It’s not too late for those organising the Franklin Graham tour of Australia next year to get on the blower and tell the man not to come. For the problem is not that too few people will turn up, but too many. And quite possibly for all the wrong reasons. We’re being told it’s about […]
While we’re all wringing our hands over the demographic decline in many denominations, spare a thought for Humanism Australia. When it comes to decline, the humanists are outstripping the churches, only unfortunately for them, quite literally, they haven’t a prayer. A friend posted this excerpt of a report from late last year on their website: …membership […]
Just when you seem to have sorted it out, that pesky secular frame seems to dip and trough all over the place. According to a report in The Conversation online news journal, Gen Z – today’s teen – has a less hostile, more ambivalent approach to religion than perhaps the Dawkins apostles would have wished […]
Twenty five years ago today, one day after my 26th birthday, Jill and I went out on our first date. A quarter of a century. My life has been a game – or a dance – of two halves, so to speak. Here’s a picture of Jill on about date number five, a month or […]
When, in my early twenties I went hiking in Northern Ireland’s Mourne Mountains; pea-green valleys, rock-strewn peaks, swirls of snow, and ancient stone walls, it was easy to imagine a deep vert dragon rising suddenly through the mists in front of me. And easier still to long for one to do so. Dan Conway’s latest […]
There have been plenty of articles about why Millennials – those twenty somethings – are not coming to church. Plenty of time and attention towards what would bring them back. Well, in our church at the moment plenty of Millennials ARE coming. It’s been noted by the older crowd that they’re starting to get outnumbered […]
Until six months ago we lived in what has been described as “a hard scrabble part of the town”. It’s not exactly the projects of Baltimore depicted in The Wire, but to have one drug house opposite you for 10 years is unfortunate. To move house and live opposite another drug house reeks of carelessness, […]
Did our Prime Minister really say that he was on God’s side? And if he did is that not a dangerous thing? This article in The Guardian seems to indicate it: Geoff Thompson, who lectures in the University of Divinity makes this comment: Beyond their morality and beyond the discussions about separating church and […]
Going prematurely bald leaves one open to all sorts of insults. Especially on the sports field. My twin brother and I both duly followed the long and honourable line of men on both sides of our family by losing our hair in our early twenties. While playing soccer, a sport renowned for on-field put-downs birthed […]
There’s an accusation doing the rounds that Christian churches that speak about sex, are not only ignoring other sins by doing so, but are doing so in order to ignore other sins. They’re speaking about sex in order to give other sins a hall pass. So sins such as slander, gossip, greed etc are being allowed […]
There’s going to come a time when the younger generation of Christians who are sick of being marketed to say “Enough is enough!” But not before we get one more book that promises to uncover the secret to the Christian faith that has been lost in the mists of time. A secret that will change […]
It’s interesting how the requirements of the Sexular Culture shift and bend. Once there were reprisals for what you did say. For what you did do. Opprobrium for saying words that would be hurtful to a specifically identified sexual minority. Now there are increasingly going to be reprisals for what you don’t say. For what […]
The primary role for a church plant in Australia, indeed around the West, is Christian rehab. I know, I know. It doesn’t look as sexy as saying we’re going to plant a church to “evangelise this neighbourhood/suburb/city/nation”, but my experience shows me that rehabilitation is the primary result of church planting, not evangelisation. This is not to […]
The modern mind cannot contemplate that the path to life may be via death. The modern Christian mind also has trouble contemplating this reality. This is despite the template of the cross of Christ, and his observation that those who seek to keep their lives will lose it, and vice versa. Yet, as I come […]
So now that Scott Morrison is safely ensconced in The Lodge, Christians on Facebook and Twitter are calling for our new Pentecostal Prime Minister to act Christianly, especially in the public square in regards to asylum seekers. But is that what they really want him to do? To act as a Christian Prime Minister? I suspect […]
So Scott Morrison is Prime Minister. For the time being at least. What can we expect from a Prime Minister who is already being labelled as our “first Pentecostal Prime Minister”? More to the point; what can we expect to be told about a so-called Pentecostal Prime Minister from a mainstream media that is the […]
Not everything is political, despite the insistence of people who feel that the personal is always political. There’s the philosophical domain, the theological domain, the psychological domain. Those should be kept the hell separate from politics. Timely words on Jordan Peterson’s podcast today, especially here in the Amusement Arcade of Australia. The manic off-key organ […]
The days are long gone since the average church goer sang “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war”, and that’s probably a good thing. But after reading Greg Sheridan’s new book: God is Good for You: A Defence of Christianity in Troubled Times, I warm to the idea of being a warrior. A happy, friendly warrior […]
Well that didn’t take long. Not long at all. In fact it took a depressingly short period of time. Blink and you’d miss it. Trinity Western University blinked after all. Faced with the dilemma of its law students no longer being recognised as accredited by their professional organisations, Trinity Western University, Canada’s largest private-funded Christian […]
What might the landscape look like if the church in the West disappeared? What would change? Would we even notice the difference? Could such a thing even happen anyway? In his commentary on 1 and 2 Kings, Peter Leithart, notes that in 2Kings 17, when the northern tribes of Israel are finally expelled from the […]
The most positive thing a Christian can do is negative split their life. Sound counterintuitive? Sound wrong? If you know anything about running, you’ll know that a negative split is a great thing; indeed it’s what you are looking for in a race. A negative split is when you do better, run faster, in the […]
The impending fall of the Willow Creek empire – for fall it surely will – is the watershed for the mega-church management model of church. And the rot has not come from without. Just like Israel in the books of 1 and 2 Kings, the rot has come from within. All that those without have […]
