Followers Or Fans?

I was recently sent this video, presumably broadcast shortly after the Osama bin Laden assasination. It makes some very good points (in a witty way).

New rule: If you're a Christian who supports killing your enemies and torture, you have to come up with a new name for yourself.

Martin Luther King gets to call himself a Christian because he actually practised loving his enemies.

He describes Christian hypocrisy as being "like joining Greenpeace and hating whales"

He (Jesus) has lines like "do not repay evil with evil" and "do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you". Really - it's in the book you hold up when you scream at gay people.

Probably the most stinging quotes were

If you ignore every single thing Jesus commanded you to do ... you're not Christ's followers, you're just fans.

and

I can say that, because I'm a non-Christian - just like most "Christians"

They are harsh statements - but probably well-deserved.

Need A Friend?

Which do you think it is?? Is the church...

(a) officially giving up on helping people find Jesus - and now operating as a neighbourhood meeting place?

(b) doing the old bait-and-switch (Haha! You came here looking for a friend. We tricked you - by "friend" we meant Jesus. Of course you weren't to know that. That's what makes it such a good trick)

(c) reading the research that church makes you sadder (unless you have friends to help you through) and advising their members of this information.

There are no prizes, because i don't know the answer myself, but feel free to suggest your own theory.

God and Sex

Michael Coogan recently wrote the book "God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says". With Rachael Kohn he talks about some of the ways

the Bible is sometimes misused when it comes to deciding how individuals and communities should act. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about what the Bible says and doesn't say ... So the Bible is used to justify opposition to same-sex marriage and yet people also quote the Bible to defend it.

Having studied the Bible, and paying a lot of attention to this area, Michael Coogan has interesting insights of the Song of Songs (sometimes desperately re-interpretted as an allegory of God/Israel), homosexuality in biblical times, and how little Jesus says about sex, "except when it comes to issues like adultery and divorce."

Jesus has a lot of good things to say, but sex doesn't seem to be very high on his list of things to be avoided. He's more concerned about interpersonal relationships and social justice and issues like that.

In what might be an afront to some churchgoers, Coogan says

I don't think one needs to necessarily justify one's beliefs or one's actions exclusively on what the Bible says

He points out the range of practices in the Bible that we no longer accept as valid - that children who curse their parents, all prostitutes, or adulterers, should all be put to death. Not to mention polygamy, slavery and treating women as possessions of men. So what role does the Bible play?

what is inspired about the Bible is not the individual passages, the individual verses which come from particular times, from particular writers with their own values, but rather in a sense the underlying message. And that message in Jewish and Christian tradition is a message of love of neighbour, of equal treatment of all persons.

Wendy Francis - 3 out of 6

In his book unChristian, David Kinnaman explores 6 negative perceptions people have of Christianity - based on the unChristlike behaviour of some Christians. This week, Wendy Francis (former political candidate and now state director of the Australian "Christian" Lobby) reinforced 3 of the 6 perceptions in the one move.

Judgemental. Hypocritical. Anti-homosexual.
The group Queensland Association of Healthy Communities had launched advertising encouraging the use of condoms to prevent the chance of HIV infection. This is the poster.


In her press release, Wendy Francis described this hug as an "act of foreplay" and orchestrated a campaign for it to be removed (alledgedly for depicting a "sexual act"). As far as thinly-disguised anti-homosexual agendas go, i'm not sure i've seen thinner.

The ridiculousness of the charade was best summmed up when this publicity photo of Wendy's appeared on facebook, with a caption satirically asking how Wendy could display such sexual images in front of her own children - there are people hugging!!


One of the two men in the ad organised a facebook event for people to join to object to the homophobia. Even as i write this, it has gone from 55,000 to 71,000 people.

The sad thing is reading some of the posts on the wall of the event. So many people (for whom this is their main experience of what Christians think) are expressing their disappointment (to put it mildly) with Wendy's actions and attitude.

If we ever needed proof of David Kinnaman's unChristian theory, here it is. Thousands of people who see this unChristlike attitude as being representative of Christianity, and hating every bit of it.

(And probably more than a few Christians who are just angry that the faith they sincerely follow is tarnished by the actions of a few followers of the unChristian faith)
------
ps. the ad company has now changed it's mind and is putting the ads back up. Coverage by Herald Sun, Triple J, Brisbane Times, ABC news

Your Church's Facebook Score?

Apparently the vast majority of churches rate as poor or mediocre when it comes to facebook usage - according to the Our Church survey.


But there's good news too. For churches that are keen to make their ministry more effective, there are 5 main areas the study suggests would be most helpful.

1. Communicate More
2. Ministry Pages
3. Facilitate Connections
4. Evangelism Training
5. Facebook Ads

Oh, and there's sometimes a temptation to think "oh, that's young people's stuff". But the full survey results show that more than 60% of respondents were aged 45+. (But of course, even if it was "just young people's stuff" we should still do it - because Jesus' message is for young people too).

Why Men Aren't Singing

David Murrow has a great piece on Men v Praise Music. A big part of the problem is songs that paint God as "a lover rather than a leader", which means they verge on homoerotic when sung by a man. But there's other stuff too.


The result is that "women are worshipping robustly while most men stand for 20 minutes with their hands in their pockets, dutifully mouthing words that fail to resonate with their hearts."

Essentially, there are 3 reasons we ended up this way. Fortunately, there are also 7 practical ideas to help make the music time less anti-men.

The Priests' Confession

ABC's Spirit of Things did an episode titled Candid Clerics - discussing with the authors the revelations of their study Our Fathers (What Australian priests really think). One of the first points was that the burdens and demands of the system prevent priests from doing effective ministry.

they were having to spend their time doing things that had to be done rather than things that should be done.

Instead of outreach, or spiritual matters, priests admitted that "their life was becoming bureaucratised and they were reduced to ritual plus administration."

And it seems that the ritual isn't actually helping people connect with Jesus.

A lot of priests argued that the parish is now obsolete, it is not the way that we connect with people or can connect to people. We're spending all our time trying to maintain a parish structure when the parish structure is not the way to connect with people. We can't do what we should do because we have to do what we must do.

When asked about alternatives, one of the authors said they were "completely opposite to the current structure of the Church. They all spoke about the need for smaller church communities, a lot spoke about house-based communities..."

Quite a few confessed "we are keeping alive a structure which really needs to collapse and lead to some rebirth".

It seems the powers-that-be continue to prop up ineffective ministry, rather than engage with anything new or different. Alternatives which (according to the priests) would be more effective are simply ignored in favour of patching up the status quo.

[Listen to the whole discussion]