of liars and leaders

The year I was sixteen, my church had an Easter church camp. The theme of the camp was that We Would Face Oppression And Resistance As Christians. It's a reliable Evangelical theme, both then and now.

That camp, we got confronted by it quite directly.

At the Saturday night event, usually only filled with teenagers from 12 to 18, their over-18 leaders (up to about age 27, maybe), and maybe four adults/parents who were there to keep an eye on everything, a stranger walked into the event and started demanding to know why we believed. What was this Jesus thing all about anyway? How could we follow this thing so blindly? He was escorted out, and the evening started to go on but ground to a halt as the leaders realised that the teenagers were mostly too traumatised to continue. The evening was disrupted, and we were sent back to the main hall while the leaders conferred about what to do next.

About half an hour later, we were called back in and a handful of the leaders confessed: the stranger was a plant. Someone that they knew from their university Christian groups who'd agreed to be the 'challenger' to a bunch of sheltered, conservative teenagers of Asian background and Australian birth about the realities of the Christian life.

Most of us accepted this, I think. I don't remember much about my thoughts and feelings, except that it seemed like a reasonable idea that had gone way out of control. Also, some of the younger girls in my cabins - 12 and 13 years old - were rather traumatised by the sudden prospect of confrontation. One was really close to the guy when he stopped in the centre aisle to castigate the leaders, and she was trembling. These are kids from Sydney's North Shore, young and protected, upper-class, private school kids brought up in a Christian environment among family and friends. They've never known hardship or struggle or oppression - and money and status and power insulate us from those things, too.

She was struggling a lot, so we had one of the female leaders sitting on the bed and talking with her, with many of the other younger girls who were still struggling to process. This leader hadn't been part of the plan. In fact, her boyfriend - a grown man of thirty - had twigged that the challenger was someone from a university Christian group back in his day, and gone after the group of leaders who'd escorted him out to reason with him, only to find out that it was all a show. A performance with the intention of 'showing us how it really was'.

He was furious at the deception.

When I ventured that the leaders had our best interests at heart - preparing us for the world - though, John shook his head. "Selina," he said, "God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom."

God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom.

I don't know if John remembers saying that, but it has stuck with me for nearly thirty years.

What does this thirty-year old memory have to do with the now?

Simple.

Scott Morrison is a liar.

He may be a Christian, but he is also an inveterate liar. He takes no true responsibility. He bears no true burden of leadership. What he can deflect to someone else, he will. What he can obfuscate and deny, he does. He may very well be saved by the blood of Jesus, but he is a terrible ambassador for Christ in the political arena because he is not a man of honour and decency. He is the Aaron Burr of our times: "talk less, smirk more, don't tell them straight what you're against or what you're for..."

And Australian Christians are voting for Morrison and his party out of fear.

All the ranking church people I know in my denomination are behind the Liberal Party of Australia. For gender certainty. For religious discrimination. For 'decency' and 'uprightness' and 'a godly society'. To keep our society from 'falling to godlessness', to maintain our privileged standing in educational institutions and charitable institutions, because God's way is the correct way and this gives us the right to demand that other people listen to us and put up with us and don't question us and our methods...

The lies and falsehoods and squirrel statements that the leaders of the Liberal Party make? All in the service of God. All in the flourishing of the Christian faith.

All in the undercutting of Christian witness.

God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom.

captive audiences and the gospel

the right to force other people to listen

In my mid-twenties, I was working in the city, commuting up the north shore line.

It was usually a quiet, unprepossessing trip, full of people who carefully didn't make eye contact and who tried not to say anything more than the barest minimum to each other. Mobile phones had not yet achieved internet status at the time, and so people read their papers or a book or stared blankly into space as they girded themselves for the day ahead.

Except this one morning.

A young man - maybe my own age, maybe a bit younger - got on my carriage at Chatswood. Taking a position near the stairs, holding firmly to the provided handles, he raised his voice for our attention and began...a stand-up comedy routine. He had a nice voice. The jokes were dad-level - that wincingly funny angle of 'oh no dad, please'. His voice carried through the quiet carriage, intruding on a peaceful morning commute. And there was no escape for anyone who didn't have headphones on. (And headphones or earphones were a far less common proposition in those days.)

We were on a train headed to work. We had no choice about being there - not if we wanted to earn money. Sure, some people smothered laughs at his routine, but my own thoughts at that moment were, I didn't sign up for this and I have nowhere to go.

The thing about that train carriage was that there were another six stops to the city, and I didn't know how long he was going to make jokes, but I wasn't in a mood to take them.

I can't remember what I said. I remember that it was short and polite and very much annoyed. I sympathised with his enthusiasm and his vigour, but at that moment if I'd had a neon sign to put up over my head, it would have read something like: DO NOT WANT.

He apologised and piped down. The guy standing next to him said quietly that he enjoyed the humour. The train ride continued, and he got off a few stops later.

Maybe under other circumstances, I might have been more forgiving. After all, the guy was passionate about what he was doing, he was enthusiastic, he was pretty funny in that dad-joke kind of way. But I didn't have the capacity for it then, and if I didn't, doubtless many other people didn't either, although none of them would have been so bold as to say so. Don't rock the boat, don't interrupt him, put aside your own discomfort to make him feel at home...

No. Sorry. A stand-up routine on a street or a platform, where people can move away? Yes. Sure. All good.

A stand-up routine with a bunch of people who are pretty much the definition of a captive audience? No. That's inflicting something on people that they haven't paid for, haven't asked for.

I think of that morning sometimes when my friends complain that they can't "tell the gospel" at their workplaces anymore.

I think of people who just want to get through their day, who are tired and grumpy, who haven't signed up for this, who didn't ask for it. I think of people who have no choice but to listen to a co-worker whose enthusiasm might be enjoyable outside of work but whose insistence on preaching the gospel inside an office space leaves no choice but for the recipient to stand up and say "No. Enough. I don't want to listen to this now. I signed up to work, not to be preached at."

What we offer to people as individuals, on their own time, in spaces where they have the choice to listen or the choice to shut it down gently. And I think of being preached at by someone who might have my best interests at heart but who has all the sensitivity of a brick when it comes to my comfort levels, or who tells themselves "it's the gospel, of course it's going to make them uncomfortable".

And I think that we are doing a great news no favours at all when we force people to listen.

In the same way, I think we are doing a great news and a great freedom no favours at all when we require people to follow Christian standards for our own comfort levels, but that's another conversation entirely.