heaven and hell and all that's in-between

The Sydney Evangelical church appears to be doubling down on the 'turn or burn' style of evangelism. It's not that it isn't a truth that we are called to the kingdom, but I feel like the risk of approaching it as such is alienating in a way that too many Sydney Evangelicals don't quite get, as alien as they are to modern culture and modern mindsets.

To the SydEvang, it's all about "they want to live a sinful lifestyle" and "they're rejecting God's plan for them".

In one of my political groups today, there was a discussion about how young people seem to have no idea about how the political system worked, and that the Governor General Sam Mosteyn wanted kids to learn about civics again. Someone mentioned the failing faith in institutions that our country and other western democracies are experiencing, and I noted in that discussion that it doesn't really matter how much you teach people about civics, if they feel that civic institutions are not benefiting them.

Like, sure, if you have a solid income, or good savings, or generous and willing parents with property, then sure the civic institutions may - on balance - benefit you. But if you're up-and-coming, or struggling to find work, or have accessibility issues, then the political institutions of our country have cut and trimmed and snipped and shaved and belittled and demeaned the people who rely on any kind of civic services - or even just the people who weren't born under a fortunate star.

Why bother engaging with a government who only seems to be working for people who aren't you? If the system appears rigged, the options are to rip the whole thing down, or to opt out, not to play a game where it's obvious you will never win.

I feel like this is also a problem with 'the church' broadly speaking.

Because so far as the average Australian is concerned, 'the church' doesn't care about them. 'The church' advocates for no electoral responsibility. It does not say that Centrelink is insufficient to live on. It does not note that then NDIS is designed to be bureaucratic so that it shoves people off. To the average Australian, 'the church' doesn't give a shit about you if you're gay or poor, if you can't put money in the plate, if you don't already act like a Christian. 'The church' as a body is a useless bit of happy clappy that doesn't improve the collective life of our society in any way.

Every Christian reading this will promptly protest that this is a vile slander, and the church runs charities (they don't, the charities are organisations outside of 'the church'), that it contributes to community life (it might, but it's unlikely to be doing so in any way that meaningfully impacts the community), that Christians do good works in the community...

Ah, and here we come to the crux.

"Christians" do good works in the community, but it is rarely with the full weight of a church behind it.

Christmas carols, yes. Perhaps an Easter service?

When was the last time 'the church' encouraged a protest...oh, the NSW bill about abortion services being available to more women across NSW? Apparently the only thing worth 'the church' getting behind. Somewhat like the donation that the Anglican diocese made to the 'No to Marriage Equality' campaign?

If the church is only self-interested - and yes, anti-abortion and no-marriage-equality are seen as 'self-interested' by outsiders - then how is it different to any other secular or other-religion community out there? If we are only advocating for the (largely theoretical) issues of the church, then what value does 'the church' have to outsiders? And these days, everyone is an outsider to the church, except for the small numbers of people who are regulars within it.

When was the last time 'the church' encouraged a protest about something that was 'moral' biblically, but 'controversial' within the Sky-After-Dark, anti-woke, largely capitalistically-minded congregation? eg. immigrants, poor people, disability, political integrity? (yes, political integrity is controversial within churches where the underlying belief is that "if you are a Christian, you will vote [x]" even if such sentiments are never explicitly voiced)

Biblically moral but congregationally controversial? Oh, that's a "conscience matter". But somehow the question of early abortion (before reasonable viability) or late-term abortion (for life-threatening medical reasons) is not a conscience matter? I have known families who made the choice to keep the child until it died of natural causes, and of families who had to make the choice to terminate the pregnancy early in the hope that a later pregnancy might be viable as the first was not. But everywhere along the timeline of pregnancy, there are Christians who have made choices - good ones, bad ones, morally approvable ones, and morally unconscionable ones. Were they good choices? Maybe not. But nowhere else do we so ferociously refuse to allow people to make bad choices, even when there are lives at stake.

IDK. I think we're stuck in a 19th Century methodology of preaching the gospel, with no idea of how to break out of it. And no, making it only 'the social gospel' isn't the way, but there's got to be a midway point between "you should be afraid of hell" and "it's all about being nice".

Vine Church and the Sydney LGBTQIA+ Mardi Gras 2025

On Saturday night, during the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras I attended an 'open grounds' event in a church in Surry Hills. Every year, the church opens their grounds, offers food and drink, a place to rest and chill, and some easy music for people to take a break from the chaos of the Mardi Gras.

This is my first year volunteering, but I know a kid from my local church who's been going the last two years, and the open grounds itself has apparently been running in some form or another for twenty years. They've got it down to a fine art, including not only setting up teams for the various stations, but also getting volunteers from all over Sydney. The kid from my local church wasn't the only one, and I found myself herding a bunch of kids home at the end and giving one a lift home from the station.

I say 'kids' because they're the age of the children of my peers at church, but they're young adults, really. I think they thought I was maybe a decade or two younger than I am - still older, but not as old as I am.

The goal is not to proselytise, not to argue sexuality or gender politics. It's also not to affirm or deny what people are doing or to make a stand on one side or another of the line. Ultimately, the goal is to provide rest and respite in a space that wouldn't usually be associated with Mardi Gras. To provide a positive interaction with Christians and the church for people who wouldn't usually step into a church ground. And for Christians of Sydney to show love and kindness and compassion to people who we might not otherwise usually have the opportunity to minister to.

I liked that goal. I could get behind it. And when my sister sent me a link about signing up for it because her church (the 'cathedral' church of our denomination) asked for volunteers, I put my name in.

They take your name, ask you to sign a statement of belief, get you to put down a spiritual referee, have you choose two teams to join, and have an 'induction' day that people attend so they can make it clear what they're asking for. Then you turn up on the afternoon of Mardi Gras, there's setup, and prep, and an information session on how the night will go. If you're part of the 'conversations' team, then they'll give you some training on how to hold those conversations in gracious and graceful ways, with love and not confrontation.

I put my name down for 'conversations' and 'pancakes' teams. I have no idea why I put down conversations, and no memory of signing up for conversations, but when the email came in, that was where I was. And, to be honest, I guess God wanted me to both challenge and be challenged by the conversations I had that night.

Two shifts through the night, you're supposed to take at least one break and switch around in the middle. I was on 'conversations' to start with, then 'pancakes' later. They set me up outside in the entryway with some beads to make friendship bracelets.

I got into a conversation with a woman who had been raised at one of the Anglican-run private schools, so she'd learned all the typical stuff, but had ended up in a very Eastern Religions background - yoga, lots of "many roads lead to the right place', etc. She helped me out with the bracelet beading as we chatted, sorting beads into groups and laying out the letters so I could spell out 'L-O-V-E-D' on the bracelets.

My recommendations for the beading would be to have a bunch already made and ready for people to take. Try to work in phrases that don't use the letters L-O-V-E-D, because those are best for the ones that we make up on the spot. Also a needle or two for easier picking up of beads, and another set of scissors.

Have some 'stable tables' that the people beading outside could put on their thighs, and a sign to advertise what's going on and that people can get a friendship bracelet as they go in. (Conversations team can then link the bracelet with our purpose in opening the church to people.)

Some people will want to sit down and choose their own colours (there were not the right colours for a pride flag, although you could maybe do a trans flag if you were thoughtful about the choices) but I mostly directed people to just move up and down the colour ranges that were available in the box.

The second most meaningful conversation of the night was a guy who came from Ireland. His experience of the church and religion was 'Catholic guilt' so I talked to him about the joy of knowing Jesus, of being known, of being loved. He didn't sit, but crouched by me while his friends went inside. We talked for about ten minutes and I made a bracelet for him. I don't remember his name, but as I tied the bracelet around his wrist, I told him that when he woke up tomorrow, I wanted him to remember that he's loved by Jesus, that it's not guilt and shame, but love and freedom.

There are probably Christians who would feel this isn't enough. You have to TELL HIM THE GOSPEL right there and then, while he's listening. HAMMER IT HOME. That sort of thing.

Sometimes, I think the problem is that we're too busy hammering it home to realise we're bruising bent reeds. It takes an average of seven times for a woman to finally, fully walk out of an abusive relationship. And what is sin if not the epitome of abusive relationship?

There were a group of women in string-and-fabric dresses who paused for a few seconds, and exclaimed over the bracelets but weren't willing to stop and make ones themselves. (Need more of a table space for this, I think.)

Note to self: I think I might make a 'string and fabric' dress for next year, but in black as per the 'uniform' request, and designed to show off my tattoo. Also, longer hemlines and with a high cowlneck, maybe a more A-line skirt. The idea is to have something in the style, but less 'flesh on display'. Also, I'm not skinny anymore, so it's not much of a thing.

And there was a couple, she was South Korean, he was Thai, they made bracelets, but their English wasn't good enough to do more than hit the high points, and even then they were a bit vague. He did ask "Church? Why?" And I tried to convey, "Because Jesus love." Don't know if I did.

Every small interaction.

Anyway, I did the beading so long as there was light, but by the time the second shift hit, it was too dark for people to see what I was doing, and most people were led towards the light inside the church foyer, so they didn't need to be drawn further in. So I tidied up my beading stuff and went inside for a break. Got some water, took a breather and chatted with a few people on the team, then went out to see if the Pancakes team needed help.

Pancakes was pretty busy; they were outside, had a gas BBQ plate that was supposed to have two lines of gas heating, but really only had one that worked with any decent heat. Then there was the issue of the pancake mixes which needed to be made up but often tended to be lumpy or too liquid or too thick. I ended up helping flip pancakes, and chatting with the people in the line. A couple of light conversations (it's difficult to talk about life-changing things in the dark when you're trying not to let the stuff you're cooking burn), and one guy from Italy "Catholic" but doesn't really believe in anything - he didn't think there was anything in any religion, but he was impressed by the fact that the church was opening up its doors and space during Mardi Gras.

Then disaster struck: the BBQ plate we were using stopped working. We had to shut the pancake station down and turn people away (directing them inside for chai and a sausage sanger), and I went back inside and took another break, chatting with a few more team members.

I came out, wandered through the church 'proper' which had been set up as a 'quiet space' - a sensory null - so people could sit out of the chaos and let their energy wind down. There was beading happening there, but they didn't need me, so I went out to get a pancake and half bumped into a guy who stopped in the lobby and stared at the ping pong table. He looked kind of shocked, so I checked in with him (he was just taking a moment to recalibrate because the guys doing ping pong were SRS BSNS) and then I asked him about the night.

Turns out, he was the 'responsible adult' of his group this year. Someone else was the responsible adult last year, so they were responsibly adulting by taking turns being the responsible adult! He had some cool beads across his cheekbones which I asked where he'd gotten them from. His experience of the church and faith was typical English standard, which is to say 'Christmas and maybe Easter' but his stepmother was devout. However, he'd listened to Tom Holland's Dominion on audiobook just last week while driving down from Brisbane, and was in a very different place of spiritual questioning than he had been just a week ago.

We talked about sticking to your moral guns, about religiosity, about what to do when organisations didn't move as fast on matters as you thought they should. About moral authority and spiritual guidance. I probably could have asked more piercing questions than I did, but it was one of those conversations where you're not sure if they're going to keep talking or if they're going to spook. He kept talking, though, and it was good. I did mention that there was an Alpha course happening at the church in the coming weeks, and if he ever wanted to walk into the church on another Sunday and ask questions, there would almost certainly be someone who'd be willing to talk to him.

We closed up around 10pm, cleaned and tidied everything up, ate the last of the pancakes and then debriefed.

At least one person (maybe) came to an understanding of the gospel that night and gave his life to Christ, albeit in another language. But many others spoke of getting people to codify what they believed - asking them to 'get meta' about their thoughts around their worldview. There were a number of comments that indicated that people appreciated this kind of Christian love in the community, which, no, shouldn't be the endgame, but is a good and beneficial filip along the way.

And then we went home, with me shepherding a group of around six young people (well, we all shepherded each other) back to Central station from whence we went home. Encountering one of the other young people from our church - not one who'd been working with the Open Church - on the way!

It's the kind of thing I've been wanting to see 'the church' do more. Action without affirmation or approval. Kindness and love without condemnation.

Is it a fraught space, a delicate negotiation between "affirming" what people are doing that night and just providing hospitality? Yes. Doubtless there are people who think that even opening the church gates to the sinful without thundering condemnation of their lifestyle is approving what they're doing. But we are in a world that no longer accepts Christianity as the baseline of its moral code, and when it does promote Christian values, those values are more often used as a bludgeon to beat others into line than they are used to value and cherish and promote the thriving of humanity. We've left human rights to the rational humanists, and too many Christian movements are now trying to legislate morality instead - as though the kingdom can be brought with civil words and good behaviour.

At this point in time, with so many words and lies and liars and con-men out there making money out of mouthing piety and practising hypocrisy, we are better off shutting our mouths for the most part, only answering when people ask, "but why are you doing this when you're supposed to hate us?" with "because Jesus asked us to love you, and this is an expression of that love".

The 'conversations' training before we opened the gates was interesting: they gave us some hints and tips, a post-it note to write down what it is about Jesus that brings us joy, about why it is that it's good to know the Lord. They asked us to think of conversation openers and how to invite people into discussions. What stuck with me was one young woman who said she wasn't comfortable with asking how they were enjoying the evening, because they would probably say it was great and fun, and she wasn't okay with them enjoying what was sinful and/or affirming that enjoyment.

I'm trying to remember myself in my twenties, with that perspective and that view: if I had that view. And how I grew out of it in the end. Probably through contact with a lot of people from all walks of life, slowly changing over the course of twenty years. I still believe the core of what I believed then, but I'd phrase it very differently. In knowing God, in trusting Him, we become who we are meant to be. We are kites with an anchor, we are creatures basking in the glory of our Creator, children trusting in the love of a father who is both loving but also who sets and recognises boundaries.

In the end, the young woman was the one who spoke to the guy with the language barrier, and called a friend who spoke his language to bring him to Christ on the phone. So there's a lesson and teaching in there for me, too. :)

In all honesty, I resonate more with the "the goal is to get them to Jesus and let Him convict them of their lifestyle". Not to mention 'lifestyle' can be anything from sexuality, gender, to monetary practices, to treatment of women as co-heirs in Christ, to having a compassionate and active heart for the vulnerable in our society, or creating opportunity for those who otherwise have little to no hope of thriving. But I move among people who 'know of the gospel' but don't believe it means anything more than a good way to live. Like the yoga lady I first talked to, it's about what you do and the kindness you show and us all doing good for each other. That's a hard shell to break through, and at this point in time and history and society, we're only going to get little cracks at doing it. So take the little cracks where you can.

To me, it's about knowing who you are in Christ, being known through and through in that relationship, and being loved all the same, even as you grow and change and become who you're meant to be: a child of God, the apex of creation, made in His image, to give glory to Him.

the future of the church

My church had a meeting about a building project - improvement on the current buildings to incorporate a more 'traditional style auditorium' (one large enough for 400 people and better to have weddings in) - and it was...interesting.

I'm not going to talk about the money involved, but about where I see the future of The Church, not just the future of this church (although obviously the church I'm attending will also be mentioned and referenced as part of The Church).

The church I attend is 100 years old. At some point in the 60s, the 'traditional style church building' that the church must have been meeting in got rebuilt to a somewhat mid-century-modern A-frame building. In the mid-00s, with the church growing through the next gen of kidlets of the faithful, they rebuilt whatever building had been used out the back for a Sunday School and general education centre, and turned it into a centre specifically for education - high ceilings, divisible rooms, storage spaces all along the sides. There was a space for an early childhood learning centre downstairs and a small kitchenette and 'mothers' room' upstairs.

The current set of buildings served all four church services (8am traditional, 10am family, 5pm family modern, 7pm youth modern) up until COVID. Then there wasn't enough space in the old A-frame church building for everyone to fit in, and so 10am, 5pm, and 7pm set up in the 'education centre' with the dividing panels folded away. The kids programs are held in the various rooms and spaces around the church during 10am and 5pm, but 8pm refused to move from the A-frame, so they get set up every week special.

Some of the services are getting bigger. 10am is regularly running into 'overflow spaces', but 7pm is also bursting at the seams. And people don't want to move services and lose their congregational community. I understand that. I haven't been in a church service in months now and the weekly bible study groups and the occasional trivia night gatherings are very much keeping me connected.

I understand the reasons for the desire to build bigger, but some of the underpinnings of those reasons are not concepts that I accede to, or at least, not the way the church board does.

Firstly: the myth of unending growth. The last 40 years have seen unprecedental global, economic, and population growth, and up until about 10 years, an unthinkable social stability. But that can't continue forever; we're running out of oil, we're running out of resources. Our society - our communities - are fraying at the edges. Fearmongering, frustration, the internet, and the social media algorithm are wedging us into smaller and smaller groups.

That isn't going to get better. Not now, not in the next twenty years. Not so long as people cling to the idea that we can get back to the boom years (really, the Boomer years). We are going off-road, baby, and there ain't no maps into this land. Now is not a time to be building up, but to be reinforcing what we have and improving our social connections.

Modern western Christians have a bad habit of thinking that the 'ever onwards and upwards' is going to be a thing forever - most likely because we're steeped in modernity and western thinking and it's hard to step outside of that. We like to cite 'Judgement Day' or the day when time will stop and all things will be made new, but apart from general evangelistic fervour, we live (and vote) as though this world doesn't matter.

Secondly: the myth of church growth. Globally, Christianity across the world has held stable for the last 40 years. However, the number of people IDing as Christians in the west are decreasing while the number of people IDing as Christians in the Global South is increasing.

My church is Anglican. It's in the name. It's a Church of England church. Which means it does things a certain way. Holds certain views. Enshrines certain perspectives.

Those perspectives are not going to hold for the next 40 years. We are going to become a minority, which means - if we want to be effective in ministry - we should be spending money working out how to reach sectors of society which the Anglican church of Australia has been generally kind and loving towards but which is wary of them in authority and leadership.

Notably, the Sydney Diocese is current led by an Archbishop who is of Sri Lankan background, who started off Hindu before he converted. This is definitely a good start, but cross-cultural ministry absolutely needs to be more of a thing, not only in our mission statements but in where we put our money and our leadership authority.

At the meeting, I brought this point up. Perhaps a little baldly: "one does not send a man accustomed to harvesting wheat to harvest sugarcane". I got a few laughs, but I think I also made my point, albeit not as thoroughly as I wanted to.

In essence: we are an Anglican church. We are Anglicised in our manner and our practices. And while we say that the gospel is relevant to and needed across all nations, the points of emphasis and comprehension will adjust according to the culture's understanding. We see this in none other than biblical translation - when a woman, when a black African, when a black American, when a native Malaysian translates the bible, the things they see in the words of Christ shift in importance.

Our current bible is written to emphasise male leadership and authority and to de-emphasise female leadership and authority. The translation of the role of historical women of the church as 'assistants' or 'helpers' rather than 'disciples' or even 'apostles'. The reduction of 'I shall make a shieldmate for him' to 'I shall make a helper for him' in the Genesis account.

It's translated so that 'homosexuality' is the word used almost universally for a number of practices that had no correlation to modern same-sex attraction and marriage, and for which we have no modern equivalent.

Even terms that encapsulate concepts that we might argue haven't changed from then to now don't match the ancient world's perspective: 'marriage' as translated from the bible doesn't really have a concept of a woman joining to a man but still remaining her own person and legal individual, with rights to her property (and his) and to the children of her body. Women weren't people, and so – in the most basic form – marriage was the passing of property and inheritance with a person as the passage.

So my church - conservative, Anglicised, with a typically western way of thinking is most certainly not intrinsically equipped to deal with an increasingly unChristianised west, and an increasingly Christian Global South - unless we're going for a White Messiah complex.

TBH, I think at this point, the best thing Christians in the west can do is to shut up and do the work of bringing in the Kingdom in anything except words. Anything that doesn't involve offering proselytisation. If they ask, by all means. But we're going to have to be something really special for them to ask and we don't have it in us, not yet. Not when the changemakers of the world are largely atheists and agnostics and while your average Christian in the neighbourhood is too busy fighting for the status quo.

That's my thoughts anyway - they're not borne out by any research or any foreknowledge. Nothing from the last eighty years will back me up – although all the scientific evidence points to our world changing dramatically in almost every aspect of life - but the next eighty years of our society, our world, will be nothing like the eighty years before that and nothing like the hundreds before that.

We have to live with it. We have to learn to live in it. We have to learn to love in it.

The current Anglican church of Australia is not as ready for this as they think they are. What too many are still dreaming of is a Billy-Graham-esque conversion of thousands of westernised Australians to Christianity, with attendant social influence, ethics, mores, and morals. They dreamed this back in the late 90s, with a movement (from America, I think) called 'The Harvest', where we were going to reach 10% of the Sydney Diocese for Christ...

That movement failed; people went, but it wasn't what they wanted. That world they wanted was already shifting and changing. The people they thought they could reach had heard it all before and their hearts were hardened.

We're not going to get those soft hearts back.

I don't think we can rewrite the church-as-a-concept's role as a villain in contemporary society. Our society's memory via the lingering records of global technology is now too long for most people to trust us when the church leaders say "but trust us, we're the good guys sent on a mission from God!" The records might not show the majority experience, but those that were hurt by abuse or rigidity or "excommunication" do not forget how they were betrayed or left by the wayside, and they are not quiet.

What we can do is individually and in our local Christian collective (ie. "church") is rewrite how the people around us - the people we interact with and the secular communities we live among - see the church and Christians. And that might mean running counter to the expectations people have of the church when it comes to peripheral matters, whatever those expectations are.

A point was brought up by a guy I know about our church becoming what I'm going to term a "vampire church" (not the phrase he used): basically a big church that pulls believers from other churches, enriching itself at the cost of others. Which nobody wants, but which does tend to happen - the more resources, the more social energy, the more everything a church has, the more that other people's heads get turned and they come and want to stick around in The Church Where It Happens.

That's not something we want to be. It's not something that any minister wants but the risk is always there, particularly as the young ones go to churches where things are happening and end up staying there.

Basically, I don't know that they've convinced me to put my money towards this, and the one question that I'd like to know is not going to be either asked or answered: what would it take to stop this work from going ahead?