Of tall poppies, mateship and pragmatism: Spirituality in the Australasian Context
Australians today celebrate Australia Day. To mark the day I thought I would reproduce a paper on Spirituality in the Australasian Context (I focus on Australia and New Zealand) which I initially presented at a workshop of the Baptist World Alliance, held in Mexico City in July 2006. It was later published in Stimulus – a New Zealand Journal (vol 16, issue 3, 2008). Though a decade has past, I think the insights are essentially valid, and are hopefully helpful. See what you think… 1) By way of an introduction In some ways it feels strange for me to write on Spirituality in the...
Read MoreChurch: A messy, risky but still powerful ideal (Part 2 of So what is church?)
Part 1 of this post set about answering the question, ‘So what is church?’ suggesting that church is a simple, but powerful idea. It did so in response to the earlier post on churchless faith – a growing phenomena that often sees people, in spite of their faith commitment, simply shrug and say, ‘Church – too difficult, too painful, too boring, too political, too time consuming, too compromised, too controlling, too irrelevant’ – or something comparable. They then quietly (or not so quietly) withdraw from active involvement from any local church. As...
Read MoreSo what is church? Part 1 Church, a simple but powerful idea…
We kicked off this short series on the church by looking at the relatively new but rapidly growing phenomena of churchless faith. I wanted to start with that post because the word church increasingly has a lot of emotional baggage attached to it. For many it smacks of control, abuse of power, manipulation, politics and thought control – a rather alarming set of associations. For others it conjures up images of boring Sundays, or of irrelevance or perhaps of sectarian squabbling. Much more positively, for large numbers the images are of spiritual growth, close community, God encounters,...
Read MoreChurchless Faith
I am about to embark on a short series on the church – and what it might mean to be church in the third millennium. This opening post looks at the increasing phenomena of what is being called ‘churchless faith’. I briefly touched on the topic in a post which proved popular, Churched, Unchurched and Dechurched, and I’d like to explore it a little more today, as very close to the surface it raises a multitude of questions of what it means to be church (and part of the capital C universal Church). So what is churchless faith? It is usually understood to mean that someone...
Read MoreAnd every step an arrival… On the gift of the present moment
I am presently reading Eugene Peterson’s wonderful biography The Pastor which has on its front cover Rilke’s memorable line ‘every step an arrival’. It reflects Peterson’s own conviction that when all is said and done, the work of a pastor is not primarily to get things done or to be surrounded by a flurry of activity, but to pay attention and call attention “to ‘what is going on right now’ between men and women, with each other and with God.” What is going on right now. Spotting God in the present moment. It is not the same as...
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