He survived. But don’t try this at home.

Would you miss Easter if it disappeared?

Once, the great high point of the Christian year, it seems we now struggle to even see regulars for Good Friday. I’m finding that nominal ‘Christmas and Easter’ Anglicans are turning into ‘Christmas only’ Anglicans.

Why is that?

Life is hard and busy. What right thinking person wouldn’t grab the chance to get away over Easter? I’ve no data to back this up but I think the short Easter break is bigger than ever. Combine it with school holidays and you will expect to see a lot of people away.

Easter has less cultural traction than Christmas. Maybe partly because it is a moving feast, it isn’t locked into the psyche or the diary in the same way. With growing biblical illiteracy I’m finding more people don’t know what Easter is for at all. Friends at school have said they feel uncomfortable talking about the death of Jesus with their kids – whereas Christmas & the angels and the  stable is a much easier ‘sell’.

Each year there is a growth in activities that compete at Easter – and pressure mounts each year to open it up for more retail trading.

Part of Easter’s decline must be the declining observance of the church calendar. It may even be more common to hear Lent preached against than practiced.

How do we react to this? Does it faze you at all – perhaps we should be content to preach the cross and resurrection every week? Should we go back to stricter observance of the church calendar? Should we just say our mission field is changing so we need to think of new ways to reach it? Should we provide an Easter counter-culture within the churches and Christian households. We could easily trump the lame celebrations of Easter currently on offer. Why not give the kids Easter presents?

The observance of Christmas provides an interesting parallel. In days of old, the Puritans did ban observance of this Romish mass. They even forced businesses to remain open. Their concern was that every day be one to the Lord, and every Sunday be a significant Lord’s Day. They didn’t want to be swept along by popular superstitious practices that seemed to have little to do with the Gospel, and provided opportunity for drunken immorality.

What would we lose if Easter came off the calendar?

This post will be published at sydneyanglicans.net on 31 March 2010. Please post comments there.

If Ned Kelly is our national hero why don’t we welcome ‘illegals’?

Why do Australians boast about their convict ancestors but would be ashamed to mention convict cousins?

Are outlaw motorcycle gangs the pin to prick any romantic national ideas about lawlessness?

If freedom tolerance and self expression are our great virtues  what place is there for law?

I preached Romans 7 tonight – it is all about the law. I reckon most Australian Christians would see no relevance in the Law. Not so Paul. As he sets out the gospel he gives so much time and space to speaking of the way the law condemns us, exposes sin, is exploited by sin but is thoroughly good. Now written on our hearts by the Spirit, it produces a life of struggle and hope. We dismiss all this talk of law at our peril. If you don’t understand the importance of the Law you can’t really get why the Gospel changes everything & why Jesus is so important.

My fear is that our culture – mostly gentile, and at least ostensibly anti-any-kind-of-law – makes it hard for us to take the Law seriously.

There are few things in this life as satisfying as filling a skip with garbage.

The rectory is being renovated and the old garage is being knocked down. Before the builder could get at it though, there was a decade of clutter to clear. So, a few blokes from church got together last Sunday afternoon. Armed with a sledgehammer, gloves, and a sense of adventure we started pulling rubbish out. Leftover paints, PA Brackets, three garbage bags of bean bag beans! Stuff that someone hadn’t been brave enough to commit to the tip years ago – ‘it might be useful one day, we can’t just toss it.’ Broken furniture, glass shelves, craft materials…

I was surprised at how little we kept and how easy it was to fill the skip. The garage had been a magnet for stuff that was too difficult to process. So it all stayed on site, collecting dust, and providing housing for the rats and the redbacks.

Its not a bad parable for what can happen around church. Its too easy for a church’s life to be choked by a clutter of competing programs. Much better to do less and to do it well, than attempt to do too much. This requires a certain degree of ruthlessness though. It is hard to throw broken old ministries into the proverberbial skip.

How many churches have the choir or youth group or ethnic ministry or congregation that is past its use by date? What was once a good ministry is no longer reaching people with the gospel. Because it is hard to close ministries, it is often left to a crisis until something happens – the leaders quit, the budget can’t be met. Sometimes it is the new rector coming in with a new broom.

Wouldn’t it be better though if we were always committed to de-cluttering? If each spring say, we decided which ministries wouldn’t be happening next year? Give thanks for what has been, but start the year with a fresh slate. Free people up from the busyness of maintaining things that weren’t helping the church mission. That would require a degree of clarity about what was essential and what wasn’t.

If you looked into the proverbial garage now – are there things you can see that need chucking? Would you be able to agree on what should be tossed and what was useful? What would it take for you to order in the skip?

If you want to think more about de-cluttering church you should read Simple Church by Thomas Rainer and Eric Geiger.

This post will go up at sydneyanglicans.net on 17 March 2010. Please comment there.

try googling South Park & Scientology!

Should the Senate have an inquiry into Scientology? Australian of the year, Proffessor Patrick McGorry, who is a mental health expert, thinks so.

I’m not sure. I genuinely feel conflicted on this one.

The allegations are very very serious.

But I’m also nervous about the government deciding what may or may not be an acceptable religion. Is that really a door we want to open? Can’t prosecutions be brought under existing laws?

Their freedoms are our freedoms. You might dismiss them as loopy or see them as more malicious – but how many Australians would see the church in the same light?

What do you reckon?

The Diocese is currently being carved up to create Mission Areas. These Mission Areas are groupings of existing parishes.

What would happen though, if you re-drew parish boundaries on the basis of mission?

• you could change boundaries to better reflect areas that churches connect with in mission. Plenty of boundaries were drawn before the motor car – major roads now create physical and mental barriers that boundaries may not reflect
• you could create new parishes around newly planted churches
• you could amalgamate neighbouring parishes where it would be helpful for mission
• you could identify areas in exisiting parishes that weren’t being reached & carve them off to create a new ‘Mission Parish’. Priority could then be given to think about who could connect with the people in these areas.
• you could create two parishes out of one to help foster church planting and better connections with the whole community.
• you could have some churches without parish boundaries – ethnic churches that draw from further, large regional churches etc

The problem of course, is who the ‘you’ is in the examples above. No-one would trust ‘the Diocese’ to do this. Wouldn’t this be exactly the kind of centralism that every right thinking rector would ignore?

Why not then make it vountary? Give each Parish 6 months to talk to its neighbouring parishes and say where lines should be re-drawn for the sake of mission. If you can’t agree then the lines stay where they are.

Let me give you a quick example of how it might work around Roseville East:

• We could split the existing Parish into two to better reach Castle Cove. We could call Al Stewart and say – we have an empty building & rectory – can you help us find a church planter?  They’d then have a parish to evangelise and we’d need to give people to that task.
• we’d talk to Chatswood about extending our boundary to the railway line or the highway rather than the arbitrary boundary that snakes through the suburb at the moment. We’d want to figure out though who & how the residential high rise and business areas would be reached. Their Chinese ministry may be better placed to do that.
• we’d talk to Roseville about the church they’ve planted in the school in our Parish. Do we keep that overlapping and messy or should a new Parish be created around the school and its catchment area?
• We’d talk to Willoughby East, Willoughby, and Northbridge about the difficulties of reaching the Middle Harbour Peninsula Suburbs. Should we work together to better reach this area? Should this involve some kind of redrawing boundaries or amalgamation or the creation of a new Parish?
• there are lots of churches on the boundaries of Chatswood but no-one church is operating inside the Chatswood CBD. Should we think of ways to work together to create a regional church bigger than any local parish? Could this happen without property?

Those would be great conversations to have. They’d open our eyes to the mission field around us. We’d pray together for the lost and think about how we can do mission together. Whether the boundaries were redrawn may not matter too much. What does matter is doing what we can to have a gospel strategy for the people around us.

I won’t be blogging here for a while.

I’m under doctors orders to massively drop my workload so that I can recover from the post mycoplasma pneumonia fatigue. Even without the orders I just don’t have energy and find myself breathless with any exertion. So I need to figure out what I can and can’t do. But this blog is one of the things on the ‘can’t’ side of ledger. So no more blogging – for now at least. I’ll still post the odd piece at sydneyanglicans.net

If you’re a praying kind of person I’d appreciate prayers – especially for Deborah & kids. Also feel miles behind in getting everything launched at Barneys for 2010.

A week ago I hadn’t heard of mycoplasma pneumonia. But that’s what I’ve got.

I’ve been out of action since just before Christmas. Magic anti-biotics are now kicking in and starting to recover.

Fear we may miss Summer School. Will get away to Forster though for some R&R.

So the blog is shut down till end of Jan.

Romans Wordle from http://gospeldelta.com/tag/romans/

Guess it’s not about me after all?

Gospel Delta have created this telling wordle of Romans.

I’m looking forward to preaching Romans in 2010.

Here’s a wordle I did for 1 Corinthians 13: