Up on a Mountain Our Lord is Alone

Up on a mountain
Our Lord is alone
Without a family, friends, or a home
He cries, "Oo, oo, oo, will you stay with me?"
He cries, "Oh, oh, oh, will you wait with me?"

Up on a mountain
Our Lord is afraid
Carrying all the mistakes we have made
And He knew
It's a long way down
Do you know
It's a long way down?

Up in the heavens
Our Lord prays for you
He sends His spirit to carry us through
So it's true
That you're not alone
Do you know
He came all the way down?
So it's true
That you're not alone
Do you know
He came all the way down?

- The Welcome Wagon, Up on a Mountain. Listen here.

I've always been struck by the end of Tenebrae service on Maundy Thursday, when all the candles are snuffed out, the communion table stripped bear, the lights turned off and congregation leaves the building in darkness and silence. It mirrors the loneliness of Jesus in Gethsemane, and ultimately on the cross, when all his disciples have been scattered and fled, and the last Israelite - the true image of his Father - is cut off from the land of the living.

They Don't Sound Like Coldplay

Welcome to the Welcome Wagon was a delightful find for me last year, even though it took about two months after buying it to listen to it.

Welcome to the Welcome Wagon is the debut album of The Welcome Wagon, husband and wife team Vito and Monique Aiuto, and was produced by there friend Sufjan Stevens. In fact, the keen Sufjan fans out there might release that Vito is very same very for whom Vito's Ordination on Michigan was written for. Vito is the pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church a church he planted in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, in 2005 (and I think is loosely connected somehow to Tim Keller).

One of the joys of WTTWW is that it is high quality amateur music. Although you can definitely hear the influence of Sufjan Stevens throughout the album (which isn't a bad thing), this is not two the work of two musical professionals. it is a husband and wife (and sometimes a choir) making music for the sake of making music. Indeed, the album took several years to produce and was done so across many different lounge rooms and bedrooms:

The Welcome Wagon began as husband and wife singing in the privacy of their home. Having little to no previous musical experience or training, Vito purchased a guitar with the desire to sing hymns with his family. With Monique accompanying on toy glockenspiel or harmonica, the two would amble through old hymnals, psalters and prayerbooks. Their inability to read music was no big issue; Vito simply made up new tunes to old words.

One of the other joys about WTTWW is that it's different to what a large segment of 'Christian music' sounds like. They are not another bunch of Christians trying to imitate Coldplay. "[T]his is precisely what sets them apart from the standard fare of contemporary liturgical music. It doesn't feign emotion; it doesn't pander to stylistic pretensions; it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is."

The first half of WTTWW is particularly good. With reflections on Jesus, Psalm 127, the crucifixion, WTTWW can be both moving and uplifting at the same time. The whole album has a good mix of original songs and covers for a new band, "from Old Testament psalms, to Presbyterian Psalters of the 17th century, to iconoclastic pop innovators of the 1960s (The Velvet Underground), to charismatic Catholics of the 1970s (Lenny Smith), and into the melancholy lovelorn pop of the 1980s (The Smiths)", and a mixture of religious and religious songs. Although I feel that WTTWW lost momentum in the last six songs, maybe it will grow on me, and overall this is generally a very good album. It also comes with a fantastic album design made up of old-school Sunday School postcards and original artwork by Monique Aiuto.

Welcome to the Welcome Wagon - I'd give it 5 out of 5. And over Easter, I'll post up some of their lyrics on hebel. For the very keen, you can listen to all the songs online and read a commentary on all of them by produce Sufjan Stevens here.

World Without End?

ALMIGHTY God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us, and to all men; [*particularly to those who desire now to offer up their praises and thanksgivings for thy late mercies vouchsafed unto them.] We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

Can any one explain why 'world without end' has completely disappeared from our 'formal' and 'informal liturgy'? The only contemporary usage of that I can think of (besides Ken Follett) is a song by Christian ska band Five Iron Frenzy >>>Listen here.

Any ideas?

Picture from Flickr.

Why Churches Die

A little while ago I 'reviewed' The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins. Jenkins has been interviewed on Christianity Today about the other of church growth - and why some churches die.

It's well worth a read, and you can find it here.

Here's an excerpt:

CT: Why does persecution sometimes strengthen a church and other times wipe it out?

PJ: The difference is how far the church establishes itself among the mass of people and doesn't just become the church of a particular segment, a class or ethnic group. In North Africa, it's basically the church of Romans and Latin-speakers, as opposed to the church of peasants, with whom the Romans don't have much connection. When the Romans go, Christianity goes with them.

But Christianity establishes itself very early as a religion of the ordinary, everyday people in Egypt as things get translated into Coptic. As a result, after almost 1,400 years under Muslim rule, there is still a thriving Coptic church that represents [perhaps] 10 percent of the Egyptian people—which I would personally put forward as the greatest example of Christian survival in history

AFES SALT: Resurrecting the Gospel

My article on the centrality of the resurrection in the apostolic gospel has been published in the Autumn AFES SALT magazine. I'm on page 10. Byron also has an article on Heaven: Not the End of the World.

If you don't already receive SALT, you can freely subscribe here.

And at some point I'll probably post my article on hebel.

A Rant on the Current State of Church Services

Once upon a time, you could walk into any Anglican Church in the world and you would know exactly what was happening in the church service. For centuries the Anglican church around the world had followed the same pattern of liturgy and worship. All this changed in the twentieth century with the updating of language and customs - which was quite right given the great difference in language from the 1662 to the 1970's when the first modern Anglican prayer book was published in Australia. But since then the rate of revision had been rapid and astronomical. After three centuries of exclusive use of the Book of Common Prayer, the Diocese of Sydney (formally) went through 3 different prayer books in just 30 years. Besides this, many churches have moved to type of informalism for their services.

Many of these changes have been necessary to keep up with the development of Australian society over the past 50 years. But accompanying this has been a worrying tendency. It has become all to easy to throw out anything the is old, traditional or formal (i.e. the creeds, communion, confession) for the sake of informality. Informalism for the sheer sake of informalism is not a desirable thing. In fact, if anything, it has often resulted in church services that are half-baked, half-arsed, and run according to whim. In pursuit of the noble cause of being informal, our church services are reduced to cliche's and entertainment - the congregation has no idea what will come next and so are reduced to being an audience as they await the next move.

The other problem is that the pursuit of this highest ideal is that our informal services are often just as unintelligible and alienating as the liturgy that they replaced. I saw this problem in my old church. The theory was that no one in the town would step into church, but they would spend all their time in cafes. So turning the church service into a cafe seemed the obvious thing to do. Except that it was a poorly run cafe - why go to there when people go to a nice and comfortable cafe two doors up the road. Nor only did it fail misread to the culture, it also failed to serve the people actually at the church. And has been stated elsewhere:

'The reason we eschewed formality in church services was because that was what WE on the inside wanted (or some of us, anyway) - the missiological reason was in fact only a justification for it'

Of course formalism for the sake of formalism is also dangerous. One of the great strengths of Anglicanism has been it's quality to culturally contextualise it's form and identity to whatever situation it's in. The challenge we face in our contemporary liturgy is to provide church services that allow for spontaneity the relaxed felling that informal service provide, whilst not descending to pure laziness or rejecting good practices on the basis of how formal they are. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

See also: Missiological assumptions?

Alpha Males and Church Leadership

Following up from my previous post, I want to nuance what I said about church planting in Sydney. We are quite prone to planting churches of one particular type - that is churches which are led by alpha males. If one of our churches starts falling behind, we parachute in one of these guys and expect their ability as a 'renaissance man' to turn everything around.

These men are typically assertive in their leadership, and can generally command the loyalty of their church by sheer force of personality. (To generalize even further, they are sporty - or at the very least are well built and handsome). You can see this in many of the leaders in our diocese. Rather than being the softly spoken kind of guys, these men are often seen at church holding court - they are the center of conversations, with younger guys hanging of their every word. And so the next generation of church leaders emulates the current crop of alpha males. They often come across as brash and assertive, and the next thing you know they are late to lectures because they're playing touch or cricket.

Remember too that the Apostle Paul was not a great speaker. He wasn't a great surfer, shuffle around in his designer clothes or have a tan to an enunciate his rugged good looks. Instead he was a poor speaker, ship wrecked and beaten a few times. It is in our weaknesses that He is strong.

I'm not saying that all our ministers are like this. There are many men in ministry who definitely aren't alpha males. They're scrawny and softly-spoken, and full power to them. But if we continue to plant churches where all the men are expected to be die hard rugby fanatics, then that is a significant portion of the population that we are marginalizing and excluding from our churches. We should not let one particular type of manhood become the exclusive picture of Christian maleness. Especially when it is already hard enough for men like this to fit into church.

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.

YOU: A Review

YOU: An Introduction by Michael Jensen

Who am I? What does it mean to be human? Is there any purpose or meaning to life? My friends still grapple with these questions of identity, most notably when they ‘reinvent themselves’ every few years. It’s a question they face every day – studying Blade Runner in high school, deciding who to vote for (and which vision of the future they want), or the advertising world subtlety telling them who they should be (i.e. I drink Coke, not Pepsi) – what does it mean for me to be me? And how do I express this to everyone else. This is especially true of people in their teens and twenties. With so many direct and instantaneous ways of communicating – blogs, Facebook, YouTube, mobile phones – who I decide to be for the next 15 minutes can be conveyed to everyone on my friends list. We spend so much time trying to discover ourselves, and yet have never been more confused about who we are.

YOU: an introduction is a timely answer to these questions about who I am. Developed originally developed by Michael Jensen as a series of blog posts, YOU is engaging and a joy to read. In fact, one of the strengths of YOU is that it has retained the character of a blog. The chapters are brief and to the point, but the writing still feels like a conversation - at the end of each chapter are the comments from the YOU blog and you can read Michael respond to comments from bloggers.

I find YOU to be particularly culturally appropriate for people my age. The images and illustrations Michael draws are the ones me and my friends would be familiar with. Michael quotes a variety of contemporary sources as diverse as Russell Crowe and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers to Wikipedia and tattooing. This does run the risk of hastening the book’s use-by-date. However I actually think that it enhances the book, as it fits the headspace of where the reader is at.

What you get with YOU is the authenticity on the behalf of the author. YOU doesn't pretend to be the last word in anthropology. Nor does it dumb down the sometimes difficult issues. Instead, it faces the big issues head on, and invites the reader to explore what scripture has to say on the matter. The book deals with several issues of what it means to be human, such as life itself, death, gender and more. After laying down the ground work for each topic (what actually is the issue? what are some alternative answers?), Michael concludes each chapter with a snapshot of what scripture has to say on the matter.

I heartily recommend this book. YOU focuses on Jesus, the real humanity. He lived a real, en-fleshed life as the true image of what it means to be human. His death paid for the sin and evil that humanity was both involved in and enslaved to. He rose from the dead as a human and now reigns as the lord of all creation under his Father. This is the God Christians worship – the God we are introduced to in YOU.

YOU is available to purchase from Matthias Media.