years, actually. We lived about 7kms out of Tumut and we didn’t exactly have close neighbours, but I couldn’t wait to get up into those mountains, away from people. I had this deep, semi-articulate hatred for society.

On reflection it was probably an emotional defence against the feeling that our family were outsiders in our community. We were poor (my parents were faith-missioners at the time) but much more highly educated than our peers (both my parents had been to Uni in a town where most people worked at the Timber Mill). We stood out morally as Christians: we didn’t watch the same TV shows, speak the same vernacular, drink at the pub, play sport because it clashed with Church, etc. It was very difficult for a kid to understand or articulate this sense of not belonging. An adult, with his or her wider experience of the world, is able to draw upon the comforting knowledge of a world which includes spectacular human diversity and mentally invokes this as a buttress against the conformist pressures of a small community. An adult Christian is also able to orient him or herself to an unseen community of unrivalled temporal and physical extent which is well equipped with narratives designed precisely to fortify the isolated. A grown-up Christian might feel all alone but is comforted by the knowledge that he or she is really part of the something big. But a little baby offspring-of-Christians is sadly pink and helpless.

It really is so very worthwhile to send teenage Christians away on Christian youth camps. Emma and I have been up at CMS Summer School for the last week and heard a number of times how significant the youth programme has been for helping Christian teenagers grow into Christian adults. A friend who teaches at a large Sydney school even told us that he started bringing his family to Summer School after seeing the difference that it made to the lives of Christian kids at his school.

This week we are camping in Ulladulla. We’ve got a really pretty spot on the headland looking out over Ulladulla harbour. The hammock is set, books are being read, there will be snorkelling.
Oh yeah, It’s in a Caravan Park…

We’re still different. But now I know that it’s not so much about me not belonging in this society, as us belonging to a different one.

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Hoping for Others

Themes: Church, Hope, Society

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster in England, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, last night gave a valedictory lecture at Westminster Cathedral. It includes an interesting perspective on the history of Catholicism in Britain over the last 160 years, but also some rather beautiful insights into the role of the Church in our secular society. The Church is one of the last voices in our culture to hold onto a set of expectations for the future which transcend personal or nationalist interests. We have a universal hope.
In the search for inclusive, inoffensive labelling, our secular society has taken to branding Churches as ‘faith communities’. Perhaps we have an opportunity to fill out that label with our own particular content – something that brings out the truth that (largely uniquely now) it is Christians who are The People Who Hope For Others.

Here’s a quote from Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor,

One day the Church may be in favour with the secular powers, another it may be pilloried. We do not seek respectability, we seek faithfulness – faithfulness to the reality of Christ who is the Light of this age and every age and to the Church which receives its truth from Him and the gift of his Spirit. And with that faithfulness to Christ and his Church comes faithfulness to what it is to be human and building of a society in which everyone has the capacity to flourish whatever their race, creed, age, status and ability. The lamentation for a past time, some glorious golden age, is not a Christian song. It is not the song of faith but of despair, for our faith gives us a vision not of what has been but of what will be – whatever the difficulties or sufferings we have to endure – we cannot surrender or lose confidence in the future which God has secured for us. This is why the Church must always be an active agent in the creation and building up of a genuinely humane culture.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, which you can do on Ruth Gledhill’s blog here.

BTW, what is the Cardinal doing to Rowan in that photo?

Photo by Catholic Church (England and Wales)

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Good Laws

Themes: Society

As far as I’m aware there are only really 3 duties that are imposed upon citizens of Australia. Of course, there are a whole lot of things that your country respectfully asks you to refrain from doing – shooting people who walk too slow along busy streets, etc. On the whole we tend to proscribe rather than require action. This is a very good thing. Laws that are in the form “Thou shalt not” leave large spaces for the exercise of individual decision-making. On a public street you can walk in any particular direction, wearing whatever peculiar get-up you like, you just can’t do it in the nude. Contrast that proscription to a situation where walking along a public street required you to give reasons and a destination.

Making good laws is a tricky business.

I went along to the NSW Parliament today to sit in on a hearing of the Standing Committee on Law and Justice. The Committee are taking public submissions on possible changes to the NSW Adoption Act to allow Same-Sex couples to adopt children (one of our ethics lecturers from Moore College was invited to make a submission, which he did brilliantly). It’s a tricky issue, there are a lot of different scenarios that need to be considered in order to frame a law that will reflect a just outcome for all the citizens of this state. We’d need a very long discussion to outline all the pros and cons.
Best part of the outing was, however, seeing gutsy and thoughtful Christian engagement with an issue that affects our community, in a way that wasn’t merely sectarian (addressed only to the concerns of Christians) but designed to helpfully participate as citizens in our democratic process.

We need far more of this kind of engagement.

As far as the 3 duties, you can work it out…

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HOPE STREET – Urban Orientation

Themes: Society

I wrote recently about the Hope Street Urban Orientation that Emma and I went on in Woolloomooloo. There’s another one coming up in November. If you are in Sydney and interested, details can be found here.

HOPE STREET – Urban Orientation

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Hope Street

Themes: Society

On Sunday Emma and I went for a stroll around Woolloomooloo (there are far too many ‘o’s in that name). There is nothing particularly unusual about that – sometimes we wander over there on a Sunday arvo to grab a pie from Harry’s Cafe de Wheels. You really can’t describe a pie from Harry’s, they are Ineffable.
In fact, The Ineffable Cheese-and-Bacon-Tiger is just about my favourite Sunday lunch.

Harry’s Cafe is at the bottom of Forbes Street, right on the edge of the pier. At the top of Forbes St is the magnificent Horizon apartment block, designed by Harry Seidler, with the best views of the Harbour Bridge, Opera House, and Gardens that I have ever seen (I had the chance to visit an apartment there when a friend landed a very sweet house-sitting gig).
Across the road from the Horizon is Emma’s old school – SCEGGS Darlinghurst.

Between Harry’s Cafe and the Horizon is the heart of Woolloomooloo, a rough-as-guts public housing estate surrounded by some of the most expensive property in Australia.
About half way along Forbes St, among the old terraces and tough-looking kids, is the Back Shed Cafe. It’s a drop-in centre run by Hope Street, a community development organisation run under the auspices of the Baptist Church. We rocked up here with another couple from our Church to be part of their ‘Urban Orientation’.
The Urban Orientation was basically a stroll through the back streets and lanes of Woolloomooloo with a couple of guys from the mission, giving details of the local area, some of the problems people face, and some of the ministries that Hope Street runs in the area.
From their website:

The inner city of Sydney is a diverse community. Here, the rich and the poor live alongside one other. In South Sydney LGA 17% of housing is public housing compared to 6% across Sydney. 80% of people in public housing are dependent on Social Security payments. Public Housing Estate are sometimes called “quasi-hospitals” because of the high rate of people with mental illness, HIV/AIDS, dementia or those coming out of domestic violence. 90% of Woolloomooloo is public housing, and in recent years very luxurious apartments have been developed right around the fringe of the suburb, making a very sharp contrast between rich and poor.

I found the experience utterly brilliant, though humbling. I’ve walked through that area before and been so blind to the lives of the people around me. Our city is layer, upon layer, upon layer.
I was particularly confronted to hear about the outreach Hope Street does with street sex workers from the area. They provide a women’s space where female sex workers can come in during the day, have a shower, watch a movie, and just chat. It is a place where they are treated as people rather than objects. Yet, even as this ministry was being described I could feel myself wanting to turn away, to think, ‘isn’t it wrong to be around those people?’ ‘Won’t you become dirty?’

I’m such a hypocrite. It wasn’t a week ago that I was preaching about the Jesus who extended his love and his hands to a prostitute, who told her to ‘Go in peace’ when everyone around just wished she had never come. Sometimes I’ve got a lot of words to say about Jesus, but at a moment like that you’d wonder if I actually know him.
You need to come for a walk with me around Woolloomooloo. Next time there’s an Urban Orientation, we need to sign up.
There’s a lot of Jesus at Hope Street. There’s a lot of people who need him. I’m one of them.

pic by iansand

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Thoughts on the Financial Crisis

Themes: Society

1. Evangelical Christians seem very quiet about it (except wannabe Marxists who just say, ‘we told you so’).

2. Most of us have no idea what’s going on.

3. That’s what Google is for.

4. The current financial crisis really is a crisis – it’s not entirely a media beat-up.

5. It is a product of the same forces that produced Gafcon and the Beijing Olympics. 2008 will be viewed as a significant year in the history of the 21st century.

6. The shape of cultural, political, and economic relations within our world is changing.

7. These cultural, economic, and political shifts could result in increased sectarianism within Christianity. This has happened numerous times in our history. Whenever a particular society has identified itself with Christianity and the political/economic power base has shifted, the Church (as an institution) has split. Constantinople/Rome, Holy Roman Empire/Germanic States, Global South/Global North.

8. This will have profound implications for Christianity. It will require theologians. It will require humility in the West. It’s a good time to be thinking about leaving here and going there, and learning to think theologically with others.

9. When the shape of our society changes, so does theology. There are different questions, different metaphors and narratives:
A ‘shame’ rather than ‘guilt’ structure within culture will affect our theology of the atonement
A different family structure will affect our thinking about how we gather at Church.

10. It’s a good time to be teaching, training, and preparing our Church family for this future. Thinking theologically matters for this too.

11. Rowan Williams has done some good theological analysis of the financial situation here. Martin Wolf has done some good economic analysis here.

Things we need to do:

1. Credit/Debt is not intrinsically wrong – but much of our current credit practice has been immoral. Some of our easy access to credit has been paid for by poor people in poor countries.
We should repent, pray, and lobby for a fairer financial system.

2. People in our Churches are feeling uncertain, maybe even freaking out.
We should be comforting them. (Luke 12:13-34)

3. If the economy slows down significantly, It will probably affect giving to Churches, and it may reduce the funds available to the Government to fund things like theological study. It will almost certainly affect giving to Missions and parachurch ministries like AFES. Many Christians give sacrificially, but it remains the case that ministry is a luxury good. This particularly affects planned giving. When there is less certainty about money people feel less able to commit to giving over a long period. MIssions are unable to budget, and thus planning and staffing are affected.
We need to keep encouraging people to give.

4. What have I missed?

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