Thinkaloud | pride & prejudice

by Maxwell Ryan

Extreme nationalism is one of the curses of the modern world. “My country, right or wrong” is not a Christian response to the requirements of responsible citizenship. Christians are good citizens when they remind their leaders that God is the final authority and that all true leadership flows from obedience to His will. God has not created one race superior to another, but He has built-in different gifts and capacities. Such real differences should be a cause for rejoicing, not a reason for national pride or merciless competitiveness.

The belief that one nationality is superior to another is destructive and has invariably led to atrocities. Savage wars have been fought with great loss of life because of supposed racial superiority. The conflicts that rage across the world often have their roots in intolerant pride which leads to prejudice, and the willingness to destroy people simply because they are different.

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Faith and fourth

Areopagus: what’s on the other side of the media’s collapse?

Bramwell Ryan is a journalist and producer. As a content creator and controller, an ex-publisher, ex-editor and ex-producer of newspapers, magazines and radio/television, Ryan is fascinated by the collapse of the media (as we know it).

There are parallels between the panic and angst in today’s media and the spiritual exhaustion with the state of the church when Martin Luther grabbed a hammer and headed to the cathedral in Wittenburg.

Ryan specializes in multi-platform content and creates video, audio, print, photographic and web material for media outlets and NGOs. His stories range from coverage of the largest caribou herd in the world to underage prostitutes in Bangladesh; grave robbers in Haiti to post-tsunami rebuilding in Sri Lanka.

In this podcast he offers an analysis of the current situation in the world of media and an invitation to the church to begin to imagine how this shifting reality might actually offer fresh opportunities for the shaping of the culture in which we live.

Bramwell Ryan is the editor of theRubicon and gave this talk at a public lecture series in April in Winnipeg, Canada.

There are two ways to hear this Areopagus presentation (runs 1:12:11) and the question period that followed:

• click on the arrow below
• click here to download the episode from iTunes

JustThinking | could’ve been a contender

Danielle Strickland says: we need a fight

This week has been eventful in Australia. At the launch of the Red Shield Appeal in Sydney a group of sex workers from Scarlett Alliance (a local sex workers collective) stormed the event as a public protest against The Salvation Army. Apparently they were upset over one of the ads for the Red Shield appeal which featured the story of a male prostitute stuck in a terrible situation including drug addiction and how The Salvation Army flew him to a detox and treatment program and now he testifies to a better life. The suggestion that if you give to The Salvation Army you are helping others like him was apparently what was so offensive.

For those of you who aren’t from this part of the world and so aren’t caught up on the legislative nightmare that is legalized prostitution in Australia, there are three other articles that you may want to check out on theRubicon (Victims or whores | Banishing wickedness | Gunilla rocks). But this particular incident sums it all up pretty well - to help someone out of prostitution and then to tell others about it, is to attack the good-natured, work-friendly face that is legalized prostitution in Australia (and elsewhere).

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Playing armies

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time with another family of Army kids. We’d kick a football on the road, ride billycarts, splash around in a backyard swimming pool or, when it was wet (as it often was in Melbourne, Australia), we’d be inside the house “playing armies.”

Don’t ye know it’s wicked to play cricket on a Sunday?
Any worse than playing soldiers, hey old boy?

The eldest boy would always be the officer leading us in an overly sincere prayer, vigorously conducting the band or preaching the hellfire and brimstone sermon. Another would play the CSM, humorously explaining some intricate detail of corps life. My sister and anyone else would be the band, songsters and timbrel brigade. My baby sister did a lot of crying from the pram, and I’d play the part of “Old Wally” who always had a very earnest testimony that started with a whisper and ended in full centurion roar. “Armies” always followed the same basic plot, and we’d laugh ourselves stupid at the jokes and routines. There was comfort in that ritual, and the humour helped us make sense of the strange actions of the adults that we observed in our corps each week.

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Violence against women

by Gen Peterson

I don’t usually like to focus unduly on statistics. Instead I prefer opinionated comment as an enticement toward social action. Blogs are effective because they mobilize the mob! Do we really need to know all the ins and outs of an issue or do we simply just need a little fire to thaw out our frigid limbs of inactivity? While, I tend to think you need a grasp of both, today, you are going to have to live with just the numbers:

• At least one in every three women is likely to be beaten, coerced into sex or somehow abused in her lifetime.
• One in five women worldwide will become a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.
• More than 80% of trafficking victims are women. Of that, 50% are minors.
• Up to 130 million women have been genitally mutilated.
• Human trafficking is the third most profitable criminal activity after drugs and arms.
• Nearly 50% of all sexual assaults worldwide target girls aged 15 or younger.
• Between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped during the conflict in Bosnia during the early 1990s; ten times that many women were sexually violated during the genocide in Rwanda.
• Abductions, detention, mutilation and other degrading and cruel punishments, including sexual torture, forced pregnancy, and deliberate infection with HIV, are among the human rights abuses inflicted upon women and girls in conflict situations.
• In Turkey, there are approximately four honour killings every week.
• Domestic violence is the most common form of violence against women. 40 to 70 percent of female murder victims in Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa, and the USA were killed by their husbands or boyfriends. The health-related costs of intimate partner violence in the US alone are estimated at $5.8 billion.
• In Thailand, intimate partner violence is the leading cause of death for women and girls aged 15-24 years.

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Messing with the DNA

The dangers of new church leadership

I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Horror stories often illustrate the inherent danger of cobbling bits of a body together or messing around with essential DNA. As a result, a monster is usually created which eventually gets out of control, wreaks havoc, destroys original intentions and lives in the process. And so it can happen in church planting.

Planting a church is a complicated and many faceted experience, but I observe there is a constant. In an ideal world everyone who got involved either by choice or appointment would be “on the same page” but unfortunately that often is not the case.

The Reverend Colin Stoodley (a former SA officer, very successful Baptist pastor, church planting expert at Pines College, Queensland, Australia) talks a lot about the importance of determining the initial, God inspired DNA of a church plant and staying true to it.

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Thinkaloud | Of scaffolds & thrones

Truths to be grasped | Maxwell Ryan

Does it really matter if one person holds to the truth, despite the fact that most do not? Does it make any difference to the workings of the universe when people are honest, or is untruth just as acceptable? Surely lies and deceptions are all right when they support a good cause, or are they? Is honesty always the best policy, or is truth merely one of many commodities available to the consumer?

Questions such as these assume that there is a universal standard of truth that moral principles exist, and that people are born with a sense of right and wrong. Indeed, Christian - such as C. S. Lewis - and non-Christian thinkers through the ages have recognized the existence of and written about “the natural law.” By this they mean the law of God, which is “part of the equipment” that people receive at birth, and which is part of what it means to be human.

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A chosen chazen

Jonathan Gainey on a forgotten role

I‘m interested in getting inside the world of Jesus. There are good reasons why… among them is the specific purpose of being able to better “fulfill” (interpret) the Word of God. Without that ability, we will suffer from the kind of lack of understanding that “abolishes” (misinterprets) the Word of God from pulpits all over the evangelical world.

The church today includes many different roles, filled by individuals with titles such as deacon, pastor, overseer, and elder. All of these titles have their roots in the synagogue. I want to focus on one specific position and title as we discuss the importance of properly “fulfilling” the Word of God from the pulpit.

In the synagogue, there was a position known as a chazen. A chazen would pray, preach behind a wooden pulpit, and provide supervision for the reading of the Torah. It is important to note that the chazen did not actually read the Torah; he merely stood next to the one who did. His job was to correct, oversee, and ensure that the Scriptures were properly “fulfilled.” Another name for the chazen was “overseer.” If someone were to “abolish” the Torah, which means to “misinterpret” it, then the overseer would step up to help him “fulfill” the Torah, which means to “correctly interpret” it.

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Proof! | Envisioning the Future

We must regain trust says Joe Noland

This is my semi-follow-up take on the The Shrinking Pool post, as promised. Recently I heard an officer say, “I accepted the call to officership at face value.” Years of experience and an educated intuition tell me that hers is the exception rather than the rule today. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that members of this “emerging generation” are not joiners, nor are they as brand loyal as in my generation. A Google search on the subject brought up over 12,000 hits on the subject. A page on the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention website features a young Southern Baptist pastor with the following observation:

“Yet Harris, a young Southern Baptist pastor, believes Southern Baptists will play a diminished role in gospel work in the next quarter century unless Southern Baptist leaders begin envisioning the future through the eyes of an emerging generation less brand loyal than previous generations.”

Substitute Salvation Army, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran or any other mainline denomination into that paragraph and you get the same result. Oh, I know there are exceptions and we thank God for them, but the hard facts are out there, impossible to ignore, and they are very scary.

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Where have all the men gone?

by Graeme Smith

Since arriving at William Booth College in London as a cadet in the Prayer Warriors Session I’ve been actively involved at three London corps and in each one I’ve noticed exactly the same issue; the men are outnumbered roughly three-to-one by the women. When did things get so bad?

What’s interesting though is that it doesn’t seem to bother that many people. We lament the fact that our young people are leaving and shed tears over the poor state of our Sunday-schools, but when it comes to the lack of men people seem to simply shrug their shoulders and accept the situation. Why is this?

This is even stranger because the research suggests that if you really want to be effective in your outreach you should aim at men. Why? Because when a father becomes a Christian there is a 93% probability that the rest of the household will follow, compared with just 3.5% for children and 17% for mothers! This is incredible stuff but how much of our effort goes into specifically male oriented activities?

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