On a mission...

My diocese is on a mission. Since 2002, our prayer has been to see 10% of the population of Sydney, Wollongong, Shoal Haven, Southern Highlands and Blue Mountains in 'Bible-believing churches' by 2012. So how are we doing? According to one estimate at Synod last year (and repeated at a talk I heard on Thursday night), in the first six years of the mission some 300 people have become Christians. Just 300 - despite all the prayer and planning and strategy. That amounts to about 1.5 people per church in the diocese. In fact, according to the figures we have, more people became Christians in the six years prior to the mission than in the first six years of the actual mission!

As a diocese, we are often proud of our strength. Our local tool of propaganda shamelessly boasts a readership of 70,000. Some of our churches are big. Not Hillsong big, or American mega-church big. But compared to many of mainline protestant churches in Australia, the Sydney Diocese is quite strong. Actually, comparing ourselves to the other Anglican dioceses throughout the country is one of our favourite games to play in Sydney. It shows how good we are - which is quite pathetic really, given that many of these dioceses are breathing their last gasps of air.

Why haven't we grown? Why aren't our churches full? Maybe Sydney is just too hard - we scatter the seed and it gets eaten up straight away. Maybe. That certainly makes it easier to spiritualize our lack of growth. 'God isn't working here for some reason, so we'll keep on doing the same thing we've always done and wait for things to change'. As a diocese we really only have one strategy for growth - church planting. Multiplying congregations is one of the goals of the mission, and scores upon scores of new churches have been started since 2002. The problem is that we spend all our time and energy producing church services that are essentially the same as the church up the road or in the morning. Even more so, constant church planting is a tiresome and exhaustive business that wears down our church members so much that they have no time to do anything else - even "connecting" to their neighbours.

According to a rector of a large church that I was talking to on Friday night, maybe the problem is that we have grieved the Holy Spirit. In our local evangelical culture we are quite wary of the Holy Spirit. Our foci's lies in completely different places, so much so that during the Connect 09 Big Day In the prayer before the sermon was for the archbishop to enlighten our hearts as to the meaning of Jonah. I have great respect and admiration for our archbishop, but the last time I checked, this was meant to be the work of the Spirit (working through Peter) and not the Archbishop himself.

Maybe we're scared of the Holy Spirit, not just because of pentecostals, but because our lives reflect to closely the lives of the city around us (I see this in my own life). We're proud and arrogant, we love stirring up controversy and arguments. Our tongues are full of bitterness and slander, and we like to gossip. We like promoting ourselves at the expense of others, and we enjoy our comforts so much that any sacrifice we might need to make, no matter how small, is to big a deal for us to cope with.

Instead, following Paul:

"(H)aving put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you."

Ephesians 4.25-32

The Lord have mercy on us.

Baptizing Them...

“’Go…and make disciples…baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ The narrative of the risen Jesus commissioning appearance presumes that the disciples know what ‘baptizing is, as indeed they did. Beyond reasonable doubt, the primal church adapted baptism from the repentance-ritual of John the Baptist, which at least some of the first disciples had themselves undergone. Those whom John’s preaching brought to repentance he washed; the meaning of the gesture is obvious...

Those washed by John, while they turned from their disobedient aspects of their previous behavior, did not turn into a new community. Whereas those from whom the preaching of the apostles brought to repentance did thereby enter a new community, the missionary church; in the Matthean passage baptism is to ‘make disciples.’ Thus we may summarize the canonical mandate of baptism so: initiate into the church those whom your preaching calls to repentance, by washing them in the Triune Name.” - Robert Jenson

We baptize because Jesus said to. We baptize because that’s what we do as Christians. The apostles knew that. At the end of the first Christian sermon in Acts 2, and the audience asked the apostles what to do, Peter said: ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit,’ and so 3000 people repent and are duly baptized. That’s what we do as the people who proclaim the glory of God and the Lordship of Jesus Christ – we baptize those who repent and welcome them into the church (for the rest of their lives). As churches here in Sydney send out their members to connect with the local community, it may be all too easy to forget the baptizing part. We’re very big on making disciples – we’ll sit with someone and lead them through Two Ways to Live or something, and when they become Christians we are ecstatic. And we try to keep discipling them – we’ll do the Just for Starters studies etc. welcome them into the church and set them on a path for life. But the command of Jesus is baptize them. As ambivalent as our churches may be with symbolism or anything that can look slightly ‘magical’, the washing of new Christians is what we are to do. It is a great shame for us if we lose or forget this image of union with the death and resurrection with Jesus. As we seek to connect with our community, lets not forget the canonical symbol of connection with Jesus.

Diabolical Pop-ups

If any can help me annihilate the uninvited pop-ups on hebel, please let me know.

100 Days and Histroy

The New York Times has posted some interesting articles by leading presidential historians on the 20th century's leading presidents and what Obama can learn from during his first 100 days in office.

As Barack Obama readies to take the office of president, which of his predecessors offers the best model for getting off on the right foot?

The historians include Richard Reeves and Robert Dallek, leading historians in the Kennedy and Johnston eras. I found Roger Morris' article on Nixon particularly insightful.

How F.D.R. Made the Presidency Matter by Jean Edward Smith.

Obama, F.D.R. and Taming the Press by Jean Edward Smith.

Kennedy’s Words, Obama’s Challenge by Richard Reeves.

L.B.J., Obama and Reassuring a Worried Nation by Robert Dallek.

The President Behind the Mask by Roger Morris.

Obama’s Reagan Transformation? by Lou Cannon.

Kudos for telling me why the picture is out of place.

Discipleship is Costly

"The disciple simply burns his boats and goes ahead. He is called out, and has to forsake his old life in order that he may 'exist' in the strictest sense of the word. The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered.The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity (that is, in truth, into the absolute security and safety of the fellowship of Jesus), from a life which is observable and calculable (it is, in fact, quite incalculable) into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous (that is, in to one that is necessary and calculable), out of the realm of finite (which is in truth the infinite) into the realm of infinite possibilities (which is the one liberating reality). Again it is no universal law. Rather is is the exact opposite of all legality. It is nothing else than bondage to Jesus Christ alone, completely breaking through every programme, every ideal, every set of laws. No other significance is possible, since Jesus is the only significance. Besides Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters." - Deitrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, p.16. H/T MPJ

John Dickson: Faith no more does little good for society

John Dickson is in today's SMH:

It hardly takes a statistician to tell us that a huge proportion of non-government welfare and aid in this country is organised through agencies with a religious heart, such as World Vision, Salvation Army, Mission Australia, Anglicare and Caritas. Then there is the evidence that the religious are more likely to become teachers, nurses and doctors. The recent Religion And Occupation study by the Christian Research Association says about 25 per cent of people in these "nurturing professions" are regular worshippers of one kind or another - much higher than the national average of 17 per cent. Religious people do not have a monopoly on doing good. Many unbelievers do a great many good things for the poor and marginalised, and there are several excellent welfare and aid agencies with no religious foundation.

Nevertheless, do-gooding remains a particular preoccupation of the faithful. Whether trying to earn their way to heaven or (more likely) trying to embody the love they think God has for the world, believers tend to give more money away, run more soup kitchens, collect more aid for those in poor countries and gravitate more toward "people professions" than those without religion.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Our Lost History

I recently read The Lost History of Christianity - The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia- and How It Died by Philip Jenkins (2008). It is a magisterial introduction to a rich but largely forgotten history. The lands Jenkins has in mind were well and truly the center of the Christian world for well over a thousand years, even after the Muslim invasion of these lands from the seventh century. To understand the Middle East, Africa and Asia as the center of Christian gravity at any time might now seem as natural today as arguing that the Buddhist homeland was once Buddhist. But Jenkins argues that even in 1200 AD there were 21 million Christians in Asia and the proportion of the world's Christians living in Asia and Africa was 34 per cent. These Christians are different from us, but they had a rich and vibrant church life of academia (far above anything the Western Church approached until at least the 14th century), liturgy (which may be the source of Gregorian Chants) and mission (particularly the Syrians, who quite successfully reached into India, central Asia and China). Before England had an archbishop of Canterbury - possibly even before Canterbury had a church - the Syrian church had established metropolitan sees in Merv and Herat, modern Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Before Poland was Catholic, before Good King Wenceslas ruled a Christian Bohemia, the church in Bukhara, Samarkand and Patna had all reached metropolitan status. Our mental maps of Christianity are too small, and we can't understand Christian history without Asia - or Asian history without Christianity.

Which makes the decline of these churches all the more tragic. The number of Christians in Asia in 1500 had fallen from 21 million to just 3.4 million. Most of these great churches ceased to exist, whilst the ones that did were small, marginalised and associated ethnic minorities. Churches who's leaders had once commanded the respect and obedience of at least a quarter of the world's Christians (and had prayed for the gospel of Yeshua to transform lives in Tibet and Java) was reduced to scratching out an existence in the hills.

Jenkins tells the stories of the churches and what happened to their survivors in the 20th Century. He also offers advice on what to do when churches die, particularly such large slabs of area where almost all Christian history has been totally eradicated. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Church history, particularly for those interested in the meaning of that history for today.