Escapee
Back in June or July, we became the owners of a fishtank and four goldfish, and have since enjoyed having these pets (or pieces of furniture? I can’t decide) swimming around in our lounge room. But something had always been missing. Goldfish are fine, but they’re so everyday, so bourgeois. So I went to the aquarium shop and returned with a new resident for our tank.
So named because she is an apple snail, Granny Smith has enlivened our tank by scooting around and scavenging on the leftover food and er, goldfish byproducts which litter the gravel. Her hobbies appear to include climbing to the top of the tank and base-jumping back to the ground, eating lettuce, hiding in logs, and getting stuck behind pipes and hoses. We also learnt that she is at least semi-amphibious, as she climbed out of the tank while we were at church and we found her on the carpet when we got home. Fortunately, she survived long enough for us to drop her back in the water.
We initially thought of Granny as elderly, but she surprised us by laying a clutch of eggs just above the waterline. We are waiting to see if they hatch – not sure what we’ll do with all those little snail-lets, especially as each clutch contains between one to three hundred eggs. If you are into escargot, please contact us.
Sent via website
One of the pluses of working on staff at a church? Receiving unsolicited emails people submit via the website (I’m not sure why they choose me – there are six other people on staff!). Here are some excerpts from two which I thought were worth sharing.
#1 – received 25/08/2008
I am writing to you on behalf of Anderson, Indiana-based pop/rock band no greater sky. We are scheduling dates for our upcoming Australia tour, which will run from November 21 to February 11. We would love to have Toongabbie Anglican Church as a part of our tour! Specifically, we will be in your area
23-26 November. Whether it be through a one-night, weekend, or week-long concert and/or worship event, we are open to what will meet the needs of your church best. We are also available for Christmas events. Below, I have included dates that are available for booking.
I did end up looking up the band’s myspace page and it turns out they are a real band. Is it a sign that you’ve made it as a church when US Christian pop/rock bands are saying that they would love to include you as part of a tour? I suggested to others in our staff team that we book in the week-long concert and/or worship event, but so far, I haven’t heard back.
#2 – received 11/09/2008
God said to worship on the Sabbath not Sunday. You can easily check and see the Catholic Church changed it about 400 AD. and every church has kept this day since. Wrong. Saturday is the day. God said to work 6 days and to rest on the Sabbath. You study some and you will see that Saturday is the day.
The 4th commandment says to keep it Holy. You sin every week by worshiping on Sunday. You will also see that the emperior [sic] worshiped on a Sunday and he with your good buddies the Catholic Church decided they could change anything in the Bible, but they can’t changed [sic] a thing.
Picked up this morning when I checked my emails. I apparently missed the memo which locked Saturday in as the only acceptable Sabbath…and the memo where I became good buddies with the entirety of the Roman Catholic Church. Better get me to a confessional and deal with all those sinful Sunday church gatherings I’ve been a part of for the past twenty-three years.
From before creation
I recently tussled with the idea of predestination as part of an assessment I did for my MTS program. The task was really to design a way of teaching predestination in a way that doesn’t require your listeners to have a BTh, but true to nerdular form, I ended up writing a companion essay to think through the issues more fully and get my head straight on what the Bible teaches on predestination.
The main surprise for me was that the whole doctrine is really not as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, I suspect people get hung up at one of three points and remain stuck there because predestination is one of those things that doesn’t neatly slot into our Western, rationalistic, logic-oriented minds (privately, I do wonder if this will become less of an issue as pluralism sinks in as an acceptable way of assessing ideas). The three points where I reckon most people run aground are:
- The idea that God predestines some and not others to eternal life. This is understandable; to accept this, it requires us to defer to God and acknowledge that He has not chosen to predestine everyone to eternal life, but rather some to eternal life and some to eternal punishment.
- The tension between God’s sovereignty (or, as Packer would argue, His Kingship) and human responsibility for sin (or, God’s role as Judge), seeing as the two are made plain in Scripture but appear irreconcilable. If God is sovereign and all our thoughts and ways are known by Him and subject to His will, how can we be held accountable for our sin? For a related difficulty, see point one above.
- The question of falling away – specifically, if God has predestined His elect, and someone who appears to be elect falls away, were they really elect in the first place?
I could write a lengthy article about these, but I won’t (perhaps I will make my essay available, for the interested). But, I will say this – could it be that our biggest problem with predestination, as a doctrine, is not that it is nonsense, or unfair, or inconsistent, but rather that we are sometimes unwilling to adopt a position of humility and accept that God’s ways are higher than ours? The conflicting, seemingly-incompatible truths presented by the Bible may cause our minds to bristle and may spawn questions which appear to have no answer. This, though, should not lead us instantly to disillusionment. Rather, perhaps we should acknowledge that our human wisdom is finite and accept that we will not always be able to wrangle Biblical truth into a logically-consistent framework. The tensions and difficulties we encounter are no doubt frustrating, but there is also comfort in the knowledge that God would not have created such tensions and difficulties if such things were meant to be skimmed over.
What are your thoughts on predestination? What difficulties do you have with this doctrine when it is taught?
Happenings
New things going down include:
- Visiting a Christian dude in an infamous detention centre, and wrestling with how to be effective in ministry with him.
- Pronouncing my second-hand espresso machine dead recently, seeing as it has turned into a squealing, slavering coffee zombie.
- As per the above, a return to plunger coffee.
- Finishing Scripture for a second term. My Kindy kids enjoyed their lesson on Jesus’ attitude towards children, and my Year 3s still show a ravenous curiosity about other countries (though, when I try to tell them about Christians in third-world nations, they seem more interested in why the left hand is considered dirty than in the hardships endured by Christian nationals for the gospel).
- Four newcomers to the house. We have inherited goldfish from friends Dan and Priscilla, who are emigrating south of the border and don’t want their aquatic friends anymore. We are now proud owners of these handsome fish. Any ideas on names? I had goldfish when I was in uni and named them after philosophers and then Roman mythical heroes, but that seems a bit tired now.
I won’t be around for a little while – though, if you are out and about north of the border, you might find me here, running around with a bunch of kids in Townsville. But, f’real, I’m pretty stoked that MTS gives me the opportunity to get involved in these kinds of conferences. I went to the LiT camp when I was in Year 12, not long after it first began, and it was great for building practical skills as well as introducing me to Christians outside of my home church. I really hope and pray that this inaugural Launch conference does the same for the kids who attend.
Sermonising
I first preached the Word in a church context back in May 2006. I was kindly given a go at the lecturn for a new preacher’s night, which was an initiative to give people a chance to write and present a sermon based on a passage of their choosing. I chose Ezekiel 37 and ended up preaching what ended up sounding like an essay on the text, with something about Jesus shoehorned in at the end. The feedback was kind, but, I feel, avoided the truth about the negative aspects of my style and my approach to the text – in hindsight, I realise that I didn’t really approach the passage from a ‘whole Bible’ perspective and didn’t devote much time to looking at how the passage is fulfilled in Jesus, which is a shame, because it’s a golden picture of redemption and recreation and humble obedience to the true King.
Preaching is now part of my job description, and I recently had a go at giving a Bible talk as part of a series on Daniel. Fortunately, my trainer saw fit to give me Daniel 5, which lies in the narrative section and not the acid-trip apocalyptic section, but the challenge remained to conquer the weaknesses of my first attempt. The initial draft blew out to 4,500 words, but with some effort and painstaking trimming, I got it down to a reasonable 3,000 words which still managed to communicate my intentions. I feel that it went off OK on the night.
Did I manage it? You can decide – listen to my efforts right here and see what you think.
Blargle
Wordle seems to be the new toy for those hip computer people (thanks to Guan for the find). It makes plain text more interesting by plotting it into artistic clouds, coloured and everyfink. Sweet, eh?
The applications for various word-related frippery are many and varied. Guan pointed it to his journal; others have allegedly converted the ESV New Testament into word clouds. The interesting thing is that when you…wordle your text (behold, I am anticipating that ‘Wordle’ will suffer the same fate of ‘Google’ and become verbised), the size of each word reflects its frequency in the source. Ashamedly, this reminded me of the various psychometric instruments which utilise word frequency as an independent variable, and made me think that psychology journals would be so much easier to read if they only used word clouds instead of graphs. You can take the nerd out of the university, but…
Anyhoo, if you weren’t at SNC on Sunday night, you can catch up with what was said by clicking below. Perhaps you could play ‘Spot the Illustration’?
Grind
The word is that I have bruxism.
This saddens me, for lo, I used to have very good teeth. Yet I had been wondering why a lone front tooth had, like a glacier, been inexorably working backwards. A four-years-late trip to the dentist revealed why. “You’re probably grinding your teeth when you sleep,” he says, shortly after telling me that I will need root canal surgery ‘one day’ on an old filling. Having that contrast in my head makes bruxism seem like good news. Still, the tooth doctor also says that if I don’t do anything about it, my glacial front tooth will eventually move so far that it will start interfering with my tongue, which means braces will be required, so he tells me to try a mouthguard when I sleep.
The medical community doesn’t seem to know why some people grind their teeth while most people don’t. I tried to diagnose myself using Wikipedia’s associated factors list and the only match was ‘relatively high levels of consumption of caffeinated drinks and foods’. Does two cups of coffee a day count as relatively high consumption? Anyway, so much for modern medicine, because not only do they not know why it happens, but they can’t cure it – the best they could offer me was the exercise in damage control that is the acrylic mouthguard, which the bruxist must wear at night, every night, for the rest of their lives.
The idea appealed, in some ways. It’s cooler than dentures, but you still get to mess around with something that looks like your teeth, and the opportunities for practical jokes are there. But it’s not as comfortable as it might look to sleep with a mouthguard in – try stuffing the space next to your gums with erasers and you’ll understand why.
And, my brain seems to understand this, even while sleeping, because for three out of four nights, I have managed to remove the mouthguard in my sleep and hidden it in the blankets. This causes some consternation upon waking: the first time it happened, I thought I had swallowed the entire thing without knowing. It’s a miracle that I haven’t choked.
Any fellow teeth-grinders out there?
Mosaic
1. Ben Arthur Cairn, 2. Chhole (Indian Curried Chick peas), 3. Tyndale Monument, 4. How much more red could this be?, 5. GA S3 Cast, 6. Not a good time for a photo, I’d rather have coffee first, 7. Lahore art, 8. thursday: dessert, 9. 21May06 Bangladesh Missionaries (21), 10. Plus haut, 11. Shades of life, 12. Batwood I Can Take That Shot Too
From Kathleen.
Cultural mystique
Is the emerging church thing passe yet? I am only just getting my head around it and I am fascinated and disturbed in equal parts. I really enjoy learning about it and talking with people about it, but I am wondering if it is a dated issue by now. I am in the process of slowly compiling some thoughts on this, provoked by our time spent in staff meetings reading Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations (2003), but here are some preliminary thoughts.
Firstly, the emerging church defies description. I have read several attempts to define and capture the emerging church movement(s?), though none that have really gained any credence. It seems that there are different degrees of ‘emergence’, and these degrees appear to stem from different thinkers or leaders who are a part of this movement(s). For example, Brian McLaren appears to be one of the more influential leaders of the emergent church, but his thinking on the topic seems to be more liberal-theology than Dan Kimball, whose book is heavily focused on culture and the arts over theology. Appropriately, no-one who I have read claims that the emerging church has a central manifesto or set of articles of faith – much like the postmodernity that it clings to, emergence claims that it cannot be boxed. Instead, it feels more like a series of ‘works-in-progress’, always moving towards something rather than saying, ‘this is what we are’. I’m not sure what it is they are moving towards, though. It smacks of narrativism.
Secondly, and relatedly, the emerging church is characterised by mystique. There is a (renewed?) fascination with the unknown and the unknowable. I have read (though I am yet to rediscover this source) that there is a tendency to be somewhat agnostic about God’s character – we cannot know all about God, in our limited human wisdom, so we should embrace a more mystical view of Him. I wonder if this goes hand-in-hand with the generally liberal theology that is coupled with the emergent church movement(s) – to create a spiritual experience for today’s savvy non-churchgoer who is suspicious of the more traditional church, it seems that many thinkers and leaders in the emergent church(es) have abandoned hard-fought-for fidelity to the Bible. Emergents seem to advocate a view that we cannot know God through His Word, so we must turn to other ways to find Him – experience, meditation, music, the arts. I wonder, then, if the emerging church has more in common with gnosticism than Biblical Christianity.
Thirdly, I am yet to read a coherent and cogent analysis of postmodernism which validates the emerging church’s foundation. Dan Kimball’s book devotes some time to talking about postmodernism, but I am not convinced that he is really engaging with postmodernity and its associated epistemological underpinnings. For example, I think he has failed to appreciate what the word ‘deconstruct’ means – he seems to use it as a synonym of ‘take apart’ (which, on the surface, is what it literally means), whereas the word takes on more nuance when discussing postmodernity, suggesting an analysis of meaning in texts and language and how meanings shift when read in light of certain contained assumptions. I am also dissatisfied with Kimball’s rendering of modernism (and, to some extent, postmodernism) as a homogeneous caricature with little nuance or detail.
Fourthly, I get the feeling the emerging church is generally more critical of the ‘institutional church’ than of postmodernism. Perhaps this is an unfair statement, but so far, the general attitude towards ‘traditional’/‘seeker-sensitive’/‘institutional’ church in Kimball’s book is that it works for ‘moderns’, but not ‘postmoderns’. But he then appears to let postmodernity drive his proposed new way of structuring church, without really critiquing whether that’s appropriate.
Fifthly, there are some positives to the emerging church, despite my grouchiness. It prompts us to take a good look at culture and subculture and assess how church interacts with those around us. It promotes the need to take the gospel to the unchurched (i.e. those who have no Christian experience or roots and have little to no exposure to Biblical Christianity in their lives). It challenges us to rethink methodology and how we ‘do’ church gatherings. It demands that we confront issues that we are perhaps scared to confront.
I am working on being more lucid about all this soon (with references! I promise!).
Mixed bag
Loving:
- The school holidays (now sadly over).
- Stardust. Unexpectedly good!
- Cooler weather.
- Working for TAC.
- Ian Irvine’s The Well of Echoes quartet (oddly).
- The Guggenheim Grotto, Jimmy Eat World, and Clare Bowditch.
Not loving:
- Our car.
- The constant state of fear and not-knowing in ministry.
- The state of the Anglican communion right now.
Thinking:
- Crap, where did all this wind come from?
Resigned to:
- There always being more washing.
- Some things not changing.
Wanting:
- A French horn.
- More time.
Anticipating:
- Another great term of SRE and other activities.
- Writing more…one day.
- A new neighbour (though we love our old neighbour).
- A new car (when we’ve sold the old one).
- Townsville and beyond in 2008-9.
