EVAN ALMIGHTY

Jan and I attended a preview of this crazy movie last night, and enjoyed it.

Briefly: this sequel to Bruce Almighty is a comedy of biblical proportions, reportedly costing $175 million (perhaps the most expensive comedy ever?). Steve Carell ('Evan Baxter') is a newly-elected senator on Capitol Hill. What he doesn't know is that he's also been elected by the Lord (an amiable Morgan Freeman) to build an ark in suburban Washington (with the help of a book 'Ark-building for Dummies'). In the process animals and birds appear two by two (177 species altogether), as does a patriarchal beard and sackcloth outfit all of which astonishes his political colleagues.

There are 3 or 4 important didactic themes: a busy politician too preoccupied with the glamour and prestige of the job to pay enough attention to his long-suffering wife (Lauren Graham) and three sons; the rape of the earth by political/industrial complexes for profit and, of course, 'jobs'; the importance of 'acts of random kindness' (ARK - get it?); and the need for humans to learn happy-dancing.

It's all very earnest (several reviewers write that to be truly comic it should have had more jokes).

The rating is PG - I'd recommend a lower-age of 11 or 12 as there are a few bawdy and scary scenes - and is quite short (89 minutes). Of course you've got to suspend credibility: it's all a comic send-up of what-wealthy-westerners-think-is-important.

It's the next movie Hollywood has aimed at (the dollars of) church-folks, after The Passion of the Christ. After your church-group sees it you'll discuss such important-to-trivial questions as: * Is it possible to be both a good steward of God's earth and a politician? * Can you be a Christian in politics and avoid legislative malfeasance? * Why do upwardly mobile professionals tend to neglect their families? * Is it OK to laugh about religious matters? * Did people who are supposed to know their Bibles figure out why the alarm went off at 6:14? * How important is it to shave your nose-hair to look good?

Enjoy!

And if you're a film-buff there's a good article in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Almighty

Rowland Croucher
September 18, 2007.

LOST AND FOUND

(Here are some notes from which I preached at a Uniting Church last Sunday. Rowland Croucher September 18, 2007).

Luke 15:1-10, 1 Timothy 1:12-17

Losing something can be trivial – mildly frustrating – or deadly serious, even life-threatening. It all depends on the value of what you’ve lost.

Lost people are in the news headlines all the time. This week? Adventurer Steve Fossett, lost somewhere in the Nevada Desert, Madelaine McCann, a little girl lost – probably abducted – in Portugal (and now her parents – parents! – are suspects). A while back, three men in a boat somewhere off the Queensland coast, who have never been found.

We write songs, tell stories and make movies of people lost: David Livingstone, apparently lost in the middle of ‘darkest Africa’; an ‘ancient mariner’ lost at sea; aviator Amelia Erhart; explorers Burke and Wills; Little Boy Lost; the Chamberlain’s baby lost in the Northern Territory desert, ‘Lost in Space’…

We joke about being lost: men aren’t lost, they’re trusting their navigational instincts (women ask for directions). As a young taxi-driver in Sydney while at University, I was lost at least once every shift.

We lose objects all the time (more so, I can tell you, as you approach ‘threescore years and ten’). Everyone has lost something at one time or another. There is even a website now at www.lostandfound.com that acts as a global ‘lost and found’ box.

I’ve lost a car three times: once when it was towed away because I was slow with hire purchase payments; another time in the Disneyland carpark (is it the largest in the world?) until with two little girls 7 and 9 we found it at 2 am!; and at the airport: I’d found a free spot out there, but one weekend they changed the parking rules and had towed my car away…

Losing things isn’t funny: a surgeon discovering after an operation that an instrument’s gone missing; if I lost my diary I think I’d lose my mind (it’s in there!); losing an important email (PTL for Google Desktop!); a loved one losing their memory; a parishioner I knew whose mother was lost, found with another identity in Adelaide. We’ve ‘lost the plot’ in Iraq…

Jesus’ parents lost him when he was 12. (One of our Sunday School hypotheticals: ‘Did Jesus ever lose anything?’ Silly question, like our other one: ‘Did Jesus the healer ever sneeze?’).

Psychologists tell us there are two kinds of lostness: ‘developmental’ and ‘situational’. We grow through various stages in life, and all of us experience a constant cycle of attachments/detachments, closeness/distance, togetherness/ separateness, loss of innocence when we collide with reality… It happens when a baby is born: they lose the security of intrauterine life; and it happens when we get older and various bodily functions don’t work as well any more.

But there’s also ‘situational’ lostness: which can happen to any of us at any time. I have clients whose grief is frozen: they’ve never gotten over the loss of a loved one. We must learn to ‘bury the dead’ twice: physically, and in terms of the grieving process. (We also must get over the grief of what our parents ‘were not’ for us…).

Jesus told three ‘lost and found’ stories in Luke 15: about a lost sheep, a lost coin, and two lost sons. This morning I want to make a couple of comments about the first story, and particularly about Luke’s setting for it.

Kenneth Bailey tells us that a single shepherd probably would not have owned 100 sheep – maybe 15 or 20. Here we have a clan or extended family and the ‘chief shepherd’ would have had ‘hirelings’ to help him look after this number of sheep. But it’s the shepherd-in-charge who goes looking for the lost sheep: note that!

Bailey says that when a sheep is lost in this part of the world it often lies down and refuses to budge. So the shepherd has to place it on his shoulders: he starts rejoicing even in prospect of a long and exhausting trip home. A wandering sheep was lucky it wasn’t attacked by wild beasts. In the meantime the other sheep have been moved from the ‘wilderness’ to the village, and the clan has a party to celebrate the whole event.

But did you notice the setting? Luke says Jesus was eating and drinking with ‘tax collectors and sinners’ – disreputables! – and the religious folks didn’t approve. These three lost and found stories are book-ended with not-so-subtle ‘digs’ at the Pharisees’ awful theology and attitudes: the elder brother in the third story is your prototypical Pharisee.

Now Jesus wasn’t merely consorting with sinners: he was acting as host, ‘welcoming’ these people. So he asks ‘Which one of you…?’ which was a naughty question for these people: they despised shepherds as well.

I was preaching once to a small very conservative congregation. They had big black Bibles and severe expressions. That night I involved them in a dialogue. I asked them to list all the good qualities of the Pharisees: they knew about Pharisees, but obviously hadn’t thought too much about Pharisees being ‘good’: after all, they were Jesus’ main antagonists.

They offered a brilliant list, which I wrote with chalk on a blackboard: most Pharisees knew their Bibles off by heart (our Old Testament); they were prayerful; they tithed (often up to a third of their income); fasted twice a week; were martyrs for their faith in Yahweh and their allegiance to the Torah; they attended ‘church’ regularly; were moral people: many could not remember breaking any of the commandments; they were ‘evangelical’ – they believed all the right doctrines (like resurrection); and Jesus said they were evangelistic missionaries – even crossing oceans to win converts.

There was a hushed silence in that little church. ‘Anything wrong?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ replied the extrovert in the front row. ‘What is it?’ ‘That’s us!’ he said. ‘Is it?’ I responded. ‘If so, we’re in trouble, because Jesus said these Pharisees were “children of the Devil”.’

So what’s wrong with these Bible-believers? Well, look at the two diatribes against the Pharisees in the Gospels, and note particularly Matthew 23:23 and Luke 11:42. Their list didn’t include the ‘most important’ thing of all: justice/love. They didn’t understand the heart of God, who loves lost people, sinners, especially the little people on the margins of society…

They also don’t understand the varieties of ‘lostness’. One can be lost through no fault of one’s own: like the lost coin. Many sinners were actually ‘sinned-against’: my wife who visits women in prison each week says the vast majority are victims of sexual/physical/emotional abuse. Or you can be lost because you’re dumb/stupid – like the lost sheep. Or, as with younger prodigal, you can get lost through deliberate willful choice.

But there’s another category of lostness: the Pharisees, like the elder brother, were lost and didn’t know it. They arrogantly categorized everyone else as lost. I meet these people all the time: they assume they’re ‘saved’ because they believe all the right doctrines: the ‘heterodox’ are lost and going to hell…

You see, the ministry-description of Jesus (and it’s ours too) is to help folks ‘name’ their ‘lostness’ and to bring good news that God is searching for them in their wilderness.

And lostness is something we all experience all the time. The spiritual masters tell us that ‘conversion’ is more an ongoing process of repentance and change and spiritual growth, rather than a ‘one-off’ experience. Now those liminal or peak experiences do happen sometimes, but it’s the little ‘lost and found’ episodes which count most.

Let me finish with two examples, one from a story about Jesus, and another from my own experience as a not-yet-fully-converted Pharisee.

When they brought the woman caught in the act of adultery (John 8) what did Jesus say to her? After ‘Where are your accusers?’ he said something no Pharisee can say: ‘I do not condemn you’ – Pharisees have a ‘ministry’ of condemning others - followed by the Pharisee’s common mantra: ‘Go and sin no more!’ With Jesus, as John Claypool often said, ‘acceptance preceded repentance; with the Pharisees it was the other way around.’ The acid test of the Pharisee, ancient or modern, is this: when someone comes to mind who has committed, say, a sexual sin, do we always associate the person with their sinning, or view them as a loved child of God?

I don’t know about you, but the Pharisee in me rank-orders people according to their sinfulness or heterodoxy or some other ‘not-like-me’ criterion. I’m passionately committed to social justice, but not to violence: so I tend to despise the scruffy protesters police toss into paddy-wagons. I have several homosexual friends, but I’m uncomfortable when they greet one another in church with a passionate kiss. When I hear about Taliban fighters in Afghanistan getting killed, I tend to categorize them as human vermin who should be destroyed, instead of people loved by God…

Jesus welcomed sinners, he hosted a party for them, they were his friends… How many lost publicans and sinners are numbered amongst our friends?

Rowland Croucher
September 2007.

POPE BENEDICT'S APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION AND ENCYCLICAL LETTER

Review: Pope Benedict's Apostolic Exhortation (Sacramentum Caritatis: The Sacrament of Love, 143 pp., 2007) and Encyclical Letter (Deus Caritas Est: On Christian Love, 71pp., 2006), St Paul's Publications, Strathfield, NSW.

These two booklets are pocket/purse-sized, and intended for the faithful's slow meditative reading.

My first response has to be to the titles: Christian love/charity is not a bad place to start for a newly-appointed Pope, eh?

And they're excellent reading - for Catholics and others.

Pope Benedict XVI was, of course, the infamous Cardinal Ratzinger (the
Church's 'rottweiler' my pro-Vatican 2 friends used to call him). As
'Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith' (1981-2005)
- formerly known as the Holy Office, the historical Inquisition - his
task was to defend the Roman Catholic Church's traditional faith and
values, which he did with ruthless zeal, and a very sharp intellect.

Now that he's Pope - a pastor pastorum - his writings have a pastoral,
more 'soft conservative' stance.

His first encyclical letter on love has 41 short paragraphs. Unlike the
Apostolic Exhortation the language is uniformly sexist - which means
that he obviously wrote it himself whereas he was helped by a more
contemporary amanuensis with the other publication. (However, just
occasionally he exhibits some knowledge of modern ideas - 'parallel
universe', for example). Some of the material has an 'in house' Roman
Catholic flavour: and we have to be patient with his strong traditional
views about Mary, the Eucharist, and the priesthood. He also dances
around the issue of love expressed in terms of social justice: unlike
the liberation theologians, Benedict does not condone the Church's
meddling in politics too much.

All that aside, there are some beautiful, even lyrical, paragraphs here.

Benedict has a first-rate mind, and is an excellent scholar of the Bible and patristics. And most of this is good raw material for devotion and prayer. One example: '...In God and with God I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person, not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern... But if I... [relate to] others solely from a desire to be "devout" and to perform my "religious duties," then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely "proper", but loveless.' (pp. 30-31).

Sacramentum Caritatus is a more substantial theological offering (with 256 endnotes!) about the centrality of the Eucharist in the Church's and Christian's life. It's an excellent introduction to this subject, and I'd encourage Protestants to read it with an open mind. The most frequently-quoted Church Father is, of course, Saint Augustine, which gives the discourse more of an 'original sin' than an 'original blessing' flavour.

Benedict is certainly traditional. The Church has to relate to polygamists gently but 'firmly' but he doesn't help us with the practical details of how to do that with love. 'Separated brethren' are still somewhat separated, and only barely brethren. (He wouldn't like what a radical Catholic priest I know did: concelebrate the Eucharist with the help of Protestant pastors). A couple of times he advocates the
use of Gregorian chants over more modern hymns and songs, encourages priests to master Latin, and urges the daily celebration of the Mass, even when the faithful are not present. And if there are 'non-practising Catholics' and others attending a wedding, for example, the officiating priest should consider replacing a celebration of the Mass with a 'celebration of the Word of God' (p. 67).

But I wrote 'Yes' in the margin a couple of times: 'The quality of homilies needs to be improved' (p. 63). 'There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know him, and to speak to others of our friendship with him' (p. 107).

In my view, whatever the anachronisms of someone who lives in a 2,000-year past (!), if this man has this sort of devotion to Christ, I for one want to hear more from him.

Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au

August 2007.

MEGACHURCHES

Megachurches: Some Personal Reflections

I was told that at some point in the 1970s we at Blackburn Baptist Church (Melbourne) were one of three 'Megachurch Congregations' in Australia. The other two were AOG Pentecostal – at Mt. Gravatt in Queensland (Reg Klimionok, senior pastor) and Paradise in Adelaide (Andrew Evans). Others in the 1980's and 1990s outgrew those three churches (including Crossway, the new name for the Blackburn Baptist Church, with up to 4,000 attending weekly).

Two definitions: 'Megachurch' for our purposes was 1,000+ attending worship services each week. (Many church consultants, following Lyle Schaller, tend put the figure at 700+; I'm told by Phil Baker that there are 259 Australian churches seeing 500+ attending each week). And a 'congregation' happens when more than 50% of Sunday or weekly attenders are part of a small study/prayer/ministry group: we had more than 60 small study/prayer groups and up to 30 ministry groups, with over 70% of Sunday attenders involved. 'Aggregations', as I use the term, describe churches where the majority of Sunday/weekly attenders are not in a small group: Australia has had several Catholic and Protestant 'megachurch aggregations' in the last 150 years.

More here. Australian Megachurchwatch.

Rowland Croucher

May 2007

AUSTRALIAN RELIGION

Gary Bouma, Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Professor Gary Bouma, an ordained Anglican priest, is head of the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. He’s one of Australia’s leading sociologists of religion, and excellently equipped to survey the Australian religious scene.

Australians are more reserved about their expression of religious commitment, writes Bouma, but religion and spiritual life in Australia are not in decline. His firm opinion is that ‘the secularity of the twenty-first century is not anti-religious or irreligious, as it was in the twentieth century.’ ‘While to many educated in the 1960s and 1970s “Australian religion” was a contradiction in terms or at best an embarrassing legacy of a forgettable past, that is not so now’. A 2005 survey found that 35% of Australians in their twenties said ‘religion was important in their lives’ compared with 21% in 1978. And while ‘in the twentieth century religion and spirituality often provided an identity and meaning for people, in the twenty-first century the core is the production and maintenance of hope.’ Another summary-statement: ‘The needs addressed by religion and spirituality are core to humanity: hope, and meaning grounded in a connection with that which is more than passing, partial and broken’ (p. 205).

The references to theoretical and research sources are authoritative, and in my view are worth the value of the book. The suggested reading, references and index at the back of the book are second-to-none. It’s all the work of a careful scholar, who is as familiar as anyone with the main sources of religious knowledge about Australians (the censuses, Christian Research Association, NCLS surveys etc.). And he’s an irenic commentator – even when describing what others might call ‘religious crazies’. (Which means – you guessed it – that he’s on the liberal end of the theological spectrum. He recommends the works of Karen Armstrong, for example).

I’d recommend that all clergy, in particular, read this book right through – even those in mainline churches who are having a hard time attracting new parishioners. (‘The formerly mainstream Protestant groups find themselves on the margins of a world they do not understand’ p. 171). Although a substantial majority of Australians continue to identify with a religious group, religious and spiritual life is becoming more diverse, and less tied to formal organizations. This book is strong on analysis, diagnosis, trends, surveys, aetiology, rather than prescription. The parish clergy I work with want to know ‘How can we in the churches harvest this growing interest in religion/ spirituality, without sacrificing our intelligence to fundamentalism, or our traditions to the latest cultural trends (eg. in music)?’ Bouma’s book doesn’t answer these questions directly, but if read carefully, my dear Watson, there are clues everywhere!

Now, some interesting facts/opinions in the ‘Did you know?’ or ‘Want to argue with this?’ categories:

‘There are now more Australian Buddhists than Baptists, more Muslims than Lutherans, more Hindus than Jews and more than twice as many Sikhs as Quakers’ (pp. 55-6)

‘In the 2001 census [there was] a dramatic rise in the number of Australians who wrote something down that related more to spirituality than to particular organized religious groups’ (p. 61)… ‘Only otiose religion is an opiate; the rest is dynamite’ (p. 197)

Between 1996 and 2001 the following Christian groups were among those suffering from numerical decline (Source: ABS census data): Brethren (down 12.28%), Churches of Christ (- 18.25%), Presbyterian/Reformed (- 5.57%), Salvation Army (- 3.67%), Uniting Church (- 6.46%). Baptists grew by 4.75%, Catholics 4.22%, Pentecostals 11.37%, ‘Other Christian’ 27.95%. [Why have the Baptists roughly kept pace with population growth but their sister denomination the Churches of Christ declined? My opinion: factor in the growth in the greater number of Baptist megachurches and ethnic congregations].

The Christian groups emanating from Britain in the 1800s – Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists etc. – ‘are moving from asking “Will our children have faith?” to “Will our faith have children? …They have effectively lost two generations and are in the process of losing a third’ (p. 67)

‘It is not acceptable to express unhappiness in a Pentecostal assembly. Sadness, grief and guilt are but momentary transitional feelings on the way to ecstasy and praise. Pentecostal forms of Christianity do not demand orthopraxy or orthodoxy so much as orthopassy’ (p. 94)

‘The primary aim of the evangelical movement is to gather people out of society and into the church, not to engage the world or to engage in attempts to shape the world from which they seek to draw people’ (p. 134)

Since the Age of Reason began ‘God was seen as the lawgiver, the source of reason… This era saw the rise of Calvinism and the Jesuits, who quintessentially expressed Christianity via reason. [Hence] the phrase “Think right thoughts and be saved; think wrong thoughts and be damned”. All of this is reflected in creeds, confessions and statements of union, which essentially demand that the believer “Toe the creedal line and you will be all right”’ (p. 166)

Disclosure: I studied with Gary Bouma towards a PhD in the early 1990s – and enjoyed the stimulation of being in academia again - but decided there were too many other competing demands for my time, and ‘demitted’.

Rowland Croucher
June 2007

JOHN STOTT: SOME PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

Prompted by reading the two-volume biography of Stott by Timothy Dudley-Smith (IVP 1999, 2001).

John Stott (1921- ) is the English-speaking world's highest-profile and most acclaimed ‘evangelical’. It has been said that if Evangelicals around the world were to elect a Pope, he would be front-runner. Personally he didn’t like the label ‘conservative evangelical’, preferring something like ‘radical conservative evangelical’. We have lunched together, corresponded a bit, mentioned each other 'in despatches' and in 2001 Jan and I were privileged to attend his 80th birthday celebration at London’s Royal Albert Hall (where he spoke for five or six minutes: a brilliant, carefully crafted summary of his Christian philosophy and commitment) - a great man, who has, with C S Lewis, influenced more undergraduates around the world in the last half-century towards an informed acceptance of the Christian faith than anyone else.

I first encountered John Stott the author through reading his Basic Christianity when at Teachers’ College in 1957. It was lucid, and made sense and with C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity gave me a foundation for understanding Christ’s claims about himself – and Christ’s claims on my life.

Later, when I was an InterVarsity Fellowship staffworker (I think about 1970), I was privileged to have an hour’s lunch with him. Our discussion mainly centred around Charismatic Renewal: and was probably one of hundreds of ‘inputs’ into his thinking between his two publications on the subject - The Baptism and Fullness of the Holy Spirit and Baptism and Fullness. The latter publication had a much more inclusive, accepting and irenic approach to the broad subject. I like to think I might have helped a little with that. I knew that John Stott got a lot of letters (his biographer says about 30 a day, six days a week), and I later – probably a year later – wrote to him, beginning as so many correspondents did, ‘You probably won’t remember me…’ and within a month I got a hand-written, one page response: ‘Of course I remember you…’ He certainly did: he had a prodigious memory for people’s names. We must also have exchanged views on homosexuality: in his note he recommended Davidson’s book The Returns of Love. Fifteen years later he commended me to a Baptist congregation in Vancouver, British Columbia, which called us to pastoral leadership. He also must have read my little book Recent Trends Among Evangelicals: he cited it a couple of times in his book Evangelical Truth: A Personal Plea for Unity, Integrity and Faithfulness (1999).

I’ve sat in his audiences many times – at university missions, in public convention centres, at All Soul’s Langham Place, and, a couple of years ago, at a couple of public meetings in Melbourne (one of them in the auditorium of a church I pastored – Blackburn - now Crossway - Baptist Church). I was one of the 3600 leaders from 190 nations who participated in the July 1989 Lausanne II Congress on World Evangelization in Manila, the Philippines (where John Stott worked so hard as chairman of the drafting committee, trying to incorporate all our theological and missiological ideas into the Manila Manifesto that he was incapacitated with a severe headache).

The influence of someone on your thinking can be measured by what-is-remembered-when about that person. I remember, for example, his brilliant talk on evangelical inclusiveness – ‘Let’s not Polarize’ – at the Pharmacy College auditorium in Melbourne. (The four ‘polarizations’: intellect and emotion, conservative and radical, form and freedom, evangelism and social action – a plea for unity, liberty and charity). I remember where I was (holidaying in Lord Howe Island) when I read the first (513-page) volume of Timothy Dudley-Smith’s biography of Stott. I’ve just Googled our website – it has 172 references to Stott; my ‘Desktop Google’ has 1141.

I am about 17 years his junior, but our journeys have been remarkably similar. We both had fathers who were emotionally distant (his relationship with his surgeon-father was ‘turbulent and elusive’ (Vol.1:333). And mothers who nurtured our faith. When, at the age of 70 John Stott was asked to look back on those who had influenced his life, he chose his mother and father first. I’m 70 this year, and would now respond the same way, and in that same order. Each of us was invited to speak to youth groups/camps at an early age (I at 13; John Stott as a Uni. Freshman). He writes: ‘I blush when I remember some of the naïve and even downright erroneous notions I taught.’ So do I. We both love browsing in secondhand bookshops, we’re both ornithologists (I’m much more amateurish), and both wore out a couple of portable typewriters.

I too was ‘formed’ in terms of both evangelicalism and evangelism at Scripture Union/Crusader camps/missions, and as a leader with the InterVarsity Fellowship. He says ‘I sometimes wonder on which scrapheap I would be today if it had not been for God’s providential gift of the (Cambridge) UCCF… The Christian Union brought the friendships, teaching, books and opportunities for service which all helped me to stand firm and grow up. I am profoundly grateful.’ So am I. We were both ‘traveling secretaries – or Staffworkers – with IVF. He had a ‘great burden’ for the ‘intelligentsia’ of the world, a neglected ‘mission-field’ he thought. (So do I).

He wasn’t used to ‘failing’: he only got a 2.1 in German at University! (I actually ‘failed’ in several undergraduate subjects).

I too was a Dispensationalist until I received more wisdom about eschatological hermeneutics (in his case from his friend John Wenham; in mine by reading Henriksen’s commentary on the Book of Revelation, More Than Conquerers). For both John Stott and myself ‘theological college’ wasn’t an inspiring experience. He writes: ‘Little that we were given by lecturers appeared to be original… most was culled from… books, so it saved lots of time to go straight to their sources. [One lecturer said to him]: “Let me see, you attended one of my lectures once”.’ (I managed to avoid one lecturer for three out of my four years). ‘Theological study did not even pretend to be much of a preparation for the ministry. It was more of an academic… exercise for the solving of intellectual problems. To study theology was to enter a spiritual wilderness… The activities at Ridley Hall [mostly] interfered with the real work I felt called to do. The staff were patient with my spiritual arrogance and critical attitudes and I am sure now that I would have grown in my knowledge of God far more had I been a little more humble and positive in my approach… We used to write letters during… lectures because we didn’t get anything out of them.’ Ditto, ditto, ditto… same here (see the chapter on Narwee Baptist Church and theological college in my blog http://rowlandcroucher.blogspot.com/ .

We both pastored churches that saw 300-400 attending grow into multi-staffed ‘megachurches’. (He stayed as rector of All Souls’ from 1950-1975, and was thereafter Rector Emeritus. I was at Blackburn Baptist Church – now Crossway – for 8 years, 1973-1981). And he (too)

was pained by the opposition and/or jealousy of clergy colleagues who saw their churches shrink while All Souls’ kept growing. We both majored on empowering the church to minister to itself. Stott used to say ‘Appointing ten curates would not get all the ministry done!’ Right on! I too served on a council of the Evangelical Alliance. He and I both admire Billy Graham (though neither of us would agree entirely with what I would call Billy’s simplistic gospel theology). John Stott’s verdict on why so many in the UK responded to Billy Graham’s call for a ‘decision’: ‘I believe Billy was the first transparently sincere preacher these people have ever heard’. If you think that’s a put-down of his country-people, it was. Stott used to talk about his coming across sometimes as an emotionless ‘cold fish’ with the natural reserve of a typical Englishman.

I know or have met many of the people mentioned in these two volumes – Dudley Foord, John Reid, Ian Hore-Lacy, John Prince, J I Packer, Stuart Piggin, Chua Wee Huan, David Watson, James Houston…

We both depend on our diaries to make sense of our programs. John Stott’s ‘large Filofax diary [was] never out of his hand.’ (If I lost my diary I’d lose my mind, I think. The deacons in the first church I pastored – Narwee Baptist, in Sydney – used to play tricks on me by snitching my diary!). John Stott took making promises so seriously that he would repeatedly ask his staff when they were to do a task ‘You have made a note of it, haven’t you?’ And he hated wasting time, so found long car-drives tedious. (So do I. I like Australian intellectual/ politician Barry Jones’ remark that he has only one hate, moving physical objects across the face of the earth, including himself!).

Stott somewhere noted this comment about London’s three best-known Methodist preachers (who were at their peak when he also began preaching in a West End London church): ‘Sangster loved the Lord; Weatherhead loved his people, while Soper loved an argument!’ Sangster is one of my heroes; I’ve read quite a bit of Weatherhead; and I’ve heard Soper preach in Hyde Park, London, which he did regularly for many years. Interesting about Leslie Weatherhead: John Stott got this letter from him: ‘Thank you for writing Basic Christianity. It has led me to make a new commitment of my life to Christ. I am old now – nearly 78 – but not too old to make a new beginning’ (1:457). I agree with Stott about the primacy of the authority of Scripture over other spiritual authorities, and have a similar hesitancy about affirming the Bible’s inerrancy (something which the Bible does not assert for itself). Stott’s preferred form of words (from the Lausanne Covenant, for which he was criticized by North American evangelicals in particular): ‘Scripture is without error in all that it affirms: not everything contained in Scripture is affirmed by Scripture’.

But we are a little apart on some other theological matters. He’s an Anglican, I’m Baptist, so we have differing ‘ecclesiologies’. He tends to major on the forensic/ substitutionary aspects of the Atonement; I’m broader on that whole question. Stott doesn’t like the idea of a woman being a rector or a bishop: Jan and I were the Australian Baptists’ first ‘clergy couple’.

On the question of hell, he rejects both universalism and the terrible notion of ‘eternal conscious torment’, and holds to a ‘conditional immortality’ view: ‘the annihilation of the wicked’ (for which he was scolded by J I Packer, but commended by F F Bruce, who wrote to him, ‘annihilation is certainly an acceptable interpretation of the relevant New Testament passages’). I’d lean more towards universalism: how could creatures made like God be wiped out forever? (But I don't call myself a 'universalist', though I would not be surprised if God is!).

He’s skeptical about the contemplative tradition (his idea of a ‘desert retreat’ is to catalogue the birds he spots!): there’s no suggestion, I think, anywhere in these two volumes of ‘a mind at rest’: John Stott’s active mind roams from theology to ornithology and back again (he can sit for 10-12 hours at a stretch studying and writing at his retreat-place, so long as he has his binoculars handy!). He didn’t like the terms ‘spirituality’ or ‘spiritual formation’: ‘the biblical idea is discipleship.’ And he is dismissive of habitual auricular confession: ‘God’s normal and natural way is not to send us to the confessional but to confront us with himself through his Word.’ I wonder what he does with James 5:16? Stott also has a slightly more critical appraisal of the ecumenical movement than I do: ‘the World Council of Churches uses Scripture as a drunk uses a lamp post, namely for support, rather than for illumination’ (2:204). John Stott says that in his early adulthood he had no literary ambitions. I think I did…

He was very human: he too had the classical preacher’s dream of mounting the pulpit and believing he’d not prepared his sermon. And he was humble: he resisted being lionized and thus had a practice of disengaging himself from the high opinions others have of him.

Several times in these two volumes there’s a reference to Stott’s sexuality (eg. 1:329ff.): was he single because of a ‘latent homosexual inclination’ (factor in his difficult relationship with the same-sex parent; his bachelor-mentor; his habit of swimming naked with boys at his retreat-place, his close relationships with his male research assistants etc.)? No, he was heterosexual: twice he met women he could have married; but ‘I’m not in favour of vows of celibacy’. I remember hearing him joke about all this… ‘I study birds… the feathered kind!’. He often says ‘I could not have traveled or written as I have done if I had had the responsibilities of family’ (1:330). True.

Like John Stott I’ve been something of a ‘lone ranger’ in terms of an accountability group: he did not set one up until he was 65, but wished he had done so earlier (1:264).

Criticisms by fellow-evangelicals over this and that ‘got to’ John Stott. He quotes Lord Shaftesbury, the great evangelical social reformer: ‘High Churchmen, Roman Catholics, even infidels, have been friendly to me; my only enemies have been Evangelicals.’ My ‘enemies’ (too strong a word, I think) have been those to the right of my theological stance, not those to the left.

I thank God regularly for the privilege of knowing John Stott, the man and his ideas.

Rowland Croucher

John Stott by Timothy Dudley-Smith (IVP 1999, 2001) is available from Ridley College Bookshop

Brian McLaren: A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY

Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (2004)

Brian McLaren is probably today’s most widely-read ‘progressive evangelical’. Surprisingly he’s never attended classes for credit in a theological institution, nor has any ordination qualifications from a bona fide denomination… ‘Rather I am a lowly English major who snuck into pastoral ministry accidentally through the back doors of the English department and church planting…’ But he’s very widely-read, writes in a racy, readable manner, and is au fait with modern, post-modern, and post-postmodern thinking. He’s honest, and the key reason he’s ‘progressive’ is that he rates ‘orthopraxy’ (right behavior) over ‘orthodoxy’ (right thinking).

A Generous Orthodoxy is a book I wish I’d written. Below is my summary of his seminal ideas:

From John Franke’s introduction: The term ‘generous orthodoxy’ was coined by Yale theologian Hans Frei, to help move beyond the liberal/conservative impasse. It connotes a rejection of both liberal and conservative certainty/universal knowledge resulting from a commitment to Enlightenment Foundationalism. (The liberals constructed theology upon the foundation of unassailable religious experience; the conservatives looked to an error-free Bible. So a generous orthodoxy is ‘post-liberal’ and ‘post-conservative’ – to foster the pursuit of truth, the unity of the church, and the gracious character of the gospel). Jesus Christ is the center of the Christian faith. This faith, as Lesslie Newbigin articulates it, is exclusive (the revelation in Jesus Christ is unique, but not in the sense of denying the possibility of salvation to those outside the Christian faith); inclusive (refusing to limit the saving grace of God to Christians, but not in the sense of viewing other religions as salvific); pluralist (acknowledging the gracious work of God in the lives of all human beings, but not denying the unique and decisive nature of what God has done in Jesus Christ).

McLaren does not covet the last word – his aim (at times) is to be ‘provocative, mischievous, and unclear’ for the purpose of encouraging readers to think and enter into the conversation themselves.

Hans Frei: ‘Generosity without orthodoxy is nothing, but orthodoxy without generosity is worse than nothing.’

More...

Visit the JMM website

Shalom!/Salaam!

Rowland Croucher

WHERE HAVE ALL THE PROPHETS GONE?

Here’s the gist of Marvin McMickle’s Where Have All The Prophets Gone? Reclaiming Prophetic Preaching in America, 2006. It’s black writing-as-preaching at its most passionate, biblically enlightened, and intelligent (he has a couple of earned Drs).

When (American) preaching isn’t prophetic you won’t hear anything about the two million persons packed into overcrowded prisons, most of them for drug-related offences that could be treated more effectively and at a fraction of the cost; or the 46 million persons without medical insurance; or the still-prevailing racism and sexism. Instead there’s an emphasis on just two ‘justice’ issues: abortion and same-sex marriage; the emergence of an oxymoron called patriot pastors; a focus on ‘praise and worship’ that doesn’t result in compassionate discipleship; and finally the vile messages of prosperity theology which have dominated the preaching of televangelists and many pulpits.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone in search of megachurches, every one.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone in search of faith-based funding, every one.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone in search of personal comfort, every one.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone in search of political correctness, every one.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone into a ministry that places praise over speaking truth to the powers, every one.

When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

Walter Brueggemann (The Prophetic Imagination) says the prophet offers us an alternative consciousness to the prevailing ‘royal consciousness’ of the entrenched political, economic, social or religious powers.

An example: Tony Campolo (Speaking My Mind) writes about the hypocrisy of those who staunchly oppose same-sex marriage, but whose heterosexual divorce rate is 50%: ‘Gays often ask why evangelicals seem willing to accept couples who are divorced and remarried, a sexual relationship Jesus specifically condemned as adultery, and then come down so hard on a sexual relationship Jesus never mentioned.’ If we follow the Levitical laws proscribing same-sex behavior, why do we not also forbid the eating of pork, or promote the idea of Jubilee – releasing people from prisons and from debt? Reason: homophobia, ‘the last acceptable prejudice in America’.

But it’s not only conservative evangelicals who have a problem here: whenever the convocations of mainline churches gather, what’s the #1 item on their agendas? Same-sex marriage, and ordaining active homosexual pastors. What about the staggering number of people confined to America’s prisons, or the 46 million without health insurance (there’s that refrain again) or the scourge of HIV/AIDS, or the explosion of divorce and teen pregnancy in America?

And the black churches? ‘Too many black clergy, especially those heading megachurches, are either apolitical or apologists for the status quo. What about [the refrain plus] staggering rates of black unemployment, black-on-black crime, the rapid spread of Islam as the religion of choice among many inner-city young men?’

America is the most professedly ‘Christian’ of the developed nations (over 85% identify as Christians), and the least Christian in its behavior. It leads them all in the murder rate, the use of capital punishment, the number of persons incarcerated, the percentage of marriages ending in divorce, the rate of teen pregnancy, and the number of children living in poverty.

Meanwhile, Christians are locked into the two issues of abortion and same-sex marriage. Where have all the prophets gone?

President Bush has said ‘Owning stuff is good.’ But that’s hard for many when 85% of the nation’s wealth is controlled by 18% of the people. While conservative evangelicals focus on their two-pronged agenda, Enron and WorldCom and other companies have been looted by their chief executive officers, leaving their workers and retirees in financial ruin. But Focus on the Family won’t get too upset about these ‘family values’ concerns. Nor will they mention anything about African Americans comprising 13% of the population yet constituting over 70% of the prison population. In 9 states when offenders are released their right to vote is revoked for life. And it’s well known that if you have a black skin you’re much more likely to serve a longer sentence than whites for the same crime. (And if you’re white and rich like Martha Stewart you’ll get less than six months for securities fraud and lying to a grand jury, and then receive more television deals).

And re Iraq: many Christians do their best impersonation of ‘hear no evil – see no evil – speak no evil’. The world is full of brutal dictators, but the Bush Administration chose to eliminate one who sat on the world’s second largest reserves of oil. The war in Vietnam failed to end communism in that country; and democratization in Iraq looks to be in dire peril of suffering the same fate. The president wages these wars abroad at the expense of the war on poverty in America.

The justice agenda of Jesus (Matthew 25): poverty, sickness, prisons, and other forms of human need.

Abortion and human sexuality are not unimportant: but they are simply not the limit of what should occupy a justice agenda in the 21^st century.

PATRIOT PASTORS

‘Patriot pastor’ is an oxymoron: a pastor’s allegiance should be to God and not to a political party. Amos, Micah, Samuel, Nathan, John the Baptist and Jesus regularly stood against the political establishment of their day in the name of the God of heaven and in defense of a more just and compassionate world. Where is patriot pastors’ concern was for the homeless, the hopeless, the hungry and the heartbroken in our society?

The evangelical East Waynesville Baptist Church, North Carolina forced nine members out of their church because they didn’t vote for George W Bush in the 2004 presidential election! The pastor said these people were holding back the work of the Kingdom of God.

But not all evangelicals are narrow: Rick Warren has been advocating help for the poor in Africa and elsewhere: ‘It is a moral issue… Jesus commanded us to help the poor so it is an obedience issue as well.’ Others are pressuring the government to do more about religious persecution, Darfur, enact legislation about prison rape in the USA and push for more funds to fight AIDS in Africa [PS and recently, climate change issues]. ‘God bless America is a patriotic tune and not a theological mandate. ‘In God We Trust’ may be engraved upon our nation’s currency but there is no evidence that those words have been etched upon the hearts of our nation’s leaders.

WHEN PROPHETIC PREACHING GIVES WAY TO PRAISE

On Christian television programs there’s an incessant theme of praise – but it, too, is severed from the prophetic message. Which is exactly what Amos condemned: ‘Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:23-24). When upstretched hands in praise do not also become outstretched hands to lift up a fallen brother or sister, that is an abomination to God.

Now praise is good: read Psalm 150. The prophets are not calling for an end to acts of praise worship, but the striking of a balance so that deeds of justice are not overlooked or ignored while Christians are busy ‘having a high time in the house of God’. Lifting up holy hands is good: provided they extend to helping hands to those Jesus describes in Matthew 25 as ‘the least of these’.

PROPHETS TO PROFITS

‘Her leaders judge for a bribe; her priests teach for a price, and her prophets tell fortunes for money’ (Micah 3:11).

A favourite text for many ‘prosperity gospel/ health and wealth/ name it and claim it’ preachers is John 10:10, where Jesus promised his followers abundant life. But the good life and the abundant life are not synonymous. Indeed prosperity preachers who base their message on John 10:10 are in fact more reflective of the thieves and robbers who come to steal and destroy. ‘What will it profit,’ asked Jesus, ‘if you gain he whole world and forfeit your life? (Matthew 16:26)? The life of abundance offered by these preachers is more defined by television commercials and magazine advertisements than by anything found in Scripture. Jesus told us not to store up treasures on earth, but rather to store up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21). Paul says he’s content with whatever he has: ‘I know what it is to have little, and I know what I is to have plenty’ (Philippians 4:11-13).

And Jesus promised his followers that they would suffer trouble. Many preachers, writes Barbara Brown Taylor, are promising a smooth road which goes around the wilderness rather than one that leads people through the wilderness with its rough places, and crooked paths and low moments.

Item - Paula and Randy White have been blessed with an 8,000 square-foot home – and urge people who are broke to borrow money from others to give to their ‘ministry’!

Very little if anything is said by these preachers about the grinding poverty which affects hundreds of millions around the world. ‘Nothing is said about the thousands of US military who have been killed and injured in an ill-conceived and poorly conducted war in Iraq, a nation that did not attack us on September 11, 2001, and a nation that did not have weapons of mass destruction’.

In his book God Has a Dream Desmond Tutu says ‘To oppose injustice and oppression is not something that is merely political. No it is profoundly religious.’

The most prophetic voices among us today may well be the voices of women who continue to push both church and society beyond the single issue of race. If the role of women in society must remain unchanged from the days of the early church, then any opposition to slavery should also have been resisted, since Paul seemed to have accepted the reality of that evil institution in Romans 13:1-7. You would have thought Galatians 3:28 – ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ – would have settled this question long ago.

There are now about as many US fatalities in the Iraq war than there were fatalities on September 11, 2001. What will have been accomplished by this reckless venture?

We should be informed by a line from the hymn ‘God of Grace and God of Glory’ written by Harry Emerson Fosdick that warns ‘Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore’.

SERMON

The book ends with a magnificent sermon on the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag where he takes to task those who oppose the inclusion of the phrase ‘under God’. One nation? What about he great divide between rich and poor? Liberty and justice for all? When over two million people are in prison? Republic? The inference is that no one is more important than anyone else and where everybody’s vote is supposed to count. But ‘what kind of republic allows what happened in Florida in the 2000 election? Indivisible? ‘We are divided by race, by region (ask the people in New Orleans whether we are indivisible).

And McMickle’s own moving story: His father abandoned the family when he was ten years old. Later, his mother tried to enroll in the music department at Moody Bible Institute, but was denied admission because she was a divorcee!’

Buy this powerful and moving book, read it, and suggest your pastor preach from it (if he/she is game!).

Rowland Croucher

April 2007

LOVER OF LIFE: F W BOREHAM'S TRIBUTE TO HIS MENTOR

'Mr. Doke', as Boreham respectfully calls his friend and mentor, was by all accounts - or at least this one - a most amazing human being and pastor.

Here we have John Broadbanks Publishing's first effort at re-issuing out-of-print F W Boreham books. Congratulations to Geoff Pound and Michael Dalton for a beautifully put-together version of Boreham's 1948 book The Man Who Saved Gandhi: A Short Biography of Joseph John Doke.

F W Boreham is Australia's and New Zealand's only really collectable religious author. (Some of his rarer works have passed through my hands - to serious collectors like Ruth Graham, Billy Graham's wife, and Ravi Zacharias - for a 3-figure dollar sum, and sometimes more). So what was his special appeal? Well, he wrote about 50 very readable books (and over 2,000 newspaper articles), preached to large crowds in Hobart and Melbourne and around the world between the two World Wars, read thousands of books, but also had a pastoral 'common touch'.

And here we meet his mentor: an amazing man. Doke was - all in one person - a brilliant preacher, wise counsellor, gifted pastor, a passionate and holy Christian, lover of Scripture (he read the Bible through four times most years) and highly committed to 'foreign missions' (he died on a journey to encourage missionaries in the middle of 'darkest Africa').

And he may have been the most authentic Christian Gandhi ever met. Which makes a puzzle out of the Mahatma's often-quoted comment "Oh, I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ." Well, if we take Boreham's word for it, Doke was the man most-like-Christ of any he knew. And Doke was amazingly Christlike to the then little-known Gandhi when they met in South Africa.

You can read these 34 pages in one sitting. Don't. Buy it for your pastor, but read it slowly first. Order some copies to give away here.

When I get more time I'll jot down here some of the wisdom I marked from this wonderful little book.

Shalom!/Salaam!

Rowland Croucher

CHURCH AND STATE (Tom Frame)

Review: CHURCH AND STATE, Australia’s Imaginary Wall, by Tom Frame (UNSW Press 2006)

Tom Frame, historian and writer, left a military career in the navy to train for the Anglican priesthood and was, until recently, the (high profile) Bishop of the Australian armed forces. In this little book (96 pages) he probes the complex relationship between church and state, especially in Australia, where the influence of religious organizations, lobby groups and individuals has increased the temperature of the discussion about whether and to what extent government policy should be ‘ínformed’ (to use a neutral word) by religious dogma.

Briefly: Tom Frame reminds us that the Australian constitution does not formally separate church and state. He argues that some contact between the two spheres is both inevitable and, occasionally, desirable. But, yes, there are tensions, and, he believes, Christians are largely responsible for these.

This is really an ancient problem, as theologian Karl Barth famously reminded us: the state which God has ordained to keep order in Romans 13 is also the ‘beast from the abyss’ in Revelation 13.

Tom’s first words: ‘Australia is not a Christian nation… it never has been, [although] public life has, of course, been shaped by a long and close encounter with Christianity.’ There’s nothing in Australian law (as there is in British law) which gives any privilege to the Anglican church or precedence to any religion.

Those who demand a strict separation between church and state (eg. the Australian Democrats) are ‘separationists’: they want to erect a legal ‘wall’ that prevents interactions from a fear that an ‘established’ church might emerge. Thus separationists want to end any special privileges churches receive – eg. taxation benefits, because, it is claimed, they amount to de facto recognition of Christianity. The opposite view is that because a clear majority of Australians declare some connection with a Christian denomination, some public reflection of the beliefs and values of Christians is warranted.

There are of course, extremists on both sides: some advocating a theocracy, others a purely secular state. And inevitably against the backdrop of global religiously-inspired terrorism, church-state relations have become a cause of widespread anxiety.

Tom’s historical overview is succinct and well-researched. Ancient Israel was a theocracy: there was no administrative or political division between the religious and mundane aspects of life. Jesus was largely indifferent to Roman rule: ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s; and to God what belongs to God’ (Matthew 22:21). The Christian apostles told their people to live in peace with each other and with the powers-that-be, although when those powers stepped up their persecution, they were an evil to be resisted – but peacefully, and if necessary, through martyrdom. The state was simply the means to an end in the divine ordering of the world. But Constantine’s conversion to Christianity (312 AD) changed all that: Christian baptism became a rite administered at birth, and was now a symbol of citizenship. For 1,000 years, 400 to 1400, in Western Europe, church and state were thoroughly intertwined – ending, in England, when Henry VIII declared in 1534 that the Pope’s jurisdiction did not extend to his realm. The English church was effectively nationalized and the church *in* England became the Church *of* England. But people like John Bunyan now suffered if they were not willing to conform to the laws and dogmas of the established church.

The pioneering American white settlers sailed across the Atlantic to get away from the strictures of state religions in Europe. For the first time we read of a ‘wall of separation’ between ‘the garden of religion’ and the ‘wilderness’ of temporal government (Roger Williams). Thus began the practice in the U.S. of church leaders and politicians advocating separation: as Tom Frame writes ‘the former [is] for protection, the latter to avoid interference.’ Thus began a uniquely modern phenomenon: the idea of constitutional freedom *from* religion, leading one nation (France, since 1905) towards constitutional secularism. To Tom’s knowledge no other nation has similarly legislated for a formal and legal separation of church and state. Overall, 2000 years of Christian church history led French theologian Jacques Ellul to lament that ‘whenever the Church has been in a position of power, it has regarded freedom as an enemy.’

Tom's interim conclusion at this point (p. 47: halfway through the book): ‘It is for these reasons that Christians must be encouraged to allow some distance between the church and state – for the church’s good, if nothing else.’

After some discussion over the years, the words ‘humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God’ were eventually added to the ‘draft preamble’ to the Australian constitution (1898). Section 116 deals with religion (it’s similar to the first amendment in the U.S.): ‘The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.’

Of course there has been public discussion about all this, when, for example Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse to participate in any politics or wars, or the Exclusive Brethren forbid voting (but allow many dollars to be spent lobbying for conservative political causes), or the Scientologists arguing (1983) that they are actually a religion and should be exempt as other churches are from government taxes. Then there was the Defense of Government Schools debate, and (Tom writes) ‘the subsequent legal argument highlighted the significant differences between the US first amendment and the widely held but mistaken belief that the Australian constitution provided a ‘wall of separation’.

Conclusions? ‘At no stage do the founders of the Australian federation seem to have been motivated by a sense that engagement between religion and the state was itself an undesirable thing’ (Catholic academic lawyer Joshua Puls).

A ‘wall of separation’ is impossible to maintain. Church and State… ‘are not two societies that can be separated by the erection of a wall between them. Religion exists within a society and is part of it’ (Dr. Cliff Pannam QC).

Tom’s cautious about right-wing religious influence on the political process in Australia (he’s referring to conservative groups like the Christian Democratic Party, Family First, and the Australian Christian Lobby, and Creationism/Intelligent Design people): he is concerned about the absence of strong ‘accountability to the broader Christian community’. A socially conservative mindset does not reflect the mindset of all Christian traditions in Australia.

But he’s also critical of ‘doctrinaire secularism’, which in its extreme form in the U.S. tries to forbid mentioning God or do any religious act in the public square. Doctrinaire secularism is not religiously neutral: it actually amounts to the promotion of a type of atheism as the unofficial state religion.

But, overall, ‘I have argued that interactions between the church and the state are inevitable, and, for the greatest part, no threat to the health of the body politic.’ ‘Christianity does not need political goodwill or financial support to survive or fulfil its mission…’ but secularists can sleep easily because ‘there is no future prospect of a religious establishment in Australia and none should be encouraged…. Unlike the U.S. Australia does not need a wall of separation between church and state, and none will be needed in the future.'

I have only a couple of minor puzzles with Tom’s approach. Why does he use the (evangelically- biassed) New American Standard translation of the Bible when he could have chosen a more respectable version, like the NRSV?

More importantly, he should have given us just a few pages outlining sympathetically the approaches to the left and right of his position. Why did the outstanding leftist jurist and senator Lionel Murphy fear too much religion ‘meddling’ with politics? On the other hand, why do the evangelical right fear that their convictions about abortion and homosexuality (in particular) will be eroded by liberal legislation?

Also he could have given ordinary folks a better handle on the essence of the debate, which might be expressed this way by conservative Christians: ‘The doctrine of separation between church and state is not about keeping religion out of politics, but keeping politics out of religion.’ And in these words by more liberal – but not secularist - thinkers: ‘If freedom and democracy mean anything, they mean the right of the individual to bring their personal beliefs into the sphere of public discourse regardless of the religious, philosophical, or political basis of those beliefs.’

Rowland Croucher
April 2007

TEN BLOGS

Dear friends,

I am in the process of composing ten Blogs for different audiences. Here are their titles and URLs:

1 Month to Meet the Baptists

1 Month of Books you should Read

1 Month to Learn About the Internet

1 Month to Understand your Local Church

1 Month of Answers to Tough Questions

1 Month of Devotions

1 Month to Change Your Life

1 Month to Meet Some Interesting People

1 Month to Become a Christian

1 Month To Meet Jesus

So for the remainder of this year I'm aiming to write about five articles a week: watch for them. And feel free to leave your comments!

Shalom!/Salaam!

Rowland Croucher

John Mark Ministries

Huston Smith: THE SOUL OF CHRISTIANITY

Huston Smith: The Soul of Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco 2005.

Huston Smith, son of Methodist missionaries in China, friend of Thomas Merton and Joseph Campbell, teacher and friend of Marcus Borg, wrote this book in 2004, and says it was 'the most exciting year of my writing'.

His parents' first child, whom he never knew, died in his father's arms one Christmas Eve. Other insights into his spiritual formation are interesting: 'One night, [my father] was visiting a village thirty miles away and he went by boat, but the lake froze over in the three days he was there... [so] he walked thirty miles home over ice. So it was that intensity, sincerity, devotion that I assimilated from my parents that was most important.' 'In our missionary home in traditional China, breakfast was followed by morning prayers, which included our servants' family. As we sat in a circle, our mother would lead us in singing a stanza of a hymn, in Chinese, of course. Then adults would take turns reading verses from the Bible... Then we would stand, about face, get down on our knees, and bury our faces in our hands on the seats of our chairs as my father led us in a prayer that closed with all of us saying the Lord's Prayer...'

Huston Smith has generally succeeded in his aim of writing a book about Christianity 'that carries the assent of all Christians', a book which is not combative, respecting various interpretations of Christianity without arguing with them. My view would be that only a liberal thinker like Huston Smith could do this. How liberal is he? Study this: 'I'm a universalist. I refuse to prioritize any one of the eight great religious traditions over the others.'

He ranges over the whole spectrum of Christianity (though hardly mentions Pentecostalism, if at all), citing liberal authors (eg. Marcus Borg) and conservative ones (like N T Wright and John Polkinghorne). He is critical of conservative Christians for their literalism and dogmatism and tendency to slip into 'disastrous political agendas' which are 'untrue to Jesus'. But Liberal churches 'are digging their own graves, for without a robust, emphatically theistic world-view to work within, they have nothing to offer their members except rallying cries to be good. We have it from Peter Berger that "if anything characterizes modernity it is the loss of the sense of transcendence".'

Huston Smith has more of a gift of wisdom/knowledge of comparative religions than accuracy. It wasn't Timothy who said 'Without doubt the mystery of our religion is great' (p. 32) but the writer of 1 Timothy (maybe Paul). It wasn't Jesus who talked about 'rejoicing with those who rejoice, and weeping with those who weep' (p. 63), it was Paul in Romans 12:15 - unless Smith has some evidence that Paul quotes Jesus at this point, evidence no one else has! For mispellings of Annie Dillard ('Anne Dillard' p. 125 etc.) we can forgive an old man - but not his editor/s. And his use of the Authorized Version of the Bible here and there (some quotes with sexist language) is unusual for a Christian scholar.

A couple of statements are in the category 'But that I can't believe', like

* 'If Jesus had not been followed by Paul, the Sermon on the Mount would have evaporated in a generation or two' (p. 89).

* 'The Christian worldview compressed into a sentence: the world is perfect, and the human opportunity is to see that and conform to that fact' (p. 33).

However, all that said, I marked the following for more reflection:

* God is *defined* by Jesus, but he is not *confined* to Jesus

* The Infinite is that out of which you cannot fall

* If it is not paradoxical, it isn't true (Shunryu Suzuki)

* A NT scholar went to heaven and asked Paul if he wrote the Letter to the Ephesians. Paul thought for a moment, stroked his beard, and said 'Yes, I think I did' which is as much as to say 'Who cares?'

* The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is its faithful servant

* 'I pray God [the God above all distinctions] that he may quit me of [the personal] God' (Meister Eckhart)

* [The people who first heard Jesus' teaching] were astonished, and with reason. If we are not, it is because we have heard Jesus's teachings so often that their edges have been worn smooth, dulling their glaring subversiveness

* 'O God whose boundless love and joy / are present everywhere, / He cannot come to visit you / unless you are not there' (17th century German mystical poet Angelus Silesius)

* Hell is popularly depicted as a fiery furnace whose flames do not consume bodies but torture them forever. But this is only a metaphor; it cannot be literally true, for resurrected bodies are incorporeal and do not have flesh that could be burned. (Remember that resurrection is not resuscitation). The theological definition of hell is total aloneness... Will anyone burn in hell forever? The answer is no, for nothing can deprive us of the imago Dei that is the foundation of our humanity

* 'There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess/ I knew no one worth my envying him' (Czeslaw Milosz)

* Though divine in origin, the Church is made up of humans, of sinners, and so in an act unique for any institution, at the end of the second millennium the Pope publicly apologized and did penance in the name of the Church for the sins of individual Christians throughout the ages

* 'The Protestant Principle', stated philosophically, warns against absolutizing the relative. Stated theologically, it warns against idolatry. (But the chief Protestant idolatry has been bibliolatry)

* Protestant diversity is not as great as its hundreds of denominations (most of them more adequately termed sects) suggest... Actually, 85% of all Protestants belong to 12 denominations.

It's a challenging book.

Shalom! Rowland Croucher

March 2007

Review: Alan Hirsch, THE FORGOTTEN WAYS

Review: Alan Hirsch, 'The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church’. Michigan: Brazos Press, 2006.

Ivan Illich was asked what he thought was the most radical way to change society; was it through violent revolution or gradual reform? He gave a careful answer. Neither. Rather, he suggested that if one wanted to change society, then one must tell an alternative story.

And for Christians the alternative story has to do with the evils of institutionalism and clericalism. A quote from sociologist Robert Merton jumped out of a Masters’ degree I once did at the University of Sydney: ‘The evil in institutions is greater than the sum of the evil of the individuals within them.’

Martin Buber warns that ‘centralization and codification, undertaken in the interests of religion, are a danger to the core of religion.’ This is inevitably the case he says, unless there is a very vigorous life of faith embodied in the whole community, one that exerts an unrelenting pressure for renewal on the institution. C.S. Lewis observed that ‘there exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it.’

In this exciting, readable and provocative book, ‘emerging church’ missiologist Alan Hirsch tells an alternative story by unlocking the secrets of the primal ‘pre-Christendom’ apostolic church – and the church in modern China. Why were/are they so dynamic, whereas mainline churches over time suffer from what sociologists call ‘the routinisation of charisma’?

Historians have often accepted the claim that the conversion of Emperor Constantine (ca 285-337) resulted in the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into an arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be brutal and lax.

Hirsch suggests that the prevailing expression of church (Christendom) has become a major stumbling block to the spread of Christianity in the West. The ‘Christendom paradigm’ doesn’t work very well any more.

On the other hand the Chinese churches grew in spite of the following:

1. They were an illegal religion.
2. They didn’t have church buildings.
3. They didn’t have scriptures (the Chinese had underground, partial copies).
4. They didn’t have any central institutions or professional forms of leadership.
5. They didn’t have seeker-sensitive services, youth groups, worship bands, seminaries, or commentaries.
6. They made it hard to join the church.

One commentator has said that in this book Alan has challenged our thinking, our vocabulary, and ‘hopefully our way of doing church in this century’ – particularly with the ‘Jesus yes, Church no’ generations. Thus we have the phenomenon again where more people are coming to faith in small informal groups but don't want the organized part of the religion to be part of the deal.

Alan has several things going for him. He’s read and digested the thinking of great missiologists like David Bosch. He was a missionary pastor – of an ‘alternative’ church: the ‘South Melbourne Resoration Community’. I’ve spoken at this church (‘church?’), and spent a weekend away with them. It was truly one of the rare communities of faith and hope which I could recommend to those on the ‘margins’.

He was also, later, a ‘denominational officer’ who tried to plant these ideas into the thinking and praxis of established churches, with, he says, mixed success. And he is now the founding director of the Forge Mission Training Network.

How do we discover our missional DNA (mDNA)? What caused the early churches to grow from 25,000 to 20 million in 200 years? How did the Chinese underground church grow from 2 million to over 100 million in sixty years despite considerable opposition, and without professional leaders, training facilities, or buildings?

Hirsch identifies six elements of Missional DNA:

· Jesus is Lord

· Disciple Making

· Missional-Incarnational Impulse

· Apostolic Environment

· Organic Systems

. Communitas

Wonderful principles, which are very hard to apply in practice. Why? My contention would be that the radicalization of family-units which imbibe a Western consumer culture with their muesli every day is a very challenging and difficult task. Parents want a ‘safe place’ for their children – in ‘church’, as everywhere else. They want peer-reinforcement of Christian faith and values for their teenagers. They look to the weekly gatherings of the Christian community to provide spiritual food for the journey, which in terms of work-stress or family-stresses may be a real battle. So they bring expectations ‘to church’ as they do to every other facet of their privileged lives.

Christian communities come in four varieties (as do commercial retail enterprises) – megachurches (= shopping malls), boutiques, franchises, and ‘parish churches’ (= corner stores). Many ‘emerging church’ folks I meet despise the megachurch model, but they shop at supermarkets, for convenience and to save time. They’re at home with technology – they have lots of powerpoint presentations, and audio-visual effects – but are (healthily) wary of multiplying committees and programs. Above all, they know that re-jigging the ‘ministry mix’ won’t bring life and health and peace to their community-of-faith. But on the other hand, they too can easily form ‘clubs-for-people-like-us’ and forget their missional mandate.

Alan Hirsch writes: ‘We cannot consume our way to discipleship.’. (On this see also Ron Sider’s ‘The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience’ and Robert Webber ‘Ancient Future Evangelism’). The alternative? A covenantal approach to discipleship.

We have in Alan Hirsch an idealist, who is also a pragmatist. There are many diagrams, and excellent footnotes for further study.

Alan Hirsch is coauthor, with Michael Frost, of The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church. Another good read.

More…

Another review

Rowland Croucher March 26, 2007

Book Review: Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics

Book Review: Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Margaret Farley (Continuum International Publishing Group, June 2006)

Dr Margaret Farley, a Sister of Mercy and a professor of Christian ethics – since 1971 - at Yale Divinity School, is one of American Christianity’s foremost ethicists.

In this book she tackles some of the most complex issues relating to Christian Sexual Ethics, and writes thoroughly, thoughtfully, compassionately and convincingly (but also, according to many conservative fellow-Catholics, too progressively). If you want to put her into a theological/philosophical box (which is difficult, given the breadth of her opinions and research) I’d say she’s a liberal, irenic feminist.

These days Amazon.com helps inform us about an author’s biasses/breadth/depth via her/his citations. This book, we are told, cites 287 books (it seemed like more!), principally: Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family by Rosemary Radford Ruether on 8 pages, Moral Theology: Challenges for the Future : Essays in Honor of Richard A. McCormick by Charles E. Curran on 7 pages, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith P. Butler on 6 pages, Being And Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre on 5 pages and Summa Theologiae by St.Thomas Aquinas on 5 pages. (I seem to recall stumbling over references to Ricoeur and Foucault more than five times).

Her main point? Justice and love should permeate all relationships, including sexual relationships. She ranges throughout history, across cultures, and tackles most of the big questions of embodiment, gender, and sexuality – including thorny issues relating to same-sex relationships, marriage and family, divorce/ remarriage, celibacy, and sexual behavior. (She doesn't touch abortion, interestingly).

She’s frank, but there’s nothing titillating here. On the contrary it’s an academic book replete with hundreds of valuable footnotes (ideal, probably, for Christian Sexual Ethics 101), occasionally dull and heavy-going, but generally jargon-free. There are surprisingly few case-studies. She’s sometimes repetitive (‘I have said several times..’).

The ‘large questions’ about sexuality she says have to do with the status of the human body, increasingly complex questions about gender, and the sources and aims of sexual desire. One online reviewer summarizes the scope of her work well: ‘Throughout history and across cultures, societies have regulated the sexual passions, channeling them mostly into heterosexual marriage involving either monogamy or polygyny; in both patrilineal and matrilineal societies, women were often subordinated to men; and polygyny presents special dangers to women's equality.’

According to Farley, the basic question of sexual ethics is, 'With what kinds of motives, under what kinds of circumstances, in what forms of relationships, do we render our sexual selves to one another in ways that are good, true, right and just? Her framework for "just sex" centres around seven criteria: do no unjust harm, free consent, mutuality, equality, commitment, fruitfulness, and social justice.

She’s realistic about the fluidity of modern notions of commitment, and indeed is quite relaxed about commitment being conditional and contingent because life is often too hard and full of unexpected surprises to live a permanent and unconditional commitment. What we must do, she says, is teach moderns just principles of relationships and sex.

What do these principles mean in practice? Farley can be quite explicit. Masturbation is OK when it serves relationships rather than burdening them. Use of pornography that weakens our capacity for healthy sexual relations and any kind of sexual abuse or use of power to obtain sex are wrong. Scriptural arguments cited in opposition to homosexuality and homosexual relationships are misinterpreted, ambiguous or part of a worldview in which the central issue was that men are superior to women. In the end there are no good reasons to apply different standards to same-sex and heterosexual relations. Both kinds are good if just, bad if unjust.

Her irenicism is quite marked in two areas where Western feminist liberals and others are mostly polemical: female circumcision and the gender-justice struggles of Islamic women. Farley is amazingly restrained, sensitive and broad-brush in her attempts to understand the background of these issues. She is also sensitive to the complexities faced by intersexed and transgendered persons. In terms of reproductive technologies she believes the key principle is that “no children should be conceived who will be born in a context unconducive to their growth and development in relationships.”

I hope that's whetted your appetite. It's a book filled with commonsense, which will gently dismantle many of your prejudices.

Rowland Croucher

March 2007