Recent Blog Posts
If I Went Back to Pastoring I’d Do ‘Pastoral Care’ Differently
May 19, 2012
One of my greatest challenges as a pastor was ‘pastoral care’ and if I was to go back into pastoring a church this is an area where I’d make big changes. During my ministry I championed the idea that we should practise congregational care not ‘pastoral care’. Nowhere do the Scriptures suggest it is the job of pastors to be the primary care-givers in the church. Rather the bible calls congregation members to care...
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Seven Things My Mother Taught Me About Love
May 16, 2012
The bible teaches that human beings are created in the image of God. We rarely image God perfectly. Rather we are like the crazy mirrors at Luna Park. Stand in front of them and you’ll appear unnaturally tall, short, fat or thin. Nonetheless however imperfect the image may be, at our best we see glimpses of the divine in each other. I suspect we see something of how God is toward us in how our mothers are toward us – at least I have...
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What should make Christians different?
May 9, 2012
What is it that makes Christians different? Prayer? Sexuality? Evangelism? A particular belief? For Christians, the answer to this question determines the shape of our lives, for we will focus our time, energy and money on those things we think central to discipleship. The answer of the Scriptures is simple: Christians are different in that they follow Jesus in loving others, with a particular emphasis on loving people living in poverty. So when...
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Review: Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
April 22, 2012
What do you do when you can no longer give yourself to the Jesus of your childhood? That’s the question Marcus Borg, Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State Univerity poses in this short book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. Borg was raised in an evangelical Lutheran church where he learned that Jesus was the divine Son of God who took human form to die on a cross and so save us from our sins and secure our...
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Has Christianity Been a Force for Good?
April 17, 2012
On Q&A last week a viewer poll asked the question “Does religious faith make the world a better place?” Seventy-six percent of voters said “no”. On the program tonight there was derisive laughter in the audience when Christopher Pyne commented that religion can be a force for good. What should we make of this? Christian religious institutions have been involved in some very damaging activities. The Crusades, the long...
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How to Ensure Financial Success Doesn’t Turn Into Spiritual Failure
April 16, 2012
I recently listened to a talk by American businessman Alan Barnhardt in which he described his determination that his financial success not turn into spiritual failure. He had poured over the teachings of Jesus during his college years and saw that wealth was described as a spiritual health hazard. When he took over a modest family business his solution was to set an income cap and give away everything he earned above that. The cap allowed him...
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Why I Am Still a Follower of Jesus
April 15, 2012
Last year my eldest brother gave a speech at my father’s funeral. My other siblings and I had rhapsodised about Dad’s virtues. But my elder brother talked about Dad’s imperfections. He recognised that Dad was flawed like the rest of us. But the thing that impressed him about Dad was Dad’s determination to be a better man. He was a good man, but he wanted to be more than a good man. He wanted to be the best man he could...
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Which Jesus?
April 9, 2012
As I survey the Australian church it seems to me there are three portraits of Jesus commonly found. I call them the forgiving Jesus, the empowering Jesus, and the just Jesus. These portraits shape our values, our mission, our ethics, our piety, our worship and our engagement with the world around us. So the portraits matter. My contention is that when we tend toward one or the other of the three portraits our discipleship is diminished and that...
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It’s the Resurrection, Stupid
April 8, 2012
When I was growing up the death of Jesus Christ on a Roman cross was the defining centre of my understanding of Christianity. Jesus’ death was God’s solution to the estrangement between humankind and God that was caused by our sin. Our wrongdoing demanded punishment of the most severe kind – eternal death. As long as that sin was unpunished it was impossible for anyone to share in eternal life with God. The death of Christ was...
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On Healing
March 6, 2012
2011 was not a good year for my health. It began with the diagnosis that I have Parkinson’s disease and closed with the discovery that I also have Chronic Lymphoctic Leukemia (CLL). At age 45 I was considered young to have acquired both these diseases. Parkinson’s is a movement disorder which has so far caused a tremor and muscle stiffness in my right hand and leg. Over time these symptoms will eventually spread to the rest of my...
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Our Father
March 4, 2012
Jesus invites us to relate to God as "our Father". In this sermon series we explore what this means. In the latest sermon, March 4 2012, we ask what it is for God to be our disciplining Father.
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Review: Remember the Poor. Paul, Poverty and the Greco-Roman World
March 1, 2012
Remember the Poor by Bruce Longenecker is a brilliant piece of work that comprehensively dismantles the notion that care for the poor was a marginal concern for Paul and convincingly demonstrates that it was rather a distinctive feature of Christian living in the Gentile Jesus communities. In the first section of the book Longenecker explores the place of the poor in the Greco-Roman world of the first century CE. Drawing on socio-historical...
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There’s a Whole Lot More to Our Environmental Challenges Than Climate Change
February 5, 2012
Listening to the public environmental discourse at the moment I hear a lot about climate change and little else. The reality is that climate change is but one of many serious environmental challenges confronting the world today. My attention was drawn to this by a 2009 paper “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity”. A collaborative effort by a group of leading earth scientists, the paper identified nine planetary boundaries that, once...
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Child Sponsorship Ain’t What It Used to Be…It’s Better
January 30, 2012
Many aid agencies have radically changed the way they run child sponsorship programs. Fifty years of experience has helped them see that the older model has some glaring weaknesses. New models seek to avoid those weaknesses and are proving much more effective.
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Review: Creatures of the Same God.
January 16, 2012
A proper regard for animals is arguably a significant blind spot in contemporary Christian thinking. It is a blind spot Rev Dr Andrew Linzey, a member of the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has spent his life trying to correct. Linzey has written twenty books and over one hundred articles on the ethical treatment of animals. Creatures of the Same God is a collection of nine of Linzey's essays, each substantially revised for this volume. The collection is somewhat eclectic, covering topics including resources for animal theology in world religions, animal theology from a Christian perspective, conflicts between animal theology and ecotheology, traditions in early Mediterranean and Chinese Christianity that emphasised the importance of animals, and animal inclusive liturgies. What emerges is a strong case that the Christian Church should re-engsge with biblical teaching on animal wellbeing, recognising that Christian theology and church history provide rich veins to mine.
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The Ethics of Sex: Deciphering the Debate Over Sexual Ethics
January 16, 2012
What is a Christian sexual ethic and how does it inform our approach issues such as defacto marriages and homosexual partnerships? This paper introduces the key issues involved in developing a biblically shaped sexual ethic, overviews different approaches and explores the ways key biblical texts are interpreted.
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The Stained Glass Ceiling: Deciphering the Debate Over Gender Roles
January 15, 2012
Differences of opinion over appropriate gender roles exist within the Christian community. This paper provides an introduction to the issue and overviews five interpretive models commonly employed to interpret the main biblical texts and apply them to life today.
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What We Need To Learn About Mission Among the Poor
January 12, 2012
In recent years there has been a growing interest among Christians in serving the poor. Unfortunately our enthusiasm is not always matched by wisdom. Wipf and Stock have published a paper I wrote on what the development sector has to teach us about being enthusiastic and effective. It’s part of a collection of papers on Baptist futures. Download Buy Book Reproduced by permission of Wipf and Stock...
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Life Everlasting
January 1, 2012
What happens when we die? In this four part series we explore the biblical vision of heaven, judgement and the afterlife and discover it is both far removed from popular thinking and profoundly relevant for life.
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Review: The Message and the Kingdom
December 26, 2011
In The Message and the Kingdom, historians Richard Horsley and Neil Silberman "attempt to reconstruct the social history of early Christianity from a wide variety of newly available evidence drawn from recent studies of ancient Roman culture and from archaeological discoveries throughout the Mediterranean world" (chapter 1). Their argument, in summary is: 1. The Roman Empire was an oppressive presence for the majority of the population in the first century Mediterranean world, maintaining an elite in a state of luxury and power by imposing heavy financial burdens on an impoverished peasantry. Rome was creating a new political and economic order in which the emperor was depicted as Saviour of the world, local subsistence economies were transformed to extract surpluses for local political elites and Rome, and dissent was crushed with ruthless violence;
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Has Aid Failed
December 24, 2011
Does aid work? In this 13 minute TED video David Damberger from Engineers Without Borders reflects on projects that went horribly wrong and what he learned about making aid work.
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Cambodia 2011
November 16, 2011
In October 2011 I flew to Cambodia with my CEO and four pastors to look at projects supported by Baptist World Aid Australia. We met amazing people and heard inspirational stories of change.
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The consumer culture in which we are immersed urges us to acquire as many things as our incomes allow. But what if our habit of acquiring more is damaging our relationship with God, eroding our generosity, exploiting people in poorer countries, wreaking havoc on the planet and inflicting suffering on animals? In this book and accompanying small group bible study published by Baptist World Aid Australia you’ll discover a Christ-shaped consuming that embodies love for God, people, the planet and our fellow creatures.
author, Exiles, The Road to Missional, Jesus the Fool