back to the books

The blog has been quiet due to the insanity of college assignments and exams. I have passed all my subjects with credits! yay! but many lessons to be had from last semester. I think if i am honest with myself i ran at about 70% of capacity and i think i can do better. So here are my top 3 tips to myself for a more successful semester…

1. i need to do the readings before class. With a lot of lecturers taking a more non-linear approach it helps to already have a handle on the material.

2. get started on assignments early. I had a couple bank up on me at the end and it wasn’t pleasant.

3. make the non lecture days count. It was easy to just have a bit of a bludge on the days without lectures.. but i think i need to take on the same 9-5 work ethic on those days..

So starting tomorrow its back to the books… i hope i will also continue to spout random thoughts on the blog as well.

church at the pub

Yesterday our little community made a new step to try and answer the question “what would church look like in the pub”.  We rocked up to the Greenwood Hotel in North Sydney, pulled together some tables, then ordered lunch and did some discussion and prayer round the table. We also dreamed about the future and what it would look like to have more people gathering here….

So early days yet but i will keep posted on future events….

something new for Rob Bell….

There is no denying that i am a Rob Bell fan-boy, I have loved most of the nooma vids, i have read each of his books and he has pointed me towards other theologians like NT Wright. I know that he has copped a lot of flack from the conservative side but I’m sure i would too if i had that sort of profile…. The one thing that i consistently love about Rob’s public front is that he is hopelessly positive… try not to be uplifted and spurred on by this resurrection message…

p.s. i think more speakers should ask themselves “can i get the whole message across in 4 min?” Cause i have sat in 1hr sermons that say less than this…

p.p.s. Rob is coming out to Australia in June

p.p.p.s. I am thinking about running a day conference sometime later this year going through a new resource Rob has put out called “the art of the sermon“

politics and pro-Life….

An interesting article over at Huffington Post, How do we balance the politics and the real life of this question?

To say that in the religious community abortion rights is a hot button issue would be an understatement. We have seen opponents and proponents of a woman’s right to choose engage in heated debate for years. It appears that most, if not all, of those of those who oppose choice, do it on the grounds of their Christian faith. But many of those who support choice are also people of faith. As a Christian and an ordained minister I have wondered if it is possible to be pro-choice politically but advocate life in our communities.

Read More

not all christian music sucks

So i have to come out of the closet and say for the last year and a bit i have been a Christian music “hater”, i had found that most of the stuff I got my hands on was either so dirivitive of a particular genre (like listen to KJ52 he is the christian eminem), or just heading down the road to cliched “worship” albums with every clean cut, high voiced, guitar strumming, hair gelled, pretty boy sounding the same….

I have even taken to pushing decent music released last year on the young musos here at bible college, warning them that they may never like 3rd day again when i am finished with them.

But i have to admit that one artist stayed firmly embedded in my iPods play-list, so much that it is regularly the top of my play count for the week.

Hammock

I was introduced to these guys via my friend dave and have loved the ambient guitar/electro soundscapes that they have produced. I have regularly used their albums for private and public prayer and meditation. There is something about their music that brings me to a place that singing a cheezy worship song over and over again just cant do…

So i was excited to see they have got a new album coming out soon and have released this fantastic clip to promo it. Enjoy!

Church is NOT the “House of God”

This morning I started to trawl through facebook, as one does, and noticed a thread of conversation on a friends status update. Basically my friend had made an off the cuff comment about people showboating in church and this other person took offense and commented as such:

Now this shows a classic, and prevalent misunderstanding about the nature of the church.

The term “House of God” is an Old Testament term and used to refer to the temple in Jerusalem, the place, as the Old Testament readers understood, that Gods very presence dwelt.

Ezra 5:15 Take these articles and go and deposit them in the temple in Jerusalem. And rebuild the house of God on its site.

Jesus however came to do away with this understanding, for in Jesus the fullness of God was seen, no temple, no curtain… God with us… Jesus alluded to the destruction of the temple system when he said:

John 2:19 Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.

Then the later writers of the New Testament re-frame the temple as the individual Christian.

1 Corinthians 6:19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?

So the dwelling place of God is within each believer, not man made buildings or institutions. God is not “only” present between 9:30am and 10:30am on a Sunday morning. And no matter what the songwriters up the hill say he is awesome in EVERY place not just “this” one.

When we think of Church as the House of God, something changes in the way we interact with the world. We see life like this:

When we see life like this then we feel we have to escape the nasty “world” and get to as many church activities as possible so we can “connect” with God. We will also believe the only way others can experience God is if we extract them from the nasty “world” and get them into Church.

This is not how it should be!

The better way to understand the world around us is like this:

When we have an integrated view of church, God and the world then we realise that God has gone before us into the world, he is to be found in the darkest, dankest corners of the “nasty” world. He is already present when we gather as believers, either in a church building or a pub!

The church is NOT the House of God, but there are many “little houses” present.

Agree? Disagree?

The dizzy effects of the postmodern nineties zeitgeist

Mark Sayers has just posted a fantastic article that questions weather whether we are still in the “spiritually seeking” 90′s or a 9-11 inspired neo-modernity.

The dizzy effects of the postmodern nineties zeitgeist seemed to make any future possible, Church would be turned into a rave, or a lentil feast, or an urban art collective, or any possible combination of the aforementioned. No longer was having a coffee with two buddies and talking about the football just having coffee with two buddies and talking about football, it was now a non-hierarchical, organic, ecclesiogical, gathering occurring in the public sphere. The sky was the limit.

But then fast forward to today. Before you can say Michel Foucault’s leather trousers everything changes. I pick up the paper and it features the global atheists conference. (Atheists? Didn’t they sell their headquarters to the international league of hot Cyber-Wiccans back in 1998?) There they all are like modern day reincarnations of the fathers of the enlightenment, except this time they are wearing Ralph Lauren slacks instead of powdered wigs. And oh my goodness, gone are the half committed Gen X mutterings about postmodernity, instead we hear the dirty catchphrase of modernity -’reason’, spoken again and again by grey haired men with clipped Oxford accents.

read on at marks blog

Music to uplift…

In my pursuit the last year or so to “detox” from “Christian” music, it has been interesting how when listening to triple J that every now and then a song pops up that somehow “lifts my soul”. I don’t know if its the pop synth repetition of this song, or the refrain that tells me that nothings wrong, but this song always seems to lift me up.

See what you think

my head esplode!

So it is the end of week 5 of full time college, and my head is getting seriously full! It is amazing how much study takes out of you. On the plus side i feel like I am learning things at a much deeper level than i have before.

One drawback of this is a growing pile of books i would love to read but now have no time for. I am keen to have a look at:

1. A new kind of Christianity – Brian Mclaren

2. Re-Jesus – Frost and Hirsh

3. The Open Secret – Leslie Newbigin (although i do need to read this one for college)

Scientology, Justice and “Religious Freedom”

Last Tuesday Senator Nick Xenophon’s push for a senate inquiry into the dealings of Scientology in Australia was overwhelmingly defeated. This came the same week that both the ABC’s “Four Corners” and Sevens “Sunday Night” increased the media spotlight on the practices of the dubious “religion”.

I have been intrigued at the way this secretive group has been portraying itself in the light of much damning evidence, I sat down this afternoon and watch the Four Corners story which was focused mainly on the stories of those who had left Scientology… and this got me thinking….

Although I have some reservations about the precedent that a senate inquiry would set for all religious organisations in Australia, I can see that this is clearly an issue of  justice. We see many lives being destroyed by this organisation that is not accountable to anyone!

The smarmy non-answers of the current Scientology PR Guy Tommy Davis makes it easy to see that this organisation is using the language of “Religion” to mask what seems to be just a money making cult.

So what would it look like if all churches, mosques and temples had to open their books to scrutiny? How would your church stack up? Do we assume that we are still “cozy” with the state as Christians and don’t need that same spotlight?

What if we didn’t have the favor of the state, tax breaks? Perhaps this is the blessing of “persecution” that the church here needs to kick its butt into more organic and less centralised models of corporate church.

One other thing that disturbed me was that as i watched the painful stories of people who have lost children and money to Scientology, i couldn’t help but recall stories of those hurt and rejected by “Christian” churches… Those who have come out bitter and abused by leadership. Sometimes we can point the finger at obvious abuses of “religion” and miss the plank in our own eye.

I hope that justice is done for all those victims of Scientology, and that perhaps all communities of faith can be more open and honest as we reflect on the world we now find ourselves in.