It’s said that CS Lewis was at a conference comparing the world’s great religions. When participants tried to identify what was distinctive about Christianity Lewis suggested “That’s easy. It’s grace.” Lewis was wrong. In Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture David DeSilva points out that grace was well known in the ancient world...
A few weeks back I blogged about what was undoubtedly the worst sermon I have ever heard. Hot on its heels was a sermon I heard by an American woman in a regional city in northern NSW. This however was one sermon that I’d happily sit through again. It was the early 1990’s and I was a youth pastor. Baptist Youth Ministries had brought a group of American youth pastors to Australia...
During my first year of pastoral ministry I experienced a crisis of faith. I had entered theological college four years previously with the confidence of both youth – I was only twenty years old – and fundamentalism. I knew what I believed and knew it with utter certainty to be true. Theological college put paid to that. I discovered students, theologians and philosophers who saw...
In my last post I reported the findings of research into what blocks engagement with Christianity for Australians. The research also provided insight into what fosters engagement. First, while half the population are not open to changing their religious views, half are, including a significant minority (7%) who are very open. Second, the methods most likely to engage those who do not currently...
This week I came across a piece of brilliant market research into Australian attitudes to Christianity and the church conducted in late 2011 by McCrindle research. For those Christians inclined to think of creation and evolution as the key ideological battleground, to assume the Church commands respect, and who are worried about the influence of prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, the report...
Last year I watched my father die. Like many Parkinsons patients he died not from Parkinsons but from the pneumonia brought on by the disease. Parkinsons impacted his ability to swallow, meaning he inhaled small pieces of food and mucous, which developed into aspirated pneumonia. I looked on helplessly as his body, already frail, shrunken and stooped surrendered. It was distressing to watch this...
When I was growing up Nelson Mandela was seen by many in my faith community as a terrorist who belonged in prison, the election of the Hawke government was declared by a key figure in my church to be God’s judgement on the nation, and justice had very little to do with Jesus. The Jesus I knew was the Son of God incarnated as a human being who came to earth to pay the penalty for my sins so...
A few years back the BBC ran a program where they asked leading international figures to identify the defining moment of their lives. One of the interviewees was Desmond Tutu. He took us back to a day when he was just nine years old, to when he was a young black boy living under South Africa’s apatheid regime. Desmond and his mother were walking down the street when a tall white man dressed...
When I finished pastoring at Edgeworth Baptist, Sandy, the kids and I went searching for a new church to belong to. We weren’t looking for perfection, just for somewhere we could all feel connected, where the preaching helped us make sense of life, and where there was a desire to be a positive influence for good in the world. The first and the third were relatively easy to find. I never...
“Scott, I’m not prepared to talk to you because it’s clear you don’t believe what the bible says”. With those words Dave (not his real name), a fellow pastor, hung up the phone. I don’t believe what the bible says? It was the mid 1990s and the Baptist churches in NSW were locked in fierce and at times ugly debate over the roles of men and women in the church...