In 2012 Baptist World Aid Australia released my first book, The End of Greed. Consuming as if God, People and the Planet Matter. In it I argue that our habit of acquiring more is damaging our relationships with God, eroding our generosity, exploiting people in poorer countries, wreaking havoc on the planet and inflicting suffering on animals. But there is a better way, a Christ-shaped consuming...
It’s dawning on me that I probably have just ten to fifteen years of good health left. Odds are that ten to fifteen years down the track I will be severely debilitated by Parkinsons or receiving chemo for my leukemia or both. The looming future has created an urgency to my present. It’s caused me to wonder just how I will spend those healthy years. In the movie ‘The Bucket...
Can we contemplate a world where extreme poverty is ended? I believe we can and that it is quite possible for such a world to emerge in my grandchildren's lifetimes. The key is to look beyond poverty as it exists now to see the larger trends over time. And it is these trends that are encouraging
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...
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...
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...
This blog is an attempt to reflect critically upon my faith and life and to share what I am learning with anyone who might be interested. Although the idea for a blog floated around my mind for some years, it was the 2011 diagnosis that I have Parkinsons disease that has spurred me on. At some stage in the next decade or so I will likely have to give up my job and I am hoping this blog will be...
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...
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...
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...