Q&A with Father Rod

In my previous article I mentioned the Father Rod, the famous priest from Gosford Anglican, did a Q&A session at the end of his talk.

Here's some more highlights from that:

The current refugee situation

He was asked about the current refugee situation. As coincidence would have it, he has written his view in an article for The Saturday Paper.

LGBT and Christian

He was asked by an LGBT person about the difficulty of being a Christian when church people tell you how bad you are for being LGBT - and LGBT people think you're crazy to hang out with church people (and get told how bad you are). She asked for Bible verses to counter the ones thrown at her by Christians.

Father Rod says the best thing you can do (in both situations) is be the loving kind person that you are. The kind of Christians that use cherry-picked Bible verses to back their point of view are generally not interested in a scholarly interpretation of the context of those Bible verses nor in hearing other Bible passages that might lead to a different conclusion.

Whether it's people inside the church accepting who she is, or people outside the church accepting her Christian faith, the best thing is to be a loving and kind person.

His famous signs

Father Rod was asked how he got started with his famous church signs. He had been asked to carry out a funeral service for a gay person, and the family were worried about negative reactions from the church.

It's a longer story but afterwards he put up the sign "Dear Christians. Some ppl are gay. Get over it. Love God" just for the local community and passers-by. It went a bit crazy on facebook and since then he has been putting up loving, but sometimes-controversial, messages on the church sign.

Did people leave? "Yeah a few left." (At this point I could imagine church treasurers vowing to stick with boring, forgettable messages lest they lose even one member).

But Father Rod hadn't finished. "A few left. Some don't like it, but stayed. But many more came."

To be blunt, he said "there's not much competition for churches that welcome everyone".

In a way that's really sad, but on the positive side, it's an opportunity for a church that's willing to live out a love-based faith.