Eternity August 2018 - Issue 94

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Number 94, August 2018 ISSN 1837-8447

Brought to you by the Bible Society

Yannick Lawry plays a devil, Screwtape but dreams of...

Remaking the arts for Jesus How God saved my marriage

In China, pastors Franklin work Graham 24/7 to tour

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Obadiah Slope TWICE AS MUCH: There’s going to be twice as much Eternity in Sydney soon. And possibly 100 per cent more than other Aussie cities.

More Eternity cafés that is – there’s one at Town Hall station (with a memorial “Eternity” in Arthur Stace’s cursive handwriting) and another one at Central Station. It is a fair bet that Arthur Stace visited both stations often, although he preferred trams.

THIN ICE: “An abandoned church in Spain has been converted into an indoor skateboard park, breathing new life into a previously crumbling building.” This is the intro to the story about a large church in Spain now used by skateboarders. It’s reported on an Aussie church newspaper website (no names, no pack drill) but under a section for positive news called “the Good News.” Obadiah has nothing against skateboarders, but stories of abandoned churches belong in a “sad news” section surely.

DAILY NEWS: Obadiah has followed the lead of Mrs Obadiah and has been reading the “Daily Office” Scriptures each day for the past few months. It is a lot of Bible – several chapters a day. But it has made me cheerful, and a more grateful Christian. Why didn’t I do this years ago? I ask.

COMFORTER: Obadiah has covered a couple of important church events lately – meetings that made entirely opposite decisions.

Yet leaders in both cases quite sincerely claimed that the Holy Spirit led the outcome. This is the sort of thing that is calculated to make a journo cynical. Working in Christian media is dangerous.

QUOTABLE: “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.

The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” – Max DePree. Hat tip Neal Michell, Livingchurch.org

AUGUST 2018

Franklin Graham to tour JOHN SANDEMAN Son of Billy, evangelist Franklin Graham, will tour Australia in February next year.

“We will share the same lifechanging message of hope my father preached in Australia 60 years ago,” said Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the international Christian relief organisation Samaritan’s Purse, which both have offices in Australia.

“I first went to Australia in 1975 with my good friend Bob Pierce, who founded Samaritan’s Purse.

Since then I’ve had the opportunity to preach in many locations across this incredibly beautiful nation.

I’m looking forward to returning next year to share with the people of Australia that God loves them.”

The tour marks the 60th anniversary of Billy Graham’s 1959 tour that had a major impact on Australia, described as “a great revival” by commentators including historian Stuart Piggin. A total of 150,000 Australians became Christians in the 1959 crusade.

Franklin Graham prays with the crowd at a “Decision America” event in Berkeley, San Francisco. June 2018 The tour dates: • Perth February 9, Perth Arena.

• Darwin February 13, Darwin Convention Centre • Melbourne February 16, Hisense Arena • Brisbane February 18, RiverStage • Adelaide February 20,

Titanium Security Arena • Sydney February 23 and 24, International Convention Centre Asked whether Franklin Graham’s reported closeness to President Donald Trump would affect the mission, Karl Faase, who chairs the Billy Graham organisations in Australia, told Eternity, “It is an issue that affects one sector of the community – people who think that everything Trump does is bad, [but] this does not represent the whole community, or every sector of the Christian church.

“But many of the evangelicals who voted for him were not saying ‘we love Trump’, but rather ‘we don’t love Hillary [Clinton]’. A few weeks ago, Franklin Graham was one of the Christian leaders who took issue with Trump for separating children from their families at the border. He’s not sitting on the sidelines cheering everything Trump does.”

GrahamTour.com.au offers free downloads to publicise the events, courses to help people witness, a chance to volunteer and to register your church. Debate: page 14

News 2-3 In Depth 5-9 Bible Society 10 Opinion 11-16

Quotable

Justine Toh “She just kept berating me over Twitter” Page 13

Uniting Church go-ahead for samesex marriages leads to protests JOHN SANDEMAN The Uniting Church in Australia’s (UCA) National Assembly has voted to allow same-sex couples to marry in the church. The decision means the church will hold “two equal and distinct statements of belief on marriage.”

A new marriage rite for “two persons” to marry, will sit alongside the UCA’s existing marriage service for men and women. The existing statement of belief is that “For Christians, marriage is the freely given consent and commitment in public and before God of a man and a woman to live together for life.” The new additional statement of belief was crafted to be as similar as possible and reads, “For Christians, marriage is the freely given consent and commitment in public and before God of two people to live together for life.”

Last month’s meeting of the

265-member Assembly in Box Hill, Melbourne, decided the issue by a secret written vote.

The vote in favour of change was overwhelming. The new rite will be available from late September.

“This decision follows many years of reflection, prayer and discernment, and I want to thank Assembly members for the way they have responded with grace to what is a difficult conversation for many people of faith,” said Uniting Church President Dr Deidre Palmer.

Dr Palmer acknowledged the ministry and struggle of LGBTIQ people in the Uniting Church over many years. “I know that this conversation is painful and difficult for you,” said Dr Palmer, directly addressing LGBTIQ church members. “We also acknowledge those who for whatever reason have not been able to support this change – and your pain and difficulty in this space.

“Please rest assured that your rights to follow your beliefs on marriage will be respected and protected.

“I thank you all for modelling a loving Christian community, holding together and caring for each other, across our diversity of strongly and faithfully held views.”

The ability to hold more than one view is what the UCA was set up to cope with, according to former president Andrew Dutney.

“Making unity in diversity visible, is what the UCA was built for,” he said in a response to the Assembly result, arguing that diversity is in the DNA of a church that includes Methodist sermons (Arminian) and Presbyterian (Calvinist) confessions as “witnesses the Uniting Church must listen to and which ministers must study.”

Some members of the UCA are concerned about the change in marriage definitions. Dr Hedley Fihaki, President of the Assembly

of Confessing Congregations, a conservative group of UCA members said, “In our view, the UCA Assembly has removed itself from the faith and unity of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

“On behalf of the National Council of the Assembly of Confessing Congregations (ACC), we therefore say, in the strongest terms possible, that we reject not only this decision but the authority of the National Assembly, and therefore stand aside from this Council of the Church.”

Unrest within the UCA has spread beyond the ACC. Some members of a network of large evangelical UCA churches have begun a “40 days of discernment process” to determine how to respond. This network includes many of the largest churches in the UCA, including NewLife church in Robina, Queensland, and Seeds Uniting in southern Adelaide.

P R E ACHIN G CO N F EREN CE 3-4 S E P TE MBER 2018

PREACHING IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE BIBLICAL PREACHING IN A POST-CHRISTIAN CULTURE

Speaker John Dickson

Register online: www.morling.edu/events or via email enquiries@morling.edu.au

Event’s Sponsor

NEWS

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Indigenous challenge from NCLS

News briefs FIRING LINE: Want to tell young people about Jesus? “Ignition” wants to help churches run interdenominational evangelistic events in 2019. They will provide seed funding, speakers, training courses, gospel tracts and follow-up courses. www.ignition.org.au

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Relations in Churches 7%

43%

16%

13% 35%

7%

17%

23% 37%

GET FOUND: Francis Chan is a US preacher, who runs Eternity Bible College, which has nothing to do with us. But to show we don’t hold that against him, we are happy to tell you that Chan will headline this year’s “Rice” rallies in Auckland, Melbourne and Sydney. This year’s theme is “FOUND.” www. ricemovement.org

My church should do more to build relationships with Aboriginal people Churches should acknowledge that they are recipients of “stolen land” used for church buildings

Strongly Agree | Agree | Neutral | Disagree | Strongly Disagree

JOHN SANDEMAN “Christian churches share in the good and the bad of this national story of Indigenous and Nonindigenous relations” researchers Steve Bevis, Miriam Pepper and Ruth Powell report in a NCLS Research occasional paper.

“The results reveal a broad level of support both for increasing local church-based involvement in the task of reconciliation and for government-based policy initiatives that would close the gap in health and employment.

“It is when looking at the results for individual and church-level action that the story loses its shine.”

Offer of really good news REBECCA ABBOTT Hundreds of thousands of Australian children and their families will be introduced to the Christ of Christmas this year through one small book published

by Bible Society.

Last year 250,000 copies of the book The Really Good News of Christmas were distributed. The response was so positive that Bible Society is urging churches and schools to pre-order copies now for this Christmas season.

This year many more copies of the updated book will be distributed. Kids are being encouraged to share the good news themselves by personalising an activity page before giving the book to a friend.

The renamed book The Really Good News of Christmas – For

Me! tells the Christmas story in fresh, child-friendly language, accompanied by vivid illustrations by artist Emma Randall. Aimed at children aged four to eight, the book explains the Christmas story in the context of creation and redemption, including Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

Digital resources based on the book are also available to download, including an animated video and an “instant nativity play,” complete with invitations, posters and costume designs.

“We used the Really Good News of Christmas instant nativity on Christmas Eve last year,” said Luke Williams, minister of The Billabong, a Uniting church in Canningvale, Western

Australia. “It was a great way for our congregation to engage with the [Christmas] story and then take home the books … to give to friends, neighbours and family.

“Christmas is a time when people are a little bit more open to the message of the Christian faith. It was a great opportunity to give away something non-threatening to our friends, as a way of sharing the good news.”

Churches, schools and other organisations can now pre-order up to 500 free copies of the book online, with free delivery also thrown in. While you’re at it, you can also place a pre-order for next year’s Easter book The Seriously Surprising Story.

TOUGH FIELD: Wrestling the prize of Australian Christian Book of the Year this month will mean topping a high-quality list. Here are some we are watching.

• Mr Eternity: The Story of Arthur Stace, Roy Williams and Elizabeth Meyers, Acorn Press • Martin Luther: A Wild Boar in the Lord’s Vineyard, Mark Worthing, Morning Star Publishing • Jesus the Game Changer: The Book of the Series, Karl Faase with George Marriott and Jane Faase, Olive Tree Media • A Doubter’s Guide to Jesus: An Introduction to the Man from Nazareth for Believers and Skeptics, John Dickson, Zondervan • Known by God: A Biblical Theology of Personal Identity, Brian Rosner, Zondervan • The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History, Meredith Lake, NewSouth Publishing

OPEN EVENING 7.00pm Monday 27 August 2018

Wondering what studying at Bible college is like?

Trying to find which college is right for you?

Come along to our Open Evening!

You’ll learn about the full-time and part-time study options, see the campus and meet our lecturers, registrars and students.

Supper will be served. No RSVP required - just come along, we'd love to see you. Bring a friend!

CENTRE FOR CROSS CULTURAL MISSION

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AUGUST 2018

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Radio amplifies justice and loving our neighbours During a recent field trip, FEBC Australia’s National Director, Rev. Kevin Keegan, discovered that in some countries where FEBC programmes are heard, people are being literally farmed for their skin.

“I was horrified,” said Rev. Keegan. “We live today in a beauty-conscious world, where people pay well to look beautiful.

But at what cost?”

Skin farms exist today in Asia to feed this longing for beauty. Young boys and girls are taken, tricked, or sold and their skin grafted off in order to make collagen for antiageing creams and other beauty products. Large areas of skin are also removed for use in plastic surgeries and other cosmetic procedures. When the skin grows back, the procedures are repeated until the victims are of no further use.

“Such actions are horrifying and they break the heart of God. As part of our radio programming, FEBC is letting people hear of their rights and the aid available. We are helping communities become aware of the signs of these terrible practices, and how to work to prevent them. One listener who fled from captivity and was connected with an on-ground support partner said, “When I heard your [FEBC] programmes I had the strength to reach out and get help… thank you for saving my life.”

It is impossible to know the full extent of modern slavery. What FEBC does know, via its field partners, is that it affects many millions of people worldwide,

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When I heard your radio programs I had the strength to reach out and get help… thank you for saving my life.”

The buying and selling of children, women and men generates an estimated $150 billion in profits annually for traffickers. with almost half believed to live in India. Global estimates, by the International Labour Organisation (ILO, a United Nations agency) put the figure at more than 40 million1.

The victims are young girls experiencing multiple rapes daily in brothels. Eight-year-old boys forced to work in blisteringly hot and unsafe factories to produce cheap goods for the West – barely

sleeping, eating or drinking.

Innocent children working in fields or forced into begging. Human slavery includes: • Child marriage • Criminal exploitation • Domestic servitude • Labour • Organ harvesting • Sexual exploitation FEBC is able to play a huge

part in preventing such atrocities because of radio’s reach.

Distance and illiteracy are not barriers. FEBC radio programmes broadcast the tell-tale signs, so communities can be alerted to the danger of people being relocated against their will.

For example, women in India who are trafficked into sex work are drugged and transported via train, often over a day’s journey.

“Our programmes alert people to the signs: have you seen a woman on the train who has slept the whole journey? Has she not gotten up to feed herself, visit a rest room? We encourage our listeners – if you spot this, alert the authorities,” said Rev. Keegan.

He shared about Mao – married at 16 in child marriage. By 18, her husband sold her into a brothel.

“The person she had trusted had betrayed her. She underwent

mental trauma, visited our radio station and stayed overnight. She wanted to commit suicide. Yet she heard our programme about ‘never giving up in life’ and was inspired.

Our team counselled her and she got to point where she could set up a small grocery shop. She generated an income, and now leads an independent life.”

This widespread education via radio has impact. After listened to a programme on sex trafficking awareness, a teacher in India made contact. “He suspected it was happening in his area, as many women and children were leaving to find work and never coming back or making contact again,” said Rev. Keegan. “He formed a group among other leaders. Now any child or woman who leaves to seek work has to provide all the details of the agent, who they are working with, and ID cards are provided. This provides greater security and safety.”

The buying and selling of children, women and men generates an estimated $150 billion in profits annually for traffickers.

“God wants us to work for justice – especially for the vulnerable.

One of the things that gladdens my heart in the global ministry of FEBC is how, through radio, not only do we offer the comfort of a friendly voice and the hope of Christ, but also how we are a voice for the voiceless,” said Rev. Keegan.

1. /www.justiceandcare.org/

“When I heard your (FEBC) programs I had the strength to reach out and get help… thank you for saving my life.”

Listener who fled from captivity and connected with an on-ground support partner.

Radio : s e u c s e r

g n i t n e v e r P y r e v a l s n moder

40+ million people trapped in modern slavery* FEBC radio programs: - Make known the signs to watch out for, so communities are protected.

- Direct trapped people to on-ground aid.

- Overcome the barriers of distance and illiteracy.

Support FEBC today. Go to febc.org.au to learn more. *source: https://www.justiceandcare.org/ (Ministry Partner)

FEBC Australia - PO Box 183 Caringbah NSW 1495 Phone: 1300 720 017 | office@febc.org.au | febc.org.au ABN. 68 000 509 517

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3 PAGES ART SPECIAL Yannick Lawry as Screwtape for Clock and Spiel

Daring to put God on the stage

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I busted up our marriage and God fixed it.

Anne Lim page 9

Clock & Spiel: theatre that’s professional and Christian at the same time ANNE LIM When a theatre work is called “daring,” it normally signifies nudity or bad language or other elements likely to discomfit an audience.

But when Christian theatre company Clock & Spiel Productions presents works that are “culturally daring,” they envisage something entirely different.

“Now, when the rest of the world is being daring by pushing the bounds of morality, we want to be brave enough to share his light and his truth in a way that is compelling and relevant to people – not just Christians, to all people,” says Hailey McQueen, an actor and scriptwriter who has set up Clock & Spiel Productions with fellow actor Yannick Lawry.

As Christians, Yannick and Hailey want to produce distinctive works that honour God and share his light – not only in the world view they present on stage but in the way they deal with artists and crew in an industry that is “proudly secular and antagonistic to faith,” in Hailey’s words.

“There’s little doubt that we live in a post-Christian society where it’s become unfashionable, even offensive, to voice an absolute belief in the truth, but we feel like theatre is a realm that’s still available to talk about these things in an open and honest way, to ask important questions, eternal questions,” says Hailey.

Yannick adds: “We believe that theatre is one of the last forums where culture and controversy

can be reflected and presented in a way which encourages people to reassess their position rather than react.”

Through Clock & Spiel productions, Hailey and Yannick want to explore unpopular notions of objective morality, truth, certainty, goodness and humanity’s need for a saviour.

Their vision for Clock & Spiel grew out of the unexpected success of their first creative collaboration, The Screwtape Letters, which starred Yannick as the devilishly devious Screwtape and George Zhao as his sidekick, Toadpipe.

Hailey’s adaptation of the C.S. Lewis classic – a series of letters between two demons trying to undermine the faith of a new Christian – enjoyed three sell-out seasons. It began with a low-key test run in Sydney in 2015, then embarked on a five-week tour of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra in 2016 and, by popular demand, played a season in Adelaide in 2017.

In all, they played 42 performances in four cities, travelled 4619km by road and reached 4874 people, with 86 per cent of seats sold.

“After our first test season of Screwtape Letters, I’d never seen anything like that and we knew God’s hand was all over it,” comments Yannick.

“Most independent theatre companies would expect an absolute maximum budget of 65 per cent of seats sold, so this was really incredible, and we knew we had to take it one step further.

“Since Screwtape wrapped up in

2017, we have been working very hard to come up with a season that we think is going to be right for Sydney in 2018.”

Yannick says both plays being presented as part of our 2018 Heart, Soul season – Hell Hole and Freud’s Last Session – are “unafraid of presenting a Christian world view, stating a belief in a spiritual realm, the truth and hope of the gospel and true-to-life conversion experiences ... sometimes in the very words of those whom God has touched.

“For many Christians and church groups, Clock & Spiel Productions are looking to present work which gives an opportunity to invite unbelievers to see something highly professional which doesn’t look to ‘preach’ but rather present the truth of what we believe simply and certainly. Our prayer is that this precursor to evangelism gives many of our brothers and sisters the opportunities to bring friends and family members to shows – presented in the neutral space of the theatre – which begin real conversations of eternal significance.”

Hailey adds: “We also care deeply about excellence and so we want to honour people for their time and their skills, particularly in an industry where, sadly, honour is lacking and often cynicism and ego get in the way of love and compassion.”

Hell Hole by Jo Kadlecek is a play set in New York in the 1920s about socialist-turned-Catholic social justice activist Dorothy Day. It will play just one night at the Seymour

Centre on August 25.

“She was a fantastic woman, single mother, humanitarian, suffragette sympathiser and her radical story of conversion and godly obedience is a real counter to the cultural narrative that we experience every day of ‘do whatever it takes to make you happy,’ ” says Yannick.

“She lived against the grain, unashamedly, and it will be our delight to give this show its world premiere – a moving performance, a warm reading essentially, at the Seymour Centre.”

The year’s main production – Freud’s Last Session by Mark St Germain – is an imagined conversation between Oxford don C.S. Lewis and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, set in England in 1939. Aimed at audiences who are hungry for more C.S. Lewis, it will run at the Seymour Centre from October 30 to November 10.

“It covers their conversation, which is on the eve of the Second World War, and ranges from subjects of sex and identity as the men move from conflict to common ground and back again,” says Yannick.

Hailey and Yannick first met on stage in 2014 when they were cast as husband and wife in a play called The God of Carnage.

“That play is not one of marital bliss – in fact, I had to vomit all over his lap every single night.

It was some kind of concoction of custard,” recalls Hailey. “But despite this we actually got along really well ... and it was just a really fabulous meeting of two people.”

Intrigued by Yannick’s

unavailability to rehearse on Sundays and a stray sentence about studying at Moore College, Hailey plucked up the courage to ask him if he was a Christian. When he said yes, their friendship and creative partnership began.

The overwhelming success of the Screwtape Letters prepared them well for the difficulties and realities of producing commercial theatre – demanding that they upskill in areas such as accountancy and payroll, working with agents, drawing up contracts, building a website, dealing with big budgets.

They plan to hold Q&A sessions after some of their shows so that people who have had their world view challenged can ask the questions that might be burning as the curtain goes down.

As they grow the brand, Hailey and Yannick will concentrate on touring the metropolitan centres of Sydney, Brisbane Melbourne and Adelaide. But they hope to be able to take tours of The Screwtape Letters, Freud’s Last Session, Hell Hole and other shows to regional cities and towns from 2021.

“We want to be able to pay people award rates for their work … we want to make sure that our productions are of the absolutely highest standard so that even if people don’t engage with the material well, they won’t be able to deny that it was a performance of the highest quality that they were witnessing.

“However, we will not step away from professing the true faith that we have in Jesus and we want to be able to do that in a safe space where people feel valued and heard.”

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The SPARC that ignites artists KYLIE BEACH

Josh Cunliffe

The Christian creative conference space is a crowded landscape these days and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out what differentiates one gathering from the next. Not all conferences survive.

Yet as the SPARC team prepare for their annual National Gathering at the end of August, they exude a quiet confidence in the health of the community they’ve been steadily building for the past six years.

SPARC is an initiative of Christian Media & Arts Australia designed to foster a community of Christian creatives.

In buzzy website lingo it’s “a cultural movement that seeks to mobilise a body of Christians who are Artists and Creatives, to be an intentional and transformative cultural influence.”

This clear directive allows director Michael Laverty to approach his role with the question: “How does SPARC better serve the creative community across Australia?”

“Our vision has been established since our very first conference,” Laverty explains.

“SPARC exists for beauty and for glory. Our mission is to encourage creatives to enkindle the heart of Christ, by living expansive and gracious lives of freedom, for beauty and glory.”

The signs of Christian

Archibald Prize finalist Jessica Le Clerc paints immersed in God’s art. celebrity are absent at SPARC – a remarkable feat, given the talent of those in the room. The gathering’s TED-style speakers sit dispersed among the crowd and make new friends over coffee in the breaks.

Equality isn’t performed at SPARC – it just is.

Everything that takes place is marked by sensitivity to the tensions Christian artists wrestle with, and the National Gathering

has become a safe space to do that wrestling. It allows room for real conversations about how artists can negotiate the tension between art and faith and find their place in their church and community.

“We don’t fear what we’re uncomfortable with,” explains Laverty. “We can have difficult conversations and still love like Christ. We can show mercy [the theme of this year’s National Gathering] and think critically. We can agree and disagree.”

This year’s SPARC National Gathering will feature US rap artist Propaganda along with a host of Australian speakers, including highly respected veteran of the advertising and film industry, Simon Lister.

Lister is a UNICEF photographer and will discuss a yet-to-be announced documentary series that follows his travels across the earth and explores the incomparable power of an image.

In 2015, fine artist Jessica Le Clerc became an Archibald Prize finalist for her portrait of artist David Hart, the son of worldrenowned artist Pro Hart.

“The Hart family history and David’s personal story have always fascinated me,” says Le Clerc.

“They are from a small farming community like myself and grew up on the land. Yet they still encouraged art and expression in a

way that has affected our country deeply.

“I never went to an art gallery as a child. I didn’t even see a piece of art till I left home. The trees and the grass, the morning and the night sky are the major influences of art, of God, of understanding beauty … when I see dusk light on a gum tree I’m with God. Painting others immersed in his art is what I know to do.”

At SPARC, Le Clerc discovered a spiritual “wide open space” that affected her deeply.

“SPARC was the beginning of me being courageous enough to believe what I was doing was both necessary and important,” she says.

Sam Dewhurst is a creative director, brand strategist and founder of the values-driven brand process trademarked The Monostory Method, and a member of the SPARC team.

Dewhurst characterises SPARC attendees as “brave” and the National Gathering as a formational space where creative hunger is seen, known and empowered.

Her passion is the business artist, a person whose ideas and education intersect with their vision for problem solving and commercial viability.

“Who should be leading change, influencing culture and solving problems better than business artists who see and recognise a creative God in the everyday?” she asks.

2018 Bush Church Aid Victoria

Spring Lunches & Events Join us to hear about the work of BCA as we reach Australia for Christ

RTC Preaching Conference 2018

Wed 26th - Thurs 27th September Venue: RTC Melbourne Campus, Level 3, 221 Queen St, Melbourne For more information & registration: rtc.edu.au/events Featuring Dr. Iain Duguid

Mon 3 Sept

2–2pm Glen Waverley Anglican, Spring Lunch*

Tues 4 Sept

12–2pm Holy Trinity, Flora Hill (SE Bendigo), Spring Lunch*

Wed 5 Sept

12–2pm All Souls’ Anglican, Sandringham, Spring Lunch*

Wed 5 Sept

7pm St James’ Ivanhoe, Youth & Young Adults Dessert Night

Thurs 6 Sept

12–2pm St Paul’s Anglican Church, Warragul, Spring Lunch*

RSVP Tuesday 28 August to victoria@bushchurchaid.com.au or call 03 9457 7556 * Spring Lunches cost $20 per person Reaching Australia for Christ since 1919

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Read the Bible, then write a song KYLIE BEACH

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Hillsong Church

Cassandra Langton oversees thousands of staff and volunteers as the Global Worship and Creative Pastor for Hillsong Church, but she talks more about Scripture and people than she does about task, strategy or albums.

She describes her role simply: “Wherever you find creativity at Hillsong Church, somehow we’re involved,” but she’s not just talking about the worship bands for Sunday services and the occasional Christmas, Mother’s or Father’s Day item.

In fact, Langton manages 170 worship, creative and television staff, who in turn oversee 10,509 volunteers. That’s in Australia.

She’s also responsible for about 25,000 staff and volunteers in 21 other countries with Hillsong churches and has oversight for weekly creative “team nights” in each country, a creative arts academy and the creative elements in each of the church’s 13 global conferences.

Yet Langton’s top priority when it comes to her team is good, oldfashioned discipleship because “we’re Christian first and the pursuit of God matters more than anything.”

That’s reassuring news for the 50 million-odd Christians in churches around the world who sing Hillsong songs in any given week. Yet Langton doesn’t plan to legislate what the church’s E

‘The day I walked into Koorong’ TAMARYN RICKETTS, CUSTOMER

over my Bible and was led to Psalm 18. That whole passage has fed my hope in such a powerful way.

Thank you Jesus.

Going forward, that day changed my life; I am now the most gracious fruit bearer of a sound mind in God’s loving grace: I quit smoking, I don’t drink alcohol any more and stopped cursing. My heart has been transformed.

I have accepted Jesus into my life; my partner asked me to marry him on Christmas Eve; I was baptised in the ocean at San Remo on the 6 February 2018; I have beared witness to others coming to Christ; he is restoring my family; I have been able to gift Bibles and pay it forward.

Praise God for giving me vision when the darkness blinded me.

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wikimedia / StAnselm

In late August 2017, I walked into Koorong. My hair was dark, my face in lines of despair. I had soul but not life, broken and lost, so blind that I just couldn’t see. It was the first day in forever I had picked up the Bible and read from it.

That was the day I met Nicola, a worker in Koorong, Blackburn, Vic. An avid bookworm, I was asked to go in and pick up a Bible called “The Message” for my partner, who had been in a Christian drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre at Nyora in Victoria called Remar Australia for a month. I was heading in for my first visit and church service that Sunday.

Months before, I had a vision of his deceased grandmother, a simple message from her, a godly woman, that I must “lead him back to God.” Now I don’t know about anyone reading this, but to tell an addicted person whom you are separated from and who you had to turn your back on for their own good and for your own health ... that message, it was hard, especially for a non-believer as I was at that time. I didn’t understand how it would be met but I didn’t need to at that point; I was just the person chosen to give the message. And by the love and grace of God, he knew it was time to seek help, and that started what will now be the rest of my walk as a woman of faith as well.

My partner – now with God’s blessing over us and the gift of forgiveness, my fiancé – had suffered greatly with drug abuse, namely ice. A very broken man, and now he is 10 months free of all addictions.

The day I walked into Koorong, I was there for him – a typical story of “I was spiritual, not religious.”

I had a warped vision of what being a Christian was, almost like drinking from a glass and looking through the bottom into what was a clear prism yet created a thick and distorted view.

I walked through the door and a bookstore excites me at the best of times but this had a feeling about it, a blessing. I didn’t have much money, but I knew what I wanted.

I asked Nicola for a hand in finding the Bible and her warm persona and kindness was almost like that big hug I had been waiting for: that warmness is what I would come to find is Christ working

The Koorong store in Blackburn, Victoria.

... I didn’t have much money but I knew what I wanted.”

within us and his spirit shining through us. What an absolute gift.

I was tallying up my money in my head and wondering how I can get myself one also, speaking with Nicola about how I can and saying I will just come back. She went away and came back and said “this is a gift for you.”

I don’t even think I knew what to say. I am pretty sure tears prickled in my eyes, and if they didn’t then they certainly started when I got home. It was the most sincere gift and I knew what having a Bible meant: it meant he wanted me to get to know him.

I asked if she could write in it and the Scripture chosen is now almost a way of living and resting in him as I await restoration and purpose: “The Lord will fight for

you; you need only be still” (Exod 14:14).

What Nicola didn’t know at that point was my testimony. My personal story is one of triumph. I was and in some parts still am an abused woman multiple times over – the cycle I never knew how to break and almost felt like that was all I would ever amount to.

I had suffered a marriage breakdown in 2012, which I am still recovering from. My two daughters from that marriage and I are experiencing a painful separation of our rights that has so far lasted three years and counting – maternal alienation and a form of domestic abuse by proxy.

My home had been burned down by arson in 2015 and I lost all material possessions. I had suffered many mental breakdowns and been in and out of hospitals for mental health and on so many different medications. I found it hard to leave the house and sat on the couch for a year, barely even living. Don’t get me wrong: I pretended I was happy but inside I was in the type of pain that only those that have been in the dark can comprehend. I was broken.

That was the first day I prayed

Psalm 18 ... That whole passage has fed my hope in such a powerful way ... ” COLIN RAWLINS, CUSTOMER SERVICE, ADELAIDE

God’s presence is shown very clearly in the lives of two customers from our Adelaide Store.

The story goes like this: One day a customer came into our store, searching for a suitable Bible which she wanted to buy for her mother to read. After belonging to the Muslim faith for most of her life, this customer had just become a Christian herself. She said that her mother had recently shown an interest in the Christian faith and had asked for a Bible to compare with the Koran.

Her mum was a woman who appreciated the finer things of life and therefore she wanted to buy the best one she could find, and she didn’t care how much it cost – she just wanted her mother to be encouraged to read it.

After much discussion, she chose a leather-bound NIV Bible which was quite expensive. I prayed over the Bible asking for God’s blessing over the choice of the Bible, and that, as her mother read it, God would speak to her heart.

The very next day, an extremely excited daughter returned to the store praising God. Her mother had sat down and immediately read about the good news of our Lord and Saviour – a wonderful miracle had occurred at 3am that night, as God revealed himself to her mother.

A few days later, the mother came into the store to purchase some Christian books. Being accustomed to the Muslim faith, she was an avid reader. At that time, by the way she spoke, one would have thought that she had been a Christian all her life. Soooo ... she went back home with over $800 of Christian books to read!

Another amazing miracle! But wait, there’s more ...

Sometime later, both mother and daughter returned to Koorong relating the story of how God had performed yet another miracle in their lives. The mother was on her way to Glenelg Beach, where she was to be baptised, when her Muslim ex-husband, who had heard of her impending baptism, tried to run her off the road. His attempts were fruitless.

Triumphantly, she proclaimed, “God protected me from an awful fate, and I was baptised despite this traumatic experience!”

And this is only one of many amazing stories from my 20 years working in the Adelaide Store.

RHEBAN BRADLEY, PREVIOUS STORE MANAGER, BLACKBURN

My first day as the manager of the Blackburn store in Melbourne was one I will never forget.

I had a request to come to the front counter as a customer wanted to see me. The customer had a huge amount of stock that, from a distance, I suspected he wanted to return. My assumption was correct but not for the right reason.

I don’t know if I could call him a customer; he was, in fact, a thief.

See, he had stolen $400 worth of stock and the Holy Spirit had convicted him to return the CDs, videos (yes, videos!), books and Bibles, as he had given his life to Jesus.

He admitted the stock was stolen and expected the police would need to be involved. I showed grace as I had been shown grace and forgiveness from Jesus for my sins, and did not involve the police.

He then became a regular paying customer and the Holy Spirit turned his life around.

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Cassandra Langton leads 25,000 creatives for Hillsong. songwriters pen anytime soon.

“I think they’re meant to write in ways that help the church articulate who God is, not necessarily what he’s saying to us.

I think the role of worship is to glorify God and lift him up.”

Instead of telling Hillsong’s songwriters what to write, she’d rather ask what they’re discovering about God and reading in the Bible, and encourage them to find the songs the church should be singing.

Langton is aware of the critics, though, and says she was recently challenged by someone “with a

social justice bent” who said, “I don’t understand why your writers aren’t writing more sending songs … songs that send people out to the mission field.”

The creative team wrestled with the critique, and Langton returned to Scripture, finding clarity by reflecting on Isaiah 6 – the passage when God’s robe fills the temple and the seraphim sing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

“In that moment, while they’re lifting up who God is and they’re talking about God’s attributes and character, God does the sending,” she explains. “God says ‘Who am I

going to send?’ and he finds Isaiah and he sends him.

“If we continue to talk about God and his nature and his character and his attributes, if we talk about Jesus and his atoning sacrifice, if we talk about the Trinity, then we give people the courtesy of actually finding God and allowing him to speak to them directly and uniquely.”

Langton says she personally finds it “a little bit hurtful” when Christians critique Hillsong’s music as unbiblical or based on their experience decades ago.

“We come out of a Baptist and Anglican background, my husband and I, so one of our main quests has been a return to Scripture and to make sure what we do is biblical. As a church, I think we’ve always had a high value on Scripture. I think how that’s outworked itself has probably looked different over the journey.”

Langton says she gets why a 40-year-old might say that a song written by an 18-year-old songwriter “isn’t about the vastness of God” or doesn’t specifically contain the theology they’re looking for. Yet she insists young writers write out of an “18-year-old understanding the love of God” and “from a really vulnerable, real place of discovery” that is also valuable.

“I think as all of our writers have grown up and matured, their depth of understanding about God has matured, but then, so did Paul’s in

his writings in Scripture.”

Langton hopes people who have looked at Hillsong’s music in the past will look again and find themselves surprised. If they’re not, though, that’s OK with Langton because “there’s plenty of incredible worship expressions and you have to find what works for you and for your church.”

Taking on the leadership of Hillsong Worship and Creative in 2011, Langton was the first oversight not from the on-platform worship team. Previous oversights had included well-known worship leaders Darlene Zschech, Reuben Morgan and Joel Houston.

For many pastors, the mere thought of wrangling Christian creatives for a living would be enough to send them on sabbatical.

Yet Langton remains not only undaunted by the task, but fiercely protective of her team.

“The number of people when I started my job who go ‘Oh, you’ve got those weird creatives! They’re difficult, they’re melancholy, they’re …’ I actually don’t think they are. And I don’t think we should define people like that. I don’t think that’s the right way to talk about people.

“I think when you say people are dysfunctional, it’s the wrong way to address people. People are unique and individuals, so you find the gold in them and you begin to mine for it. I think that’s beautiful.

That’s what Jesus does with us.”

Singing of God’s peace for mental health BEN MCEACHEN Ben Hastings is no stranger to the power of songwriting. Member of the Hillsong Worship team – the global posse that collaborates on music crafted for singing in churches – Hastings was a chief lyricist on O Praise the Name, So Will I, Crowns and Rescuer. Quite a playlist of music proclaimed by believers around the world.

But the understated, amiable bloke from Ireland is quietly proud of Peace. Part of Hillsong Young and Free’s latest album, III, Ben’s song began life as an intimate dose of comfort and care. “My wife suffers from a few different anxiety disorders,” shares Ben about Jessie,

who discussed her struggles this year at Hillsong’s Worship and Creative conference. “For the longest time I’ve wanted to write a song that she could sing when she was having a panic attack.”

Ben describes Hillsong Worship as a “shared community of songs” without borders, and his musical attempt to help Jessie found its way to Young and Free. “Peace ended up being that song,” he sums up about its eventual form.

From a promising student at Hillsong Bible College in Sydney, through positive relationships and the “kind” encouragement of Global Creative pastor Cass Langton, Ben has become an entrenched Hillsong Worship

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songwriter. While he’s part of a ministry with enormous influence, he’s still stunned by what Peace can do in the pews. Sorry, seats.

“It’s been amazing watching the song roll out in church, and see the ‘lean in’ from people – and the conversations it’s started around positive mental health at church.

“It’s a big topic and I know it’s one we don’t talk about very often, so I do think it’s really important … if it does trigger something for someone listening, they should go to talk with a medical professional.

My wife Jessie and I both go to a therapist to talk about it, to help her through it.”

At no point does Ben suggest Peace could solve someone’s mental

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health issues. Instead, he hopes his song could, at least, help them to “feel understood in a church environment.

“Perhaps it will also give them something to hold to, in those moments.” What should they be left holding on to? “It’s the peace of the Holy Spirit,” explains Ben of Peace’s peace, before nodding to Philippians 4:7.

“It’s the peace that surpasses all understanding, a promise that’s been given to us from God.”

Ben Hastings, song writer for ‘Oh Praise the Name’ and ‘So will I’.

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IN DEPTH

8

AUGUST 2018

What working with God looks like KARINA KREMINSKI

no agenda and, rather, the basis is an unconditional acceptance of the person. This is not just a nice idea; it is the way that Jesus lived his life. Notice that Jesus made friends with sinners and those who were unacceptable to society. More broadly, God put on flesh in order to save us and show us his love.

He did this not with an agenda or with a condition that we would get our act together first; he came to us while we were sinners. God loves us as we are. Of course, when we come to be in God, we learn to reflect him and so we change.

As we are drawn to the attractive light of God, we want to let go of anything that stops us from receiving and growing in that light.

Regardless, God loves each of us unconditionally; we don’t have to clean ourselves up before he can love us.

What if we practised true friendship with our neighbours, sacrificial love and cruciformity?

Would that not have an impact on our local neighbourhood? Would that not be a witness to the gospel?

This has been especially important to me in the work that I do in my community. I had initially set out to move into the inner city of Sydney to plant a church, but instead God told me to simply love the people in my neighbourhood and serve there. At first I was very disappointed with this revelation.

I had wanted to start up a church so that it looked like I was actually doing something for God. Instead

Pexels / Helena Lopes

I’m often surprised by how complicated Christians can make things when usually the simplest action is what is called for. I was a leader in a church for many years and I found that I often fell into the trap of spending most of my time creating strategies, planning methodologies, taking up new programmes and putting on very time-consuming events when it came to ministry. This is what took up my days.

What I find is that when it comes to thinking about how we can connect with our community where God has placed us, we especially tend to gravitate towards complex actions and plans rather than thinking about the most obvious and simple ways that we can do this.

The church in the West today is no longer at the centre of power; we have lost our influence and many people are deeply suspicious about the institution of the church. Most people don’t wake up on a Sunday morning and think about the attractive church sign out the front of the local church advertising this month’s sermon series and think, “That looks interesting I might pop in there today.” That doesn’t happen in the secularised innercity suburb where I live anyway.

Some people in my neighbourhood are militantly against the church, but most people I know simply don’t think about the church at all. Church does not figure in their thoughts, aspirations or cultural narratives. They don’t see the purpose and they can’t imagine any personal rationale for the church.

What people do resonate with, however, is seeing individuals who embody authentic, sacrificial love in the context where they live. When we flesh out the good news of the gospel in our neighbourhoods before we proclaim it, this indicates that our actions match up to our words. In a culture that turns its nose up at lack of authenticity in a flash, this is what speaks truth today.

This isn’t to say that programmes and more complex methods of connecting with our community are wrong, only that our priorities need to shift from programmes to personal relationships.

Sadly, quite often, when we do engage in personal relationships, we have an agenda. We want to convert people or bring them to church. But true friendships have

“

I had wanted to start up a church so that it looked like I was actually doing something for God. Instead God asked me to love those in my neighbourhood who would never set foot in a church.

God asked me to love those in my neighbourhood who would never set foot in a church. Sometimes it feels like I am doing nothing at all, but I have come to realise that this way of doing “ministry” is what working with God is supposed to look like. Jesus says in Matthew 11:28-30 “Are you tired? Worn out?

Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms

of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

We are supposed to walk with Jesus and work with him and this is meant to be a restful activity.

As we abide in him, we work with him to do his mission in our neighbourhoods. This is not complex but rather it entails the simple act of loving those in the places where we live. We must learn the “rhythms of unforced grace” as we love those who are different to us. Even though this sounds very simple, it is, in fact, one of the hardest things to do. Sometimes I wonder if this is why we stick primarily to programmes; they are much easier to control and manipulate.

Making true friendships with people who don’t know Jesus is messy, uncomfortable and time consuming.

I’ve found it hard to build friendships in my neighbourhood with people who are not Christian and who have values that are very different to mine. Sometimes I would much prefer to be with people who affirm my values.

When I have catch-ups with people who have a different sexual ethic from mine, or value material things in life to the point of idolatry, for instance, I can struggle to know how to relate and connect in a meaningful way. However, I will always be challenged and learn something new each time I meet

up with my friends. No matter how different we are, God always affirms their humanity and the image of God in them.

No matter how different the values are or how the people in my neighbourhood are living their lives, I can always discern God at work in them. Usually I will say something like this to them when they are telling me about a particular incident in their lives, “Do you think that’s God’s voice or presence at work there in your life?” They are usually stunned at my suggestion that God might actually condescend to draw near to them and interact with them.

Many of the people I mix with have come from difficult backgrounds and could not imagine a God who would come close to them.

The closer we draw to people who have no conscious experience of the love of God, the more we resemble the ministry and life of Jesus.

Chilean priest and writer Segundo Galilea says, “Mission is to leave one’s own geographic or cultural Christian world in order to enter the world of even the poorest and the most unchristian. The nonbeliever, the fallen-away Christian, the poor and the oppressed are always the subject of missionary love, and the more mission leaves its own world in search of them, the more it is radicalised and the closer it approaches the model and desire of Christ.”

It is very simple to engage with our community even though many seem to be baffled about how we do this in a post-Christendom culture. It is simple but it is also difficult because the “strategy” we must use is embodying God’s love in our neighbourhoods.

This will take time, it will be costly and sacrificial, we will be misunderstood as Jesus was and accused of hanging out with “sinners”; it will also be messy. But it will also be restful, joyful and we will love the world as God loves the world. We will be imitators of Jesus working with him to live out the alternative values of the kingdom of God in the here and now.

Karina Kreminski is a lecturer in Missional Studies at Morling College, Sydney.

Her new book is Urban Spirituality and is available at Koorong.com

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I busted up our marriage and God fixed it ANNE LIM A week before Catherine Sharpe went to hear American evangelist Will Graham speak in the NSW town of Orange, she was planning to kill herself and take her daughter with her.

She was in despair over the break-up of her marriage a year earlier, and all the mistakes she had made, including picking up with a man she had met while being treated for depression in hospital. At that stage their daughter, Sofia, was ten months old. “It was such a shock to everyone that we broke up because you show up to church, you say all the right things, keep that smile going, but you can’t be fake with God – he knows,” says Cat. When her husband Jeremy, who everyone calls Sharpey, moved from Bathurst to Orange, Cat decided to follow him so Sofia could see her father regularly.

“Once I’d got there, I got my own house with Sofia, but then I was like ‘what am I doing? I am in this new house in this new town, I don’t have any support or know anybody here and I’m still struggling through uni.’ I am not a natural mum – I find motherhood quite difficult.”

Cat decided that the best thing for everybody would be for her to remove herself from the picture so that she was not a burden on anyone. After all, to die would be to go to heaven, which would be better than the life she was living.

“Mother’s Day was coming up and we weren’t still together.

The time for separation [before divorce] was coming to an end and I was like ‘what is my life, what is my purpose? All I’ve done is made all of these mistakes and I don’t have anybody, I don’t belong anywhere – all I am is a burden on people. My family is ashamed of me, I need all this help and I’ve always been taught you don’t burden people with your problems.’

“I got to the point where I went, ‘the best thing for everybody will be for me to remove myself from the picture so that I’m not a burden on anyone, but if I leave Sofia behind then that’s going to be a burden because people are still going to be picking up after my mess. So, I’m just going to have to take her with me – and it’s going to be sad because Mum will lose a grandkid, but then there won’t be any loose ends, we’ll be out of the picture and people can just move on with their lives.’ ” At that point, Cat realised she was in serious trouble, so she put a message on Facebook saying “help me.” Sharpey responded by taking her to a local church where her uncle and aunt worshipped.

“The next week, when I went to church, I met this new friend and she said, ‘the Billy Graham thing is on tonight – do you want to come with us?’ So I went in and Will [Graham is] talking about how Jesus loves us even as we are and Jesus knows everything about us and he cares about what’s going on in our life and we’re important to him. And it’s just like the revelation hit me and I was like ‘what am I

“ One of my favourite quotes is ‘sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to realise that Jesus is the rock at the bottom.’”

Jeremy Sharpe doing? Of course Jesus loves me!

He actually thinks I’m valuable; he actually cares. Even if I feel like nobody else is there for me, he’s there and he’s got my back.’

“So I went up for the altar call and rededicated my life and I said, ‘Jesus I am so sorry; I don’t want to be here; I want to be doing what you’ve got planned for me.’ I met Will and his team at Maccas afterwards. And I told him ‘a week ago I was ready to kill myself and you guys have just reinjected life into me, thank you.’

“So that was the real turning point when Sharpey and I started going ‘all right, we’re serious. We cannot do this, but God can do this with us – Sofia deserves a family.’ ” Cat and Sharpey are telling their story to Eternity in the kitchen of their home in Goulburn, near Canberra, with two-year-old Raff y taking a nap in his bedroom.

With the advantage of hindsight, Sharpey believes the marriage failed because he thought Cat would be better off without him.

“At that stage I was about 170 kilograms. I hated myself because I could see what I was doing to my wife and I basically pushed her out the door,” he says.

“You basically stopped talking to me,” adds Cat. “Because I didn’t know how to relate to her. I didn’t know how to treat her, but because I hated myself, the worst-case scenario when your head gets in that space is ‘she needs to go because that’s the only way that I can feel peace about her being OK.’ ” Sharpey had been bullied every day in primary school and even at church copped a lot of mocking from the kids in youth group.

“Mum and Dad ended up leaving and went to another church, but I definitely wasn’t ‘saved.’ I hadn’t figured any of this church stuff out because my experience of church was nothing but being humiliated.”

Cat explains: “We got married when we were 21, 22, very young and inexperienced, and proceeded

Stormie Omartian], and I started praying, ‘change me, make me able to forgive mistakes and not hold on to them, make me able to support people and forgive them for being human.’ ” Six months after the pivotal Will Graham rally, Cat and Sharpey felt strong enough to try to be a family again.

“So we officially reunited in November 2012 and then we planned a second wedding rededication. We dedicated Sofia at church on the same day, and we redid our vows and had everybody back to our place and had a beautiful lunch,” says Cat. Even so, there wasn’t an immediate fix for the anxiety Sharpey felt about Cat going off with another man.

“That took us a further four or five years of physical insecurity on both parts to work through – it’s been a long time to come out the other side. It’s not a matter of, bang, Jesus comes in and everything’s better. It’s bang, Jesus comes in and suddenly the journey is doable.”

Cat loves giving her testimony and has spoken at three Will Graham rallies now – at Broken Hill, Mildura and Narrabri.

“People will say to us ‘how do you be so vulnerable?’ That’s the testimony, really, that we are so,” says Sharpey. “One of my favourite quotes is ‘sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to realise that Jesus is the rock at the bottom.’

But that vulnerability is part of our heart and that has led us to really successful ministry with numerous different people.

“It’s been a tough but a good journey; I wouldn’t change what we went through at all. I’ve seen the darkest side of myself and I’ve seen the darkest side of where I can go, and I wouldn’t change that … And if we hadn’t busted up, there’s no way I’d be anywhere near where I am now. If Jesus hadn’t found me, I’d still be a rotten mess, playing church, having the facade.

It was an easy process for me to hand my life to Jesus because I’d wanted to get rid of my life.”

Cat sees the birth of their son Raff y two years ago as the culmination of their testimony.

“It’s such a cool story, but I’m so glad I’m on this side of it because you learn so much about who God actually is, as opposed to the human filtered version of what we think he is.

“You hear ‘God will be with you always’, but until you put that to the test and go, ‘are you actually going to stick by me, God?’ You can’t know it unless you experience it yourself.”

Asked how the experience has changed her, Cat says: “I’ve learnt grace. It’s a word that’s become stigmatised, like people think it’s almost like an excuse, but grace means beautiful – that’s what grace is, it’s God’s beauty on us.

“It just makes life so much more exciting because it’s like an honour to be able to live your life back for him, to be able to sow into other people, and to be able to tell people about hope – that’s a privilege and it’s exciting.”

“ Even if I feel like nobody else is there for me, he’s there and he’s got my back.”

Cat Sharpe

“

I used to say he was a slob and I was a nag. That just doesn’t work.” to make all of the mistakes in the marriage book – breaking of trust, bad financial decisions, terrible communication.”

“I was an arrogant jerk,” adds Sharpey. “I was so full of myself – everything was about me. I was working 60 to 70 hours a week and getting paid for 40, so I was stressed out, but in my mind Cat was never really a wife. She was more of a friend that just happened to live in the same house.

I put that firmly down to me not understanding marriage at all.

I didn’t understand what it was, let alone putting it in a biblical perspective.”

Cat adds: “I used to say he was a slob and I was a nag. That just doesn’t work. So we’d made all these terrible decisions; I was at uni at the time and, three years in, we got pregnant and that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was, ‘how on earth are we going to look after a kid? We can’t even look after ourselves.’ ” Cat says she tried to do everything she could to fix the marriage – including going to counselling alone – but eventually felt she’d run out of options.

About six months after he and Cat separated, Sharpey’s self-hate forced him into his own suicidal crisis. It was at that low point Sharpey had an experience that would change his outlook on life.

“I’d pushed Cat out and hated myself but decided she was better off. I figured the only way the hate would end would be to end me,” he says. “But Jesus ended up finding

me on my bedroom floor. It’s one of the most crazy experiences that I’ve ever had. I closed my eyes in my bedroom because I thought ‘it’s over’ and when the enormity of that decision sinks in, you realise that this is actually where you’ve got to.

“I closed my eyes. I was, like, ‘OK, here we are.’ And I opened my eyes and I wasn’t in my bedroom.

I was sitting underneath a tree in a field on a nice day, but more importantly there were these arms wrapped around me from behind.

And a voice just said in my ear quite plainly, ‘this is not what I made you for. I love you and you are so much more than this.’ And that was it. I cried for about 18 hours straight. And then I came out of the room the next morning and I remember saying to my housemate that I’d decided to live and he was ecstatic.”

After his dramatic encounter with Jesus, Sharpey was fully committed to learning how to live as a Christian, with the help of mentors from Harvest for Christ (now Ever Upward Church) in Orange.

“I was done with playing church.

I’ve seen what playing church does and I don’t want to be there,” he says. “But the biggest lesson that I learned that is still with me to this day is God is a God of restoration, but the restoration has to start with yourself first … you have to be right with God. “Through there, I wasn’t depressed anymore, I saw the selfhatred for what it was, out of the back of years and years of abuse … it meant that from then on, whenever Cat would say something snide or would hold something against me, it didn’t matter anymore. I had forgiven her, so I was free.”

In the meantime, Cat had decided she wanted to learn to be a real wife, either for Sharpey or for an imagined future husband.

“So I started praying through The Power of a Praying Wife [by

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10

AUGUST 2018

BIBLE @ WORK

Clare Kendall

Reverend Liu Xiaofan leads the worship at Da Sheng Church, near Nanjing, China.

In 35 years, this pastor has never had a day off KALEY PAYNE Let’s start with the good news.

Christianity in China is growing at more than 10 per cent a year, according to both secular sources such as the Council on Foreign Relations and faith-based sources such as the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity.

But there is a human cost.

Reverend Liu Xiafan has woken up at 4am every day for the past 35 years. He walks along the river, praying and singing, to start his day. He works a 19-hour day, seven days a week. He lives on site at his home church in Luhe, to ensure he is constantly available for his congregation.

Liu is like the Brian Houston of Jiangsu province in eastern China. While Houston’s Hillsong

network sees about 40,000 people attend one of the 82 weekly church services across 30 locations in Australia, Liu cares for close to 45,000 Christians worshipping in 40 churches across the Jiangsu province.

One of them is Rev. Liu’s home church in Luhe, which welcomes more than 2500 people every week.

The rest are house churches.

But while Houston – or other leaders such as Sydney’s Archbishop Glenn Davies of the Anglicans, or John Wilson, who leads Australia’s Presbyterians, have many dedicated pastors to work with, Liu is one of only four pastors looking after the area. Liu is tired.

“I never get a day off. It’s the way here,” he says. “My daughter got married and even then I didn’t

have the day off. Our situation is not considered too extreme, because we have four trained pastors in the area. In some situations, there’s just one. We are quite lucky.

“For me, it’s very natural,” he says. “I believe in being on call 24 hours a day.”

Rev. Liu is not the only pastor working like this in China. It’s a pattern repeated over and over again. Church growth, combined with a lag in the number of pastors being trained, means that across China there are an average of 6700 Christians for every trained pastor.

Rev. Liu dreams of having a pastor in each of the churches he is visiting. He believes that, with the training he is implementing, his dream might just come true in the next 10 years.

2,700

people in China come to faith DAILY *

“We have 44 theological students in training from this district.

They will all come back here. The district has produced the most seminary students within the province – they make up one whole class in the seminary in Nanjing!

It’s quite an accomplishment. I feel very thankful and grateful to God for how he’s moving here.”

Bible Society wants to make Rev. Liu’s dream a reality, too. In 2018, it is helping equip more than 450 pastors and seminary students in theological training.

Pastors who have been working non-stop for many years are being given the opportunity to study, learning more about their beloved Bible and acquiring knowledge they can take back to their congregations of thousands who are hungry to learn about

God and his plan for the world.

The students make great sacrifices to train. It’s common for married students to live apart when on campus, because the six- or eight-bed dormitories are single sex.

And new theological students are being prepared for a life on mission, who can return to their communities ready to take some of the enormous load from the pastors looking after flocks of thousands and leading more to faith. It is estimated that more than one million people in China are coming to faith every year.

The need for theologically trained pastors is great. And you can help.

+ If you would like more details, visit biblesociety.org.au/chinaep

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*Based on conservative estimates

AUGUST 2018

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OPINION

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It’s a jungle out there Justine Toh Page 13

Taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, Emile Signol.

Michael Jensen on why war has never been holy Almost 1000 years ago, the First Crusade, inspired by the preaching of the Pope, Urban II, reached Jerusalem, determined to liberate it from Muslim control. One eyewitness account described the scene: Both day and night, on the fourth and fi fth days of the week,

we made a determined attack on the city from all sides. However, before we made this assault on the city, the bishops and priests persuaded all, by exhorting and preaching, to honour the Lord by marching around Jerusalem in a great procession, and to prepare for battle by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Early on the sixth day of the week we again attacked the city on all sides, but as the assault was unsuccessful, we were all astounded and fearful. However, when the hour approached on which our Lord Jesus Christ deigned to suffer on the Cross for us, our knights began to fight bravely in one of the towers ... One of our knights … clambered up the wall of the city ... Our men followed, killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles.

Another author wrote: “neither women nor children were spared.”

This is, sadly, not an isolated incident. The Emperor Constantine painted crosses on the shields of his soldiers. Need we mention the atrocities of the Conquistadors in South America, the terrors of the Inquisition, or the witch hunts of Salem, or the Puritan Oliver Cromwell using the Bible to justify genocide against Catholics in Ireland.

Just last year, I visited the spot in Zurich from which a group of Anabaptists were drowned in the river under one of my theological heroes, Ulrich Zwingli, for their heretical views.

Closer to our own time, Catholics and Protestants have only recently emerged from a decades-long violent struggle in Northern Ireland.

As theologian Miroslav Volf has written: “Beginning at least

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with Constantine’s conversion, the followers of the Crucified have perpetrated gruesome acts of violence under the sign of the cross.”

So, it seems like an open and shut case. Christians and their churches have endorsed unjust and excessive violence – and not just incidentally but in the name of their faith.

Perhaps the hymn we should all sing is John Lennon’s Imagine: Imagine no religion, it’s easy if you try …

Imagine all the people, living life in peace …

Surely there is something poisonous about Christianity? The Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg puts the case this way: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

You’ve heard your Uncle Barry or Joanne at the next desk say the same thing: “religion causes wars.”

So, here’s a question for us: is there something inherent in Christianity that not only fails to prevent violence but makes it much, much worse?

Some writers, such as the atheist Sam Harris, have argued that monotheism is the problem.

Belief in one God only has many advantages over polytheism. But monotheists can’t accept that their god is one god amongst many. If you believe that your god is the creator of heaven and earth, and is the only true god, then you are making an exclusive claim about your god over and against other gods. Monotheism brooks no competitors. It is not tolerant or accommodating. It names as the first sin false worship – worship of gods that are not god, and it says continued page 12

wikimedia / Hohum

Hasn’t Christianity endorsed violence?

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AUGUST 2018

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Thailand rescue

In a world fractured by crisis and conflict, the extraordinary rescue of 12 young Thai footballers and their coach from an underground cave is a powerful reminder of what we could achieve together.

We witnessed humanity at its best as heroes from at least half a dozen countries, including Australia, risked everything in the perilous rescue effort.

violence

from page 11 that from this sin come all others.

And Harris and others have argued that this idea, common to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, leads to their violent tendencies.

The desire to protect the oneness of God leads to the exclusion, by violent means if necessary, of all that is felt to corrupt it. War can become a religious duty – a holy war, in other words. Jihad, or crusade. Whatever nice and peaceful teachings may be found in religious books, they are obscured by this fanatical desire to protect the oneness of God. Add to this the idea of bloody sacrifice at the heart of Christianity and you have a dangerous recipe. The cross is an everpresent reminder to Christians, say the detractors, of both the bloodthirstiness of their God and the fact that the world is out to get Christians. If God uses violence, then surely it is justified for human beings to use it in his name.

And the blood flows, as a result.

So, what to say in response to these charges?

While it is impossible to deny the fact that Christians have at times endorsed and carried out appalling acts of violence in the name of the crucified Christ, it is simply not the case that

We connected a few years ago when we saw a photo of the tiny body of Alan Kurdi, the threeyear-old Syrian refugee whose body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean.

Why do we not connect in the same way to the hundreds who died at the same time as the Thailand rescue in Japanese floods? Or the 7500 children under five who still die every day of preventable or treatable illnesses?

This is a bias called the

identifiable victim syndrome.

We feel greater empathy and compassion for individuals we can identify with rather than a large group of anonymous people in peril.

Yet the Good Samaritan showed compassion for a stranger from another tribe he found beaten on a roadway. He didn’t know the victim’s story. He just saw someone in need and acted. The story suggests our faith should be galvanised to care as much for the

nameless and faceless millions who are trapped in poverty and cast out to the fringes.

Hopefully, the Thai cave rescue gives us a new focus to broaden our ambit of concern. Australia’s expertise in the rescue reflects the role we could and should play in the world. We should realise the opportunities God is giving us to show his love to a world in need.

Great hopes can be realised if we consistently work together to heal the world’s suffering.

there is something inherent in Christianity that makes it so.

I want to make three points.

First, Christianity has been co-opted for violence by those interested in power. But take away the Christianity, and you still find empires, nations, and political factions sponsoring violence.

The first emperor to become a Christian, Constantine, did so because he won a military victory after he painted a Christian sign on the shields of his soldiers. So he made Christianity the official religion of the empire.

We still have officially Christian nations down to this day – the United Kingdom, Denmark, Greece and Argentina, to name just four.

Now, while on the one hand much good can come from the church influencing a state, it is also the case that a state will try to coopt Christianity for its own ends – to justify its own often violent actions.

Religion, including Christianity, has been associated with war and violence. But it is far too simplistic to say that Christianity causes wars.

If there is one common factor in human conflict, it is not religion but national or tribal identity. The supposedly peaceful secular liberal democracies of the past 200 years have been no less bloodthirsty than religious regimes, and avowedly

atheistic governments have been much worse.

The classic case for Christianity as warmonger that is often cited is the Thirty Years War that tore Europe apart in 1618-48. That terrible war, pitting Protestant against Catholic, led to the birth of the idea of the secular state.

So the story goes. But the reality is far more complex. These wars of religion were often fought between alliances of Protestants and Catholics on both sides. What was really going on was not a war for religious supremacy but for national identity.

Secondly, Christianity does make universal claims, but it makes them in the name of love and peace. The excessive violence that mars some phases of Christian history is at odds with Christianity itself. There is no endorsement of the idea of holy war in the Christian Bible. The wars of conquest of the Old Testament are not seen in the New Testament as a pattern for Christian expansion. In fact, the opposite.

Jesus was a king, and was proclaimed as Lord, but he was a king like no other. In John 6:15, we read that the people wanted to make him king “by force” – they’d just seen the feeding of the five thousand. What was Jesus’ response? It was to withdraw to a mountain. When Peter drew a sword to defend Jesus in the

Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus rebuked him.

Recently the Chinese President Xi Jinping said, according to the Wall Street Journal: “In the West you have the notion that if somebody hits you on the left cheek, you turn the other cheek. In our culture we punch back.”

Now I’m not sure that Jesus’ teaching has really affected our culture as much as he thinks. But even the President of Communist China knows that the central figure in Christianity taught against violent retaliation.

Christianity does make a universal claim. It is for everybody, regardless of race, or gender, or status. Christ is proclaimed as Lord of all, not Lord of some.

He’s not our personal Lord and saviour. All nations and peoples are called to know him. It’s a terrible distortion of Christianity to say that it’s an ethnic religion.

But clearly, Jesus and his followers only ever endorsed preaching the gospel accompanied by acts of sacrificial love even for our enemies as the means to Christian expansion.

Which leads me to my third point: if we are to recognise Jesus as one of history’s greatest teachers of peace, then we cannot pretend that his monotheism was incidental to his teaching.

Jesus was not some first-century

hippie, just telling everyone to be kind to one another. Remember: he was Jewish to the bootstraps. Jesus believed in the one God who made heaven and earth, and who was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For him, love of the one God and love of neighbour – even an enemy – were inextricably linked.

You can’t pull one ingredient out: for Jesus, we love our neighbour because we love God, or rather because God loves us, and we learn it from him.

The gospel that the apostle Paul preached was a declaration of the supreme power of the risen Lord Jesus. But this ruler’s rule, according to Paul, was symbolised by his death as a victim of the emperor’s regime, out of love.

And Christians are likewise called to represent this one Lord, not by acts of violent oppression but by living lives that look like Jesus’ life and by speaking his name.

It is a tragedy that we haven’t always done so. Christians certainly have endorsed acts of horrendous violence. But when they have done so – even when Popes and bishops and preachers have done so – they have misrepresented the Lord they claim to serve.

Michael Jensen is the rector of St Mark’s Anglican Church in Darling Point, Sydney, and the author of several books.

Seriously good jobs visit eternityjobs.com.au

U.S. Air Force photo by Capt. Jessica Tait)

Tim Costello on caring strangers

We related to the plight of these vulnerable innocents, the perseverance against the odds by a crack international team and the final triumph over despair.

Around the world, many thousands – perhaps millions – prayed, hoped and watched.

And eventually, out of the cave’s darkness emerged a spiritual light.

Hope was realised and gave us a vision of what we gain when we work together with one goal. This one small moment in time – marked by an absence of self-interest – proved that with courage, empathy and unity, humankind can achieve remarkable results.

Why were so many profoundly moved by this story? Perhaps because we related to the young boys trapped then set free by caring strangers. Perhaps we thought of our own children being in the same circumstances. We connected.

US Airmen prepare to dive on July 2 at the cave in Chiang Rai where 12 boys and their coach were trapped.

OPINION

AUGUST 2018

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It’s a jungle out there

Justine Toh gets trolled on twitter It’s a jungle out there …

Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed.

The ruthless inevitability of the law of the jungle divides the world into those that survive and thrive, and those that are dead meat. But this jungle logic doesn’t confine itself to the wild, as it were, but appears with increasing frequency online. Our political climate is so polarised, and our habits of shouting at those who disagree with us so stubbornly entrenched, that a baser, tribal instinct begins to assert itself. It’s the prospect of making someone else your “repugnant cultural other” and/or becoming one yourself.

The term, and its abbreviation to RCO, appears in Alan Jacobs’ book How to Think: A Guide for the Perplexed, and describes the way we stigmatise our ideological, political, social and religious others as enemies, regarding them with a toxic mix of suspicion and hostility.

This tendency to divide the social world into the virtuous “us” and the evil “them” becomes all the more inevitable given our groupishness: our habits, both online and off, of huddling together with those who already agree with us.

Note the repugnance, because it’s critical to the phenomenon. When we talk about our opponents and when we talk to them – or, more accurately at them – typically, we’re not being neutral. Rather, our speech is charged with the double ick factor of heated dislike (at best) and outright disgust (at worst). We lead with our animal instincts, activating visceral responses a world away from the cool rationality we often pride ourselves on.

I recently found myself the unwitting target of one such spray online because, surprise surprise, it turns out that I am someone’s RCO! Lyle Shelton, the former managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby, who will run for a senate seat with the Australian Conservatives at the next election, had tweeted his enthusiasm for the Centre for Public Christianity’s documentary For the Love of God: How the Church Is Better and Worse Than You Ever Imagined. One of his followers immediately trolled him back, but because myself and my co-presenters were tagged in the initial tweet, all and sundry suddenly found ourselves accused of gross bigotry against the gay community and the deliberate cover-up of a culture of sexual abuse within the church.

If the portrait our accuser had painted of us was true, I’d hate us too. But it’s not. I tried to answer her objections as best I could, and

gently dispute her characterisation.

I was trying to channel David Abitbol, whose persistently friendly tweets to Megan Phelps-Roper, a member of the Westboro Baptist Church (infamous for telling certain groups that God definitely hates them), ultimately meant she exited her community.

But nothing could dent this woman’s fortified conviction. She just resumed her tirade against the church and kept berating me over Twitter. I managed to do something that has so far eluded me as a mum: continue conversing in a calm, friendly but firm tone in the face of incessant aggravation. It probably helped that I only tweeted back hours after reading her latest reply.

My ability to remain calm is basically the only win I can report, because my story does not have a happy ending: we did not continue to exchange a flurry of tweets, slowly come to understand each other, eventually decide to meet up for a cult screening of Roadhouse (a guilty pleasure that, we discovered, we shared), and then, over time, marvel at the realisation that we’d become friends without even realising it, even while continuing to think the other was seriously mistaken about everything.

Rather, I saw that this conversation was going nowhere fast, and just stopped responding.

I ghosted her! This encounter has to be chalked up as an unmitigated “fail” in the effort to promote civil discourse, which means any advice I offer now is, surely, not at all worth taking. But precisely because

I recognise my impoverishment, I’ve actively gone looking for pointers on what I should have done instead.

Here’s what I’ve found: 1. Humanise everyone.

As Megan Phelps-Roper tweeted back and forth with David Abitbol and others like him, she found, to her great surprise, that they were funny, kind and interesting.

“I was beginning to see them as human,” she told Adrian Chen, who reported on her story in The New Yorker. And that made all the difference.

It’s easy to forget the human behind the screen when we bomb our RCOs with tweets full of bile and rage, or treat their contemptible position on controversial topic X as the sum total of their being. We never get the chance to discover that we have more in common than we might think. Objectifying someone as our RCO, says Alan Jacobs, “prevents us from recognising others as our neighbours – even when they are quite literally our neighbours.”

Trying to remember that everyone is a bewilderingly complex mix of beliefs, attitudes, emotions, experiences and loves – “a universe unto themselves,” to tweak a Jewish saying – goes some way to rehumanising everyone.

And this commitment to the fundamental humanity of all is especially crucial for Christians whose faith obliges them to seek out the face of God in everyone else, regardless of their politics, their beliefs, or anything else.

Which leads me to the need to …

2. Campaign on behalf of the

injuries others have suffered, rather than any done to me.

I responded to charges levelled at the church, and myself, but didn’t say anything on behalf of anyone else caught up in the crossfire. I regret that I didn’t take issue, for instance, with the way our accuser rechristened Lyle as “Vyle.” Sorry I abandoned you Lyle!

No matter how strongly she may disagree with his beliefs or actions, calling him “Vyle” made him seem less human, a despised figure any reasonable person would not listen to, empathise with, or interpret charitably.

Of course, someone could say that I’d be standing up for Lyle because, as a fellow Christian, he’s in my tribe. So to ensure that this doesn’t become another instance of tribal warfare, I’d have to commit to taking a stand against the dehumanising rhetoric of anyone, regardless of their tribe or politics.

From what I understand, sexual minorities regard Lyle’s stance on marriage as pure bigotry, which in their minds disqualifies him from the respect they’d offer anyone else.

But it’s hard to grasp how going along with the dehumanisation of RCOs does anything to promote understanding despite deep differences, or helps us to find common ground with each other, even if no one can agree on a common good. But of course, this will mean I’m asking for us to …

3. Expect to be injured, but don’t strike back.

I have to admit, I hate my own counsel on this point because it is so profoundly unfair. To meet others’ hostility with grace and patience, and to absorb the impact of their verbal attacks takes great reserves of strength – far more than I can ever hope to muster up on my own. It’s much easier, and way more satisfying, to retaliate.

But then an intractable question arises: are we doomed to trade blows forever? If that isn’t to be our fate, then someone has to lay down their arms first. And it may as well

“

...everyone is a bewilderingly complex mix of beliefs, attitudes, emotions, experiences and loves.”

be you or me, given that it’s a bit rich to ask something of others that we aren’t prepared to do ourselves.

Since that option makes zero sense within the human realm, perhaps we’ll have to call on more than merely human means if we want to take it. For the Christian, the single most compelling reason to do so is Jesus, and his forbearance in the face of suffering.

His willing self-sacrifice for the sake of his enemies refuses jungle logic and the neat carving up of the world into friends on my side and foes that are fair game.

Rather, Jesus chooses reconciliation by moving towards especially repugnant others (a category in which, according to the biblical diagnosis, the whole of humanity finds itself) in recognition that all of us are also beloved members of the same human family, even if we actually prefer being estranged from each other. By doing so, he treads a path of peace for all of us, otherwise locked in intractable tribal conflict, to follow. * Whether or not I encounter my particular accuser again, I’ll be keeping those points in mind.

But even if I don’t, the trolling and tribalism doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. So I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of opportunities to try, and try again.

Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity.

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OPINION

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AUGUST 2018

Would you go to hear Franklin Graham?

KARL FAASE SAYS: THIS WON’T BE ABOUT POLITICS, IT’S JUST ABOUT JESUS

I have personally known Franklin Graham for more than 20 years.

What I know of Franklin, from personal conversations and involvement in both Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association – Australia, is that he is deeply committed to the gospel message – the life, death and resurrection of Jesus available to everyone. Just like his father, he is passionate about sharing that message by any means possible.

Franklin Graham has been outspoken in his concern for American society and for the direction it was heading. Before the 2016 election, Graham called for people to vote for candidates who would best represent Christian values. His positive

Billy Graham Evangelistic Association

Franklin Graham, a preacher like his father Billy, is touring Australia in February 2019. Will he gather a crowd, or will Donald Trump and US politics get in the way? Two prominent Aussie Christians have very different views about whether to get behind the Franklin Graham tour.

Karl Faase, presenter of the video series Jesus the Game Changer, says “go and hear Franklin”. Michael Bird, blogger and Ridley Melbourne lecturer, says you should think about staying at home.

Franklin Graham’s support of US President Donald Trump may be an obstacle for some when he tours Australia. response to the election of Trump was not an endorsement of Trump’s character but rather supporting the candidate who would uphold Christian values in American society in a way that the previous administration had not. In particular, Graham and many other Christian leaders encouraged voters to endorse a candidate who would appoint Supreme Court judges with conservative Christian values. It is an outcome that will impact the US for the next generation.

I have heard Franklin Graham speak at events such as these around the world, and have seen God use him to bring thousands to a saving knowledge of Jesus.

I am confident that the events being planned across Australia in 2019 will be marked by three key qualities: a clear gospel message, a series of fabulous meetings and a politics-free agenda.

Australians can be confident

that this is not about politics but a commitment to sharing the message of Jesus as clearly and broadly as possible. We should all be praying, be involved and invite friends and family to join us.

Karl Faase Board Chair, Australian Samaritan’s Purse and BGEA boards

MIKE BIRD SAYS PLEASE SEND SOMEONE ELSE

I am a big supporter of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, I have friends and family who came to faith through Billy Graham’s ministry, and my family and I have routinely put together the Christmas shoeboxes for the charity Samaritan’s Purse.

However, I think inviting Franklin

Graham to tour Australia will be counter-productive because Franklin Graham has been hyper-partisan in his support of President Donald Trump. He has repeatedly tried to mitigate Trump’s unchristian behaviour and asked Christians to overlook Trump’s attitude towards women.

Yes, I know that Franklin Graham did oppose things like Trump’s border policy, but on the whole, Graham has been a vocal and energetic supporter of Trump and even appealed to Trump as a Godsent figure. (Where Trump sits in relation to God’s providence is a conversation for another day.)

Look, I have no problem with an American friend who supports Trump or voted for Trump – many of my American friends did. The problem is that Franklin Graham has tethered his own reputation and ministry to the Trump administration. Graham the younger’s “Decision Tour”

of California was an unhealthy mixture of gospel proclamation and pro-Trump support, as if the two belonged together. The Faustian pact of providing Trump with religious capital in exchange for political influence and proChristian policies is a shortsighted game that will haunt American evangelicalism in the long term.

If Franklin Graham is hosted in Australia, it would entail that we support the particular brand of Christianity that Franklin Graham represents. And that is – to be frank – a version of Christianity which I am very reluctant to tether my own witness, ministry and reputation to. I mean, for the love of Vegemite and avocado, Aussie evangelicals have enough problems in Australia being portrayed as religious extremists who fantasise about being the theocrats in some kind of Handmaid’s Tale dystopian regime; the last thing we need to do is to invite Donald Trump’s main religious cheerleader. It will give our critics a big, big stick to hit us with.

I would love to see the BGEA send a gifted speaker to Australia to preach to the churches and to commemorate ’59. In my mind, a better option would be Franklin Graham’s son, Will Graham, who has already visited Australia and does not have the partisan reputation of his father.

PS. Let it be known that I am willing to change my verdict on Franklin Graham if he can persuade Chick-fil-A to open up a store in Doncaster, Melbourne!

I really, really love their chicken burgers!!

Dr Michael F. Bird

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OPINION

AUGUST 2018

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Two views about sex, two religions?

John Sandeman meets a Bible Champion

Gafcon 2018’s family photo “However, as far as I can see, the issues that have given birth to GAFCON (I don’t say GAFCON per se), it seems to me, are vital for the survival of Christianity in the West.”

The Anglican family (of GAFCON) began in 2003 with the election of Gene Robinson, a partnered gay man, as Bishop of New Hampshire in the United States, and the official adoption of same-sex blessings by the Vancouver-based New Westminster Diocese (region).

“People say all you are talking about is sex,” says Jensen. “No. All the other people are talking about is sex because they raised the matter. However, first of all, yes that is the presenting issue – but it is far more than that because it involves the whole authority of the Bible and therefore the nature of Christian faith.

“But it is not an accident that it revolves around sex. Because our sexuality, as the Bible teaches us, is so fundamental to our being that it is not an accident that when you turn your back on God, as in Romans 1, then in our sexual lives we begin to worship [the creature not the creator] at that point.

“People say ‘it’s all about sex’ to which I say ‘No, it’s all about the Bible.’ But on the other hand, our sexuality is hugely important, and God makes that clear in his word. So we don’t want to denigrate that either and say ‘No, it is not about sex.’ ” The GAFCON strategy surprises many of its liberal critics. In Jerusalem, the GAFCON group

made it clear they do not plan to leave the Anglican Communion.

They want to stay, and renew it from within.

Peter Jensen also wants to make it clear that not everyone in it is like him.

“Interestingly, GAFCON is not an evangelical group. It is the Anglican Communion as it was before 2003. It contains charismatics, it contains AngloCatholics, it contains evangelicals.

The thing that drew them together – and you may find it strange that I am saying this – is a commitment to tradition.

“That is, tradition properly understood – the theological tradition that comes from the Bible and which has helped shape the Christian churches.

“What the liberal Americans did was to so breach the tradition – at a pretty vital point – that it has begun to create a new religion.

“It is an observation that John Gresham Machen made a hundred years ago in his book, Christianity and Liberalism, where he really regarded liberalism as a new religion.”

Machen led a conservative revolt in the US against “modernism,” which downplayed the authority of the Bible. He is a key figure in forming the conservative Bible scholarship that underpins today’s evangelicals.

“Even Machen, who was a very committed Presbyterian, even he said in his book that an alliance with Roman Catholics, for example, is going to be necessary

“

GAFCON combines both a desire to correct what it sees as false teaching with a desire to win more people to Christ.”

(and I am not quoting him now) to sustain the theological tradition based on Scripture which has shaped Christianity.

“GAFCON may or may not be a work of God, but the issue that GAFCON is addressing is ‘A re we going to be Christian in the future or are we going to be liberal?’ ” Somewhat like former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, supposedly asked by Gough Whitlam about the significance of the French Revolution (“It’s too early to tell”), Jensen finds it hard to weigh up his ten years in GAFCON against his other concerns. “It is hard to answer that question. It has certainly been very significant. It has certainly been very draining.

It could be even more significant; it may be – although one does not want to prejudge this – a seismic shift in the Anglican Communion.

Cafcon

In the aftermath of last year’s postal survey, debate about same-sex marriage is now firmly focused in the church. Last month the Uniting Church in Australia comes to its decision point (see story on page 2), and the United Methodists, its cousin in the US, Europe and Africa, will decide in early 2019 (at present it takes a conservative view).

Around the world, Anglican churches too are taking opposing stances. Many readers of Eternity with an Anglican bent may have noticed that their ministers disappeared in June.

Several hundred Aussie leaders turned up in Jerusalem for an event hashtagged #GAFCON2018, which local commentators described as “a turning point in the history of Anglicanism” and “effectively an alternate Communion structure.”

GAFCON unscrambled means “Global Anglican Future Conference.” It pulls together leaders representing the majority of the world’s Anglicans even while some Western (mostly) white branches of the Communion churches are accepting same-sex marriages or blessings. Could it be that there’s a big change coming to the Anglican Communion, the network of churches planted by the British empire?

Peter Jensen, former archbishop of Sydney and a strong advocate for traditional man-woman marriage, has been at the centre of worldwide debate as the general secretary of GAFCON. But he is careful to avoid triumphalism.

“One of my problems is that you can always think that the thing you are involved in is the most important thing that has ever happened. You can deceive yourself and others by overstating things. That is a problem that we all have,” he says.

I myself am more deeply interested in the evangelisation of Sydney.”

In a few months Jensen will leave his position as general secretary – essentially the chief organiser – of GAFCON. His successor will be Benjamin Kwashi, Archbishop of Jos in Nigeria, who no sooner had returned home than had his home raided, his neighbour shot dead and his cattle stolen. Nigerian Christians are on the front line of a battle with Islamic forces who want to push them out of the northern part of the country.

Asked by Eternity “is there something else you want to add?”

Jensen replies: “The Sydney Morning Herald once asked me that and I responded ‘What your readers need to know is that Jesus loves you and he died to save the world.’ And The Sydney Morning Herald lady laughed and said ‘they would not print that.’ ” Eternity responded as you might expect: “Well, I am going to print that.”

Jensen says that as in Philippians 1, which calls on Christians to “defend and proclaim the gospel,” GAFCON combines both a desire to correct what it sees as false teaching with a desire to win more people to Christ.

A “letter to the churches” from GAFCON in Jerusalem finishes with a call upon God, “that the Anglican Communion may become a mighty instrument in the hand of God for the salvation of the world. We invite all faithful Anglicans to join us in this great enterprise of proclaiming Christ faithfully to the nations.”

eternitynews.com.au A national newspaper for Australian Christians, Eternity is sent free to any church, school or Christian businesses.

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Edited by John Sandeman.

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OPINION

16

AUGUST 2018

The habit of remembering well Clarke family memories

Greg Clarke on capturing memories I’ve had the privilege just recently of a week of intensive study at one of the world’s great universities.

Now I have to remember what I learnt. There’s no chance that I’ll remember everything; and it’s a little unpredictable whether I’ll remember the most important things, or simply the entertaining parts (such as when the lecturer broke into song).

If I’m going to make some of that learning stick, I’ll have to practise remembering. I’ll do it by rewriting notes, by telling other people about it (annoyingly) and by periodically rehearsing the way I first learnt it (usually by bringing to mind the way the lecturer spoke, or visualising what she wrote on the board). These techniques have to be used to overcome the natural

Bible Stat

human tendency to forget most things.

Because that’s the truth: we forget most things. We have to, or our brains wouldn’t cope. Our mental filing cabinet would be chock full to that point where the drawers won’t close properly and we are catching our metaphorical sleeves on their sharp corners. We filter and distil our experiences so we can move on to the next ones.

There’s also collective memory, and collective forgetfulness.

Cultures remember all sorts of parts of their history, and forget other parts. They mark some events with special days, festivals, name plaques and poems. Other parts just drift away, unnoticed until it is as if they never happened.

They did happen, of course, and they left their mark on things, but because no one remembers, we are not able to explain how things got to be the way they are now.

This is why I’m supportive of the study of “marginal” cultures,

because it seeks to stymie the forgetfulness, to cauterise the powerful forces of collective reminiscence which favour some cultures over others. This is why the rise of historical study of women, conquered people groups, minority cultures and the like is not mere political correctness but often historical correction. It’s trying to remember things more, and more comprehensively, before important truths are completely lost.

The recent focus on the indigenous leader, William Cooper, is a potent example. We celebrate NAIDOC week now in July, but very few of us know its origins in this great justice campaigner. Cooper beseeched the nation’s churches to come together in prayer that the word of Christ would ring out through this country for both indigene and settler alike.

That was Cooper’s National Aborigines Day, which began

80 years ago in 1938 but slowly morphed into NAIDOC Week (and away from Australia Day into July), until its origins were forgotten. Well, nearly forgotten.

Judging by the buzz last month during NAIDOC Week, it seems to be coming back to life (see Eternity’s articles about Cooper online).

The rise of DNA technologies has helped us to face the reality of the past. Just because something has been lost to memory doesn’t mean it is unimportant or, in our worst fantasies, didn’t happen. We just manage to let memories lie dormant if it is too inconvenient for us otherwise. But DNA won’t let us forget. Archaeology won’t let us forget. Literature won’t let us forget. But we have to pay attention, and practise remembering.

Christian faith depends on remembering well. We have to remember who we are (God’s creatures). We have to remember

what we were (sinners in God’s eyes). And we have to remember why we have hope (Jesus Christ is Lord). How well we track in our journey through life comes down to how well we remember these things.

In the end, someone has to be able to do the remembering perfectly. That person is God himself, who can number the hairs on our heads, whose capacity to remember is unlimited, and who feels no need to leave anything out.

He has the robustness to cope with reality. He’s got the whole world in his hands, and in his mental filing cabinet.

He can without effort remember everyone and everything from the beginning of his creation, in order that he can renew it completely when the time is right. None of those memories will go to waste.

In memory of my father, James Sydney Clarke (1942-2018). He was a lovely Dad. Greg Clarke is CEO of Bible Society Australia.

A record number of Scripture portions – 200,281 – were distributed in Syria in 2017