they can tak' our media but they'll never tak' our freeeedooooom!

There's a growing theme among Australian Christians, that our society is 'being taken from us'.

It manifests in the increasing attitudes of "well, you can't say anything godly at all anymore without someone coming in to cancel you". It manifests in the persisting belief that "Australia is a Christian nation (or at least a nation founded on Christian values) and we should keep it that way." It manifests in the insistence that "well, we've seen how feminism and wokeness and the modern sexuality has destroyed our society, so why don't we take it back to the old (Christian) ways?"

There's a desire for a simplistic narrative - a 'back to the basics' attitude. These are mostly voiced by older people, white guys, and people who haven't studied history, or use the term 'woke' as a pejorative.

There's also an exaggeration happening around Christian thought. Christians are increasingly using dramatic language to describe the response to the mores and morality expressions of our faith. It's also interesting that the Christians using dramatic language are frequently more invested in the morality expressions of our faith that are contradictory to those of the world - setting up worldly perspectives as an antagonist, rather than coming alongside them as a friend.

Possibly ironically, Sam Chan's Evangelism in a Modern World addresses the matter of coming alongside worldly perspectives as a friend to the person - not necessarily agreeing, but pushing our friends to think further and deeper about what they really believe.

--

Listening to Majority 54 Podcast the other week - the episode release on the 21st April entitled Political Therapy with a conversation with an author, Monica Guzman whose book I Never Thought Of It That Way. The conversation was around a willingness to listen and understand where people are coming from. Ravi was talking about his older brother and how his older brother seems to have no interest in anything Ravi is doing or Ravi's thoughts on anything, and that he feels that sting quite keenly. Then, recently, he learned that his older brother feels like he already knows everything he needs to about his brother because their mom boasts about Ravi and what he's doing all the time.

One of the points that Monica made was that conservatives feel hemmed in by the media, there's nowhere that promotes a 'Christian perspective' anymore and that gets them on the back foot. They have no interest in the specific stories of individuals - liberals, progressives, non-Christians - because they already feel like they know it all and so they don't need to be told.

From a liberal vs conservative POV, without any faith in the mix, I can see that conservatives would be angry and defensive and just prefer to lump all liberals and progressives in together without seeing them individually: and yes, understanding where the specific person you love is coming from is one thing, thinking you understand where "liberals and progressives" are coming from is entirely another.

From a Christian perspective, though, I feel like Christians should be better listeners; better at tailoring our message and our interactions with the specific individual that we're trying to reach. Not just issuing a "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN" notice.

I feel like this is what Sam Chan is getting at regarding how to evangelise, although the cynic in me would have called it "How to Evangelise When You Already Think You Know Everything You Need To Know". Hm. I wonder if I could write a book about that...

why we don't have room for anything they'd recognise as 'love'

There was a conversation over at MF's FB over the statement: "the church should be famous for its love".

And I noted

Where too often "LOVE" is translated a "you're dirty and awful and nasty and should be glad that the God of heaven cares for you (through the [self-]righteous mouthings of his people)..."

I've been wondering the last couple of years that maybe most of us Christians don't actually believe "in Christ alone". There's always a "and you must" clause.

"And you must prioritise the unborn, the nuclear family, the legality of the gospel, the rights of Christians and the church, the moral Christianising of the law, and your life must look like an western middle-class aspirational life...

Do all this in the name of Jesus Christ and you will surely inherit the kingdom of God!"

The bit that I didn't add was:

I am starting to wonder if it's a by-product "fear of losing their salvation by too-close association with The World"? Even (especially?) in certain Christian circles (*coughs*SydneyEvangelicalism*cough*), the implications have persisted that if you follow the "wrong" path on opinions of everything from homosexuality to abortion to transgenderism then your very salvation is imperilled. And yet at the same time, the leaders attempt to reassure me that "my hope is built on nothing less..."

If my salvation is in Christ's hands alone - if nothing I can do or think other than repudiation of His gift of grace will keep me from the love of God (in Jesus Christ) - then I have no fear of walking out into The World and dispensing the love and support that God has graced me with no matter to whom, or even whether it enables further sinfulness in those I love in my actions. His grace is sufficient for me, and also for them, and I trust in that as I witness to others in ways that 'The Church' may not generally approve.

However, if I feel like my salvation (and, indeed, my church acceptance) is based on my reputation within the church, on the way I vote, on my policy opinions regarding hotbutton culture topics, on my association with the right kind of people in a world of sinners...then, yes, I will not just reject the worldview of the world, but reject the people of the world because they represent my likely rivening from the grace of God.

do we hate sin more than we love other people?

A person who took the lives of women in some part because he had learned to hate sexual sin to such a degree that he believed killing other women vs working on his understanding of those issues within himself was a good plan…

His faith community told him to hate sin more than he loved other people.

I am reminded of a story - a medieval murder mystery - where the local priest of a village is found dead in the river. The man had been chosen by the abbot of the nearby monastery as a man upright in all things, knowledgeable and educated, and more than fit to teach the parishoners all they needed to know of the things of God.

More than suitable, right?

Well, a newborn was birthed and considered sickly, and they ran for the priest to baptise it, but he was at his devotions and wouldn't rouse from them, even for this. He came afterwards, but the baby was already dead. And because it wasn't baptised, in the tradition of his faith, he wouldn't allow it to be buried in consecrated ground.

A mentally deficient young woman would sleep with any man who cozened her, and ended up giving birth to a child out of wedlock. But when she tried to return to the church, the priest told her she was an unrepentant sinner and excommunicated her. In grief, she went and drowned herself.

Yardage between the priest's allotment and a local man's plot was considered 'flexible', and the local man had used it to drive his cattle acrosss with the blessing of the previous priest. But now the new priest demanded that it be tilled for his usage all the way to the edge, cutting off the local man.

A freeman born operated a piece of ground that was traditional serf-held, and the priest required that the freeman prove his status or else he would be held bound to the land. The town elders held the freeman's freedom and the priest backed down, but claimed he had done nothing wrong.

The priest was theologically sound, legally within his rights, morally correct... But he had no heart for people. For 'sheep without a shepherd' as we are taught Jesus looked upon the crowds.

I did a little questionnaire about men's mental health this morning - teenaged son of the pastor of our church - and while I know the stereotypes of masculinity that tend to be bruited about, I also know that I follow a faith that grounds itself in a God - divinity, authority, power - who clothed himself in fragile mortal flesh, endured the little twinges of human existence, wept, grieved, submitted to brutality, and is still considered the lynchpin of our faith. Like, the Jesus of the gospels - whose harshest words were for those who led others astray with religiosity, whose most brutal action is against the bleed-em-til-they're-dry monetary systems of the day, who refused to take up arms against armed soldiers who came looking for him - is everything humanity should be, and he embodies so few of the 'masculine' traits that a group of kids would probably pick if you asked them to choose.

But back to having a heart for people - not just 'the lost', as churches like to phrase it, but people. Even those who have cast Christianity away. Do we still love them? How capable are we really of hating the sin and loving the sinner?

Because I think that, in our Sydney Evangelical context we hate the sin far more than we love the sinners. And this is a big problem going forward.

Sin is something to be wary of - absolutely. But one of the tensions of human existence is where it is better to restrain sin or sinfulness and where it is wiser to show love. And Jesus walked it perfectly - mostly by showing love to the 'sheep without a shepherd'. We can't hope to match it perfectly, but I think we should try to follow in love more than in hatred of sin.

abortion: a new way of thinking

I think late-term abortion needs to be legal.

Mostly because 90% of the situations in which late-term abortion would be considered necessary are already traumatic scenarios.

The baby was hoped for:

• carried for the majority of term - and then died in utero and needs to be removed from the uterus for medical reasons.
• something happend that impacted the safety of the mother and a medical procedure that risks the life of the child may be ncessary
• a medical condition to the child - both life threatening and 'merely inconvenient' - that means the parents no longer wish to have this child

Basically, the scenarios in which all but the most fervent anti-abortion proponents would say well, it's not the best situation, but maybe it's necessary are all ones in which there is already enough trauma. And then, onto this, the need to navigate the 'exceptions under which we will consider allowing an abortion' would be added - one more burden that serves no purpose except to make us believe that we've 'stopped evil'.

The legality of late-term abortions would mean that if someone truly doesn't want a pregnancy, they would have ended it much earlier. Because with the legality of abortion at any point in pregnancy comes improved contraception, improved health outcomes for women, less judgement of women facing hard life choices, fewer hurdles and therefore less anxiety when facing an uncertain pregnancy.

I'm not going into the 'she doesn't want the child anymore' option right here, because that's usually related to a serious change in circumstances - most usually relational/financial.

Both could be solved by financially and emotionally supporting mothers, particularly single ones, without qualification for whether they're the right colour or background or social status or personality. Just support mothers, nothing more. And local churches and Christians would be perfectly placed to provide the kind of community and support that such women need. An opportunity to show the love of Christ - and, perhaps (maybe, possibly, if the opportunity provides, but not as a requirement or precursor) share the gospel with her.

gain the world; lose our soul

I honestly don't know if I'm completely in Denial or if my life really is just that good or if other people's lives are really just that Fucked.

I came online looking for things that I wasn't finding in real life. I didn't know I was looking for them, but I was. Geekiness, passion about creative endeavours, answers to questions I couldn't ask in my conservative upbringing and conservative church circles, and which I wasn't comfortable asking of my uni social group who always treated me like I was broken simply for coming from those circles.

I have never seen myself as broken. I just needed to know more than my circles were comfortable questioning. I like knowing what's circumscribed, the proscribed places, but then I want to see the proscribed places for myself.

Sometimes it feels like this isn't something that people understand - either online or offline. The people I know in 'meatspace' are happy where they are, okay not questioning, content with what they have, okay to presume that this is the way things should be for everyone because it works for them. The people I know online are discontented, frustrated, ground down - and with good reason to be so when you walk in their shoes.

And here I am, in the middle.

Okay with the system for me, not okay with it for the people who don't fit.

I'm way outside the comfort zone of my church friends in RL. Because if it works for us, then it should work for everyone! Don't you want it to work for everyone? (Yes, but it's not working for everyone, and a civic governance that can allow for difference - for diversity beyond traditional norms - makes society stronger. And, too, I think that in the absence of perceived cultural influence over our society, Christians seem to be reaching for political power in any form, even if it comes to them in a Christian guise and with Christian promises.

I'm way beyond the comprehension of people in fandom. Because don't I hate myself, what made me, the system, the situation? Don't I want to just escape it all by being something else? No. I don't want to be something else; I like what I am. And while it wasn't comfortable to get to where I am in many ways and I probably wouldn't do it willingly again, that experience is part of me.

But yes, I want to change the system so the people who didn't have the luck - yes, luck - to have the openings available that I could capitalise on (yes, I did work those opportunities when they came but the opportunities were available for me in the first place, which they aren't for so many others).

It's a difficult night tonight; a lot of job cuts, a lot of Murdochian lies, and a lot of casual and thoughtless cruelty, churches who seem to blindly praise and follow a leader who claims to be Christian and yet whose concern seems to be not about the poor or the widow or the fatherless, but about the glory of his government and the economic state of the country. Christians who are more concerned with love of Christian culture than they are with helping those whom no-one else will help.

It's not the valley of the shadow of death because I don't fear death.

I fear the hardening of our compassion, the closing of Christian hearts against 'the world' and the condemnation of everyone who doesn't agree precisely with us, and the society that has lost out as Christians greedily cling to political and temporal power to make up for our loss of cultural influence.

What does it help Christ's church to gain the whole world in politics and power but lose our tenderness of soul for those whom God loves?

a continuum of sin: thought, word, and deed

Remember Hannah Clarke.

There's not Good Men and Bad Men, nor Christian Men and Ungodly Men.

It's not boxes that you're put in when you're born and you'll never end up in the other one.

There are only Men On A Continuum Of Gendered Violence. And yes, it's absolutely gendered violence, because the incidences of women abusing men in relationships is so small in comparison that it's like, say, Ghana taking on the USA in a financial throwdown. Yeah, it's there, but it's not even statistically significant.

The truth is that every man is somewhere between "has never gotten frustrated with his wife" and "sets his wife and kids on fire rather than let them walk away from him". Every man.

This is what I imagine Jesus meant when he said "to hate is as to murder". The first is the seed, the last is the full grown plant that harvests blood. It's not what goes into a person that makes them unclean, but what comes out of them: thought, word, and deed.

The man who gets angry with his wife and thinks that she's his property, that he should get to control her life and lifestyle, that she should submit to him...well, that's on the same continuum as the man who set his family on fire. Yes, it's a long way away from it, but even the trip of a thousand kilometres can be done by taking one small step at a time.

And, honestly sometimes I wonder: am I the only one who is terrified of the possibilities that live inside me?

I could soak the world in blood if I was given a reason and my conscience taken away. If I saw people as things or lesser, and didn't care about their feelings or their suffering.

Just about everyone who knows me will say that I'm a nice person. And it's not that I'm not. But I know the possibilities that live inside me, and they terrify me.

All I can think is "hoo boy, you have NO IDEA".

peculiar irony (also witness to the world)

Someone said something to me on the weekend; just a fragment right at the end of a social gathering. She mentioned my FB feed and how I posted interesting things on a Christian perspective: not just the standard Christian lines that are parroted by evangelical Christians (and, yes, misrepresented in a worldly context, but we exist in a worldly context), but Christians who are struggling with those grey areas that conservative evangelicals like to paint as black and white.

Women in ministry. Gays in the church. Abortion. You know, those things.

I wonder if 'the world' wants to see Christians struggling more with these questions. Publically struggling. Admitting they don't know the right/wrong of it, or even admitting that they have a right/wrong of it but being willing to let others make those decisions themselves, wrong though they might be.

Sometimes I wonder if our solidarity of belief as Christians isn't a deterrent as much, if not more than, our apparent behaviour. And not just coming to the easy blanket answer: "well of course slavery is okay, because Christians have owned slaves since the time of Paul, right? So it can't have been wrong..."

And, no, the media is not on our side. That doesn't mean they're always wrong about the ways that we're bull-headed and stupid. Just because Scott Morrison claims to be a Christian doesn't mean he's not also a complete shitwit with zero sensitivity and formulated compassion.

"Be cunning as serpents and innocent as doves," Jesus said. Naivete is not any kind of an excuse, and yet so often it seems to be the first Christian defence: "I didn't know."

We are to know the truth - the truth of the gospel, absolutely, but also the truth of ourselves and our world. To see the flaws in ourselves, admit to them, improve on them. No, it doesn't guarantee our salvation, but it pushes us slowly towards becoming made in the image of Jesus.

My mother's church friends told her that she was wrong to remarry, that she should wait and maybe God's direction for her life would become clear. She was okay to re-marry by our modern Christian mores (my father had been unfaithful to her which most modern ministers would say was okay because my father had broken the intimacy of the relationship and so she was free to remarry), but her husband-to-be was not because he and his wife had divorced for the modern "irreconcilable differences".

The church they went to would not let them get married in the building, so they left the church. All the church. For almost a decade.

Sometimes I think insisting we all toe the black and white and shaming people when they don't manage it does more damage than the admission that we're struggling with something, and trusting in God's grace in the meantime.

--

There are four women I was friends with a decade ago and more.

In the last three months, they have all turned up on my FB feed commenting on things that they disagree with (environmentalism), or things that they want to get 'woke points' for (not being racist).

The irony is that not one of these four women has extended an independent "Hi, how are you?" to me in that decade. They have made no overtures of friendship, asked no questions about my life - they haven't even hit LIKE on my FB posts. And, yes, I notice these things.

I notice the people who come by and comment on stuff - innocuous stuff, stuff that isn't Christian or political, which is just every day life. "I love your quilting work." "Ooh, nice garden!" "Are you okay?" These four women do not fall into the 'everyday friend' category - not even on FB.

They cannot be arsed to care about my life apart from when I post something that either makes them feel good about themselves, or which challenges their beliefs.

YES. I NOTICE.

And if I notice this about fellow "sisters in Christ", you can bet your blue, winged donkey that non-Christians notice this about the Christians who are intent on morally policing them.

High-up Christian leaders bemoan that people don't follow 'moral values' anymore, that the church is no longer a voice in the community.

Maybe - just maybe - this is because so few Christians are part of the community. And if Christians haven't done the hard yards of friendship, then non-Christians are not going to listen to them. That's the plain and simple truth.

Paul knew this - of course he did as one of a bare handful of Christians in a pantheistic society where worth was dictated by the gods, not by a declaration of human rights. To the Greeks, he became a Greek; to the Jews, he became a Jew.

And, no, a lot of people who we befriend are not going to listen to the gospel from Christian lips anymore. They've heard it all before and it's like the screech of nails down blackboard to their ears as high-profile leaders are shown to be abusers, to be bigots, to be willing to hitch their carts to the morally corrupt individuals in the name of political power.

What 'the world' will be willing to listen to is the language of love: an ear hearing their pain and sorrow and frustration, a voice crying out for justice for all people not just for the people who are like the voice crying out, a handhold - not even a 'hand-up or a hand-out' that our politicians like to dichotomise - someone to say "you are here, and maybe I can help by being here, too".

--

I saw a phrase via Michael Frost’s FB last year: ‘once born’ and ‘twice born’ Christians. ‘Once born’ Christians find their faith and never question it. God is there, he is holy, he is great, he is good. They hold to that all their life and it’s not difficult. ‘Twice born’ Christians find their faith, but they might struggle at some point, lose it, walk away, grieve, and in the end come back to the faith again. It’s not an easy journey, but it’s a faith rooted in trust in God and his promises, not in the reality of their lives.

I don't know that I've been twice born; I've never lost my faith, although I drifted away from the church. But I am very grateful for those years spent drifting, learning ways outside the traditions of my childhood, discovering people living on the fringes and the edges of the world that I was brought up in. I like to think it's given me compassion and understanding, and the ability to walk into greyscales that I don't think too many Christians are comfortable walking in - and as a result, they struggle to do anything but black and white the situation and other people's choices.

And maybe someday one of my non-Christian friends will be able to say, "Well, I don't know that I agreed with Sel, but she managed to love me in a way that made me feel valuable and said it was because of Jesus, so maybe I'll give Jesus a(nother) go..."

uncomfortable and complicated

Sarah Bessey wrote an essay on the ‘deconversion’ of assorted famous(ish) Christians who've lately made the news. It’s part of her subscribers-only section, and she talks about how she’s tempted to filter their stories of ‘deconversion’ through her own lens of experience, which was to walk away from the faith community she’d begun in - but not to walk away from Jesus, and to rediscover Jesus before finding a community among whom they could worship. In the essay, she acknowledges that this may not be the experience of the people who are confessing their ‘deconversion’, and she can’t cast it in terms of her own experience because she is not them and the experiences that have formed them as people and Christians are not her experiences.

In the last twenty years, I’ve come to understand just how...messy...humanity is. And Christianity with it because the heart of Christianity is all about the heart of humans and the heart of God and how they relate to each other. At this point in life, I feel like there must be nuance because we live in a world of uncomfortable grey zones and life and existence and chaos-entropy-sin gets in the way even as we strive to do the perfectly right thing...

I don’t know if I always succeed.

I do know that I’m not always comfortable with it. I know that my faith is a journey and there are rocky stretches. And I know that insofar as being someone who other people would trust with their faith journeys – as comforter and friend and possibly guide and acolyte – requires me to be more loving than correct – particularly among the groups that I feel more called to minister among: people who have turned their backs on the church and their faith community - and to trust in grace. I like to think of it as a connection that won’t be severed on my end – that’s open for them if they want it to be, that can be a personal connection to Christianity rather than the big amorphous conservative-face-of-Christianity that is mostly depicted in hardline opposition to something. That’s very uncomfortable. And discomfiting. And complicated.

In this, I’m enjoying Pete Enn’s The Sin Of Certainty and Rachel Held Evans’ Inspired to remember that the divinity of God’s revelation can still shine through our flawed humanity, but that we have to be careful about assigning divinity to one category or another of human action.

Yet God has extended grace to me – I don’t have to be right or better or correct – I can just be loving. And sometimes that loving will include words specific to the God who has extended grace to me, and sometimes that loving will involve shutting up and letting care be my words.

Not all answers are neat. A divine God crucified in bloody sacrifice to display the seriousness of our ‘fuck you’ to Him while simultaneously paying the consequences of that ‘fuck you’? Was messy. So, so incredibly messy. And yet God was willing to come and be messy with us in the now.

--

Lately I feel very much like I’m not a good fit in Evangelical churches. But I’m pretty sure I’m not a good fit in Pentecostal ones either. And I’m not a good fit in the ‘usual run’ of Uniting churches – more about social good than the good news of God wanting us to be with him. So maybe I’m just not a good fit anywhere in the church?

Does that mean I’m not a good fit for God?

I certainly don’t believe that.

Maybe I’m not the only one who feels this, or maybe it’s a function of my life stage. Maybe this is the swinging pendulum of intimacy and emotion that carries me from feeling like I’m an accepted part of a community to hearing the message of “we don’t like your thoughts here, take them and your questions somewhere else, because we only want righteous certainty here” in the space of six months.

But I'm not willing to let go of God and His word has assured me that He's never going to let go of me so...

I guess it’s the messy and uncomfortable and complicated for me.

bricks in the middle of dinner

So, decriminalisation of abortion has passed the House in NSW. It’s likely to pass the Senate.

What happens next, Christians? What’s our next move?

I suspect that the hierarchies (Anglican, Catholic, ACL) will just push for it to be revoked. Just go with the good old ‘Thou Shalt Not Abort’, picketing people who go to doctors, or hospital wings with YOUR BABY IS A PERSON TOO, and declaring women who have had or are contemplating abortions as irrevocably emotionally scarred (with a jolly good side helping of ‘God Can Never Forgive You For Killing Your Baby, Unless You Live In Constant Guilt In Which Case, He Is Merciful And Kind But You’re Still DirtyBadWrong’).

Is this a setback or an opportunity? And when I say ‘opportunity’ I don’t mean an opportunity to preach The Good News Of Abortion Is A Sin And You Just Have To Not Do It; I mean the opportunity to Love Our Neighbour. Are we willing to Love Our Neighbour – and let our fellow Christians love their neighbours without getting in there and Telling Them The Good News Of Abortion Is A Sin?

Example: A Christian friend on FB posted a thoughtful piece about abortion – about the balance between the life of the woman and the possible life of a child, and how society had failed the woman when she felt abortion was the only option. It would be a vastly insufficient statement for the people who are ‘NO QUESTIONS, NO PERSUASION; SHE WANTS, SHE GETS.’ But it wasn’t a screed for public consumption, it was a conversation between this woman and the people who read her FB. And one of her friends responded in the same style of conversation; personal, pointing out that the laws are not just for Christians but for everyone – that the options should be there.

A Christian aquaintance promptly posted a counter-argument, didactic, with a ‘tone’. Said acquaintance is a lovely Christian woman, but...let’s just say she once accused me of trying to make a baby gay by giving him a quilt that had a patch which featured some pink. The conversation wasn’t lost, exactly, but the effect was rather like a brick dropped into a dinner party.

I imagine that well-meaning Christians across NSW are, this morning, happily dropping bricks into dinner parties and thinking they’re doing the Lord’s work.

I don’t want to drop a brick into conversations; I want to find ways to build, IDK, a pizza oven out of the bricks and then invite people around to see my pizza oven, eat the pizzas from it, see how it’s useful. We don’t have to be brick-at-dinner-party people, we can be make-the-pizza-oven-and-invite-people-over people. Obviously, it’s so much easier to drop a brick into a dinner party than it is to build a pizza oven – snappy comebacks on social media are so satisfying, how we love to spit them out! (Prov 18:8) - but I’m pretty sure that the pizza oven will get more people over for dinner and make better connections.

Yes, that’s a really mixed metaphor, but it also illustrates the point: we need to do less brick-dropping and more pizza-oven-building. (Or, you know, BBQ grill building; the BBQ at the house I grew up in was a brick niche near the patio, with a grate over it, and a gap to shove the wood in and shovel the ashes out.)

That’s hard work – planning and building something that’s not immediate and more difficult, with no promise of the brick actually being appreciated (although the whole pizza oven might be admired). But people are much more likely to appreciate bricks with a role and a purpose and in an appropriate context; and in the same way, people are more likely to comprehend Christianity as something worth investigating when they’re not having Christian values shoved in their face but are seeing it as a new and different paradigm to the current worldview. Which, of course, requires us to be willing to develop a different paradigm. When the comes to abortion, it’s one in which the emotional, physical, and fiscal needs of women contemplating abortions are considered as well as the child. Which is what I feel my friend on FB was trying to highlight at the same time as she spoke about abortions and the sadness that they had to take place.

Implementing such a paradigm will cost Christians time and energy and effort with no guarantee of return and (possibly more important to your average Christian) no option to paint ourselves as the morally righteous cruelly and casually rejected by worldly sinners intent on celebrating their sinfulness.

I guess I consider that to be part of the ‘take up your cross’ bit of following Jesus.

it's the little, loving things

I learned last night that a previous minister of our church wouldn't let a couple get confirmed (a number of years ago) because they were living together but not married at the time. The couple is in my bible study and they said that in the country where they come from, they had to be confirmed in order to get married in a church (heavily Catholic country). They're not bitter - more amused - and they serve in the church and are integrated parts of the community which is surely the grace of God at work in their lives.

Still, I sometimes wonder if we let our dogma get in the way of our love. We're more concerned about being 'correct Christians' than 'loving Christians'.

--

What does middle-aged faith look like outside of the 'spinster' box?

What does love look like when you don't let dogma get in the way?

--

NSW is trying to get abortion off the criminal code.

This is going about as well as expected.

I think it needs to be non-criminal and legal. BUT I also think we need to provide measures of prevention when it comes to sex (including sex education and contraceptives for both men and women), we need to provide support options for women who don't want to be left carrying the literal baby when the man they're seeing decides to nick off, we need to provide security for women who are in abusive situations and for whom pregnancy is one more fetter, we need to work on our social expecations of women as caregivers and family anchors, and to do all this requires committment and a willingness to put resources towards this that's so much more than just "don't get an abortion!"

Plus, there's a lot of nastiness coming from conservative Christians about this. I just want to tell so many people: "Look, don't @ me regarding 'the other side' - they haven't been called by grace to live lives of love and service in the name of Christ!"

Christians like to talk about how they're loving the world by imposing values on it, but the attitude I see is that most of us would rather be correct than loving. Correct is clean and sterile, it's definitive and certain, it's the logical, rational, proper way to go! Loving is messy and complicated, requires constant maintenance and repair, and might end you up on the Wrong Side Of The Church People...

It's purity culture, the Christian way.

Jesus could be loving and correct; he was God. I suspect us humans will have to make do with being Loving over being Correct. Correct sure feels good on our side, but it mostly sows bitterness in the people we deem Wrong.

between pious prayer and agnostic activism

It's a bit tough today. It's Sunday, the Lord's Day, and everything's a melange of internal grief and questioning right now.

I live in a conservative stronghold of an electorate. I know most of my friends at church voted LNP (conservative) for "religious freedom" - or the right to say anything biblical and not legally or socially suffer for it - the Israel Folau Stance. My sister says they might care about things like refugee rights on Nauru but they think they can change the mind of the LNP, who've only ever doubled down on internment for asylum seekers.

I trust God and love his people, I just feel like I don't like them much right now. It raises a lot of questions about Christian community and belonging, along with the question whether a single woman of Chinese ancestry, left-leaning and socially progressive is really going to fit in a conservative white family church? No, I don't want your reassurances, Christian friends. Right now, they just feel empty. I like the people - they're very nice people, but very nice people also put the Jews into Dachau, so that's disingenuous. They want to do the right thing by Christians and by the gospel of the Lord, but in suburbia 'the right thing by Christians' means Scripture in schools and not letting people tell children that they don't have to conform to 'male' or 'female' if they feel like they're something else, or educating children about sexualities "too young" (as though every girl being told how pretty she is, while every boy being told how clever he is doesn't emphasise the difference in the way we treat sexuality).

Donating helps in the short-term, but in the long term, it's about policies that the people donating have no power to make, save for at the ballot box, and in letting their representatives know about it in personal emails, written post, or phone calls. And even that stops at the border of our country. Honestly? For most of us it never even gets out of our head - pushed away by busyness or simple selfishness.

Does it feel like all the activists are atheists and agnostics? That the people who care about others who aren't like them are more likely not to be Christians? Along the way, we've learned to give thoughts and prayers and money...but not time and attention and love.

Surely there's somewhere between piously praying and atheistic activism? A middle ground?

we inherited our fear fairly; that doesn't mean we get to use it as a club

I've been thinking about persecution complexes in Christians in the west.

Christians have always been taught that our ‘persecution’ would take the shape of the Roman persecution of the late empire - open oppression from the authorities of the world, as described in Acts and in history books. This has driven a lot of the panic from the Christian Right about culture wars and ‘losing Christian society’.

In fact, however I think the church’s greatest temptation has been, is, and will be to be offered the whole world and lose its soul - “if you take on the power of the world, you will not die spiritually as God has claimed but will be like Him, having the power to define good and evil” - pretty much the exact same way humanity was originally persuaded to rebel against God - convincing them that they knew best.

And I firmly believe that far too many western Christians have just accepted that lie about worldly power - that forcing a largely non-Christian society into a Christian mould will make us safe, will enable our mission to the world, and will bring about the kingdom of God.

Interestingly, I am starting to believe that the reason the church has grown so much across Asia in the last fifty years even as western churches have stagnated, is because ‘Christian society’ doesn’t actually engender true faith - it’s like a shell of a creature: the living being once inhabited it, but has since moved on to something else, leaving behind only the shape of what it once was.

And I can see that our (the church’s) great sin of the 2000s will be that of omission (the things we have not done that we should have done), not commission (the things that we did that we shouldn’t have done): already we have too many people staying silent and safe when injustice and cruelty take place either at a personal level or at a societal level.

God in his Word says:

‘Away with your noisy hymns of praise!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice,
an endless river of righteous living.’

~ Amos 5:23-24 ~

God does not desire worship in the form of music or filled pews, but in the justice and love-for-others of his people.

This theme is frequently repeated throughout the OT prophets: Don’t just look to your own house, look to your neighbour’s house. Don’t just look out for yourself or the people with All The Things, but look out for those who have nothing - no power, no money, no means. Jesus goes on about this in the Sermon on the Mount - blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, the grieving, the lonely - and his examples through his ministry frequently elevated the acts of the poor and the weak and the helpless rather than the political leaders of the day. The two people commended for great faith were not Jewish at all, but a Roman centurion, and a Syrophoenician woman.

And yet ‘Safety and prosperity’ are the household gods of most Western Christians - the most important thing in their lives is their life and their family’s lives.

Martyrdom in other parts of the world means actually losing your job, your freedom, your life. ‘Martyrdom’ in the west happens when someone challenges your politics, or when people return your ‘Merry Christmas’ with 'Happy Holidays'.

I think we (western Christians) have become so jumpy at anything that smacks of resistance to our faith and our message, thanks to the (actual) persecution of the early church, that we’ve forgotten that our faith is validated in what we do in troubled times: and not just our own times of trouble, but in the time of others’ trouble, also.

And, yeah, the martyrs of the early church lost their lives, but they gained the whole world.

Have western Christians gained the whole world in politics and yet lost the soul of their faith: to love the world as Christ loved us?

lama sabacthani?

Right now, I feel mostly abandoned by my fellow Christians. Out on the edge, being a "social justice warrior" for the widowed, the poor, the fatherless, the alien the people of colour, the immigrant, the Muslim and Jew, the 'different'.

I know a lot of people like that, thanks to my time on the internet. No, they're not Christians, but they're still people. God still loves them and sent Jesus to die for them, and they can reject him all the way up to the point that they die, after which they face judgement. But God still loves them and wants them to know Him, and I am the messenger of that news - perhaps the only Christian in their circles, for many have been burned by the church, by religious families, by social and religious condemnation. I'm open about my faith, but not proselytising, I hope. And I hope to give them a different view of Christians to the one they were brought up with - people who said 'I can't love you because you're not as God wants you to be'. Because my view is that God says to me, "I love you, even though you're not what I want you be - yet." And he has committed to remake me to be spiritually more like him (although I resist the process a lot). But I'm not who God wants me to be - not yet. And we - He and I - are working on it, still, after forty years.

The thing is that most of my Australian Christian friends don't have the connections I do. My spiritual mentor does - her daughters are just out of school and in the arts, and are struggling with their faith and how the church has tended to approach queer peoples in the past. I'm grateful to have that; we read the bible and do a small study, and pray with each other. And I can voice my doubts to her without fearing automatic condemnation, or the standard Australian Evangelical line.

See, here's the thing: I remember a Christian friend who wouldn't donate to a group because they supported an organisation that promoted marriage equality. Would they defend gay people being targeted by bigots? I wish I could say yes, but I don't know.

I've been asked "No, where do you really come from?" many many times. And when they don't get the answer they want, people tend to keep asking until they get the admission that my family came from overseas (as compared to, say, being Australian Indigenous). The only time I remember friends stepping in were two women who'd known me for ten years at that point, and they laughed and encouraged me when I kept on obfuscating. "Sydney. Australia. Australian. Australian." One of them said, "Actually, Selina's more Australian than I am: both her parents are Australian, my dad's still British." I've never forgotten that defence and I never will. Incidentally, neither profess faith in Christ.

Would my white Christian friends intervene on my behalf if someone insulted me? Yes. Probably.

Would my white Christian friends intervene for someone else like me if someone insulted them? Maybe. I think so.

Would my white Christian friends intervene when someone generally made a blanketing comment about people like me? I don't know.

I think that's the part that's most isolating: I DON'T KNOW.

If I were in the US, I'd be an at-risk person. Low-risk, as a 'safe minority' but still at-risk of generic bigotry, rather like that New York Times editor who was told "Go back home to China" although he was born in America. That's the possibility that I'd be facing over there - insignificant compared with having a headscarf torn from me and my car stolen, or having people threaten me physically because I'm not white - but there, and while I trust that my American friends might defend me, would they do the same for someone else, someone they didn't know? Would they speak up to stop stereotyping? I don't know that, I can't trust that.

And that terrifies me.

I'm not even American. I don't have to identify with American Evangelicals, but I look at them and I wonder about Australian Evangelicals: if someone promised us No Gay Marriage, would we also flock to a banner that was held by someone who said and did terrible things, and encouraged bigots, and wouldn't defend everyone - only those who agreed with him? Is that what we've already done with the Australian Liberal Party and Nauru and the Marriage Plebiscite?

I listen to the fears my non-Christian, at-risk American friends, and I hear the silence from my Christian-identifying, voted-for-Trump American friends when they're asked to condemn the violence against individuals of colour, sexuality, and religion - or else I wade through screeds about 'unity' and 'liberals who can't accept the results' - and wonder if this is what it is to love my neighbour.

It's not wrong to love my neighbour as myself, is it? To love those who might hate me, and to be a blessing to those who might curse me, to do good to those who might do evil to me, and to pray for those who might happily see me dead? No. No, it's not. It's right to defend people regardless of their policy or politics, whether they're sinners like non-Christians or sinners like Christians.

But I'm tired, and I'm scared - for my friends-who-aren't-socially-or-evangelically-accepetable and a little for myself - and I really feel like I'm out on the edge, alone, without support from either my Australian Christian friends or my American Christian friends, both of whose silence condemns me for my 'social justice crusade'.

I'm not - I have Christ with me, giving me strength. "Inasmuch as you did for the least of those, you did for me," said Jesus.

And yet that's more intellectually known than spiritually felt at this point in time.