politics

Hitching ourselves to political power of any kind is a bad idea, but hitching ourselves to political power that enshrines Christianity as The Right Way To Live is a truly terrible idea. What we have - what we are - should be a choice, not an imperative. Civic Christianity is not at all radical, and while it is safe to hide behind civic religion, it guarantees neither devotion nor piety, merely slavish adherence to the show of things.

community: the modern evangelical's trip into Asia Minor to spread the gospel

I only thought of this comparison while writing the title to this post.

It was originally sparked by the news that Australians consider church authorities (generally) to be the least trustworthy of public leaders, with 75%+ of the general population distrusting church authorities. I wanted to say that we've been sitting in our comfortable enclaves, expecting others to come to us for the last half-century; now I think we're going to have to go out and meet society on its terms and wrestle with complicated living-it-out-in-love and not just back the safe this-is-what-the-bible-says-in-theory.

And it occurred to me that Paul went out of his comfort zone to tell the gospel. He didn't wait for non-Hebrew societies to beat down the doors of the believers in Jerusalem, he took the news out to other cities, dealt with people on their own turf, lived among them like they were worth his time and effort, and brought the gospel to them at the same time as his everyday living showed these people that they were valuable to him and valued by God - so much so that He sent His son.

It was the 'community of believers' that Paul created in each city: people with nothing more in common to each other than the grace of God. And they met and theologised over his writings and probably the Jewish teachings filtered through the lens of Jesus' ministry and the recountings of his teachings and actions, broke bread and prayed, and then went back out into their usual regular unbelieving communities, taking their 'gospel' with them.

I feel like this should have been the methodology of the modern Christian church, but it's kind of failed. Church events tend to require the community to come to us rather than us going out into the community. There are no church stalls

"If mission is the alerting of people to the reign of God through Christ, our mandate is to do whatever is required in the circumstances to both demonstrate and announce that kingship. We feed the hungry because in the world to come there will be no such thing as starvation. We share Christ because in the world to come there will be no such thing as unbelief. Both are the fashioning of foretastes of that world to come, none more or less valid or important than the other." - Michael Frost, Road to Missional - here -

politics in a time of COVID-19

The other day, I heard a friend voice what amounts to eugenics: "we can't let these old people, who've only a little while to live, dictate how our society goes foward!"

She's nice and white and middle class and conservative, and our politics are very much not aligned. In a nutshell, I think she represents the nice, well-intentioned yet oblivious surface of modern western Christianity.

It's like a comment I saw today in response to the discovery that the Melbourne/Victorian outbreaks may have been spurred by a hotel employee, not the security guard who had sex with a COVID-19 positive patient: "I see people calling for an apology to the Victorian Premier, but I don't think that he should be immune from criticism."

Criticism is one thing; dogpiling is another.

George Pell vs the media is dogpiling.

The Victorian Premier (centrist party, up against a conservative party with a 'Christian' leader) vs the media is "appropriate criticism".

I feel like Christians are so busy defending Scott Morrison from any bad press, that they're failing to understand just how bad is the press around their 'good Christian witness'. Nobody wants to just hear the gospel anymore - not when it's not accompanied by any other expression of love. So many Christians behave like not being able to talk about the gospel is a horrific thing. But what people want is to experience the love of God as shown through his people. They want to know that God loves them in all their broken misery - not that he's going to preach to them or tell them they're dirtybadwrong or their way or life is dirtybadwrong or that they need to improve and then God will love them...

And yes, what people hear with 'hate the sin, love the sinner' is that they and their lives are dirtybadwrong. Maybe it's technically correct, but in a society where you are what you eat and you are how you identify, WE NEED TO STOP USING THAT PHRASE OR WE'RE JUST SCREWING PEOPLE UP WHEN IT COMES TO FAITH.

"But eventually, you have to talk to them about the gospel!"

Yes. Yes, you do. But I wonder if Christians haven't gotten downright lazy once secular humanitarianism took over social justice, instead of thinking about what it meant to be 'made in the image of God' and what other things that might mean.

When Christians talk about social justice like it's dirty, when they back away into their spiritual enclaves in order to remain pure, when we're so busy pursuing political validity via our country's leadership - "Scott Morrison's doing such a good job! (offering marginal support and only to certain people, setting up a group to promote economic growth at the cost of social and environmental security, doing nothing to promote unity in leadership during the pandemic)" - that we can't really love our fellow people...

IDK. I'm just so tired. And sometimes I worry that sooner or later, the church I presently attend will no longer fit me when it comes to social justice concerns and facing outwards beyond the structures that we've become accustomed to as a church body and church culture.

Although we had a good talk about that at bible study the other week - largely related to Michael Frost's 'when you're alone at church' - I think we forget that loneliness is the expected separation from humanity, and while we can mitigate that in the church, sometimes becoming a clique isn't the answer.

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?

godliness in epidemic

When the goverment announced that there would be eviction halts and rent freezes, a former friend from a former church EXPLODED on FB.

I use the term 'former' because she doesn't follow my journal. We don't interact. I don't think she's commented on my stuff once. Her posts come up and I read them because they're infrequent, but - like so many evangelical Christians - they're not actually a form of interaction, there to add a layer of contact and love, just another pulpit from which to preach.

She's very conservative, very evangelical, very judgemental. She thinks of things in the way that I was when I was 22 and everything was pure and clean and simple and obvious. I've since grown out of that perspective because...life, maturity, empathy, and the friendship of a lot of people whose experience comes up quite contrary to mine. And I feel like the social justice of God needs more emphasis right now than plain evangelism.

Everyone thinks they know what we're selling in Western culture. Most of them think it's snake oil. Why? Because a lot of people calling themselves Christians don't practice what they preach. Many of them are high up. Many of them are leaders. Many of us Christians in the trenches have made excusess for them and defended them and reclaimed them to positions of glory and authority once more 'because: grace'...and nonbelievers have decided that hypocrisy is just what the church is and does. They don't have an ear to hear, because we poured our own poison in there, and then demand that they hear the gospel while they're writhing in pain.

And no, they don't know the grace, but if what we do is 'grace' then they don't want any of it. Christians who are more concerned with making sure that their marriages are sacrosanct and their right to worship and proselytise is maintained and their middle-class morality is properly visited on everyone around them.

I quite frequently feel rather like the Scotsman who, upon discovering that his name wasn't down as one who loved God, asked for his name to be put down as the one who loved his fellow man.

Is this just me? That strain of: we love God by loving our fellow man - and yes, the gospel is in there, because I never spoke to an Evangelical who hastened to stress the importance of telling the gospel, as though that evangelistic streak wasn't ingrained into us - but the early church in the Roman empire loved the sick and the helpless and the dregs of society so well that the empire freaked out because people were coming to see that weird monotheism of the 'Jewish Christ' was a real thing, full of the kind of love and concern that was even accorded to slaves - bought goods and chattel, who these 'Christers' yet declared to be made in the image of the divine...

--

As I type (and hopefully post this), the general consensus is that Australia has been spared the worst of COVID-19 - at least in the first wave. We were lucky in timing, in our geography and isolation, in the lowered numbers of tourists thanks to the bushfires over summer. We also had a population who largely trusted their officials, who were well-informed, who are pragmatic about health practices and the need for them in a time of infection. And we had governments who took things seriously, who organised, who made responsible decisions regarding health.

At bible study tonight, we talked about 'survivor's guilt' - the idea that we prayed for succour and God gave it to Australia. But...what about the Christians of other countries, praying for a miracle? If the answer so far is 'yes' for Australia to be spared, why not for, say, China? For Brazil? Italy? The UK? The US? What makes us special? Why were we spared?

I posited that the question we should be asking is not "why were we spared" but "what do we do now that we have been spared?" We have been blessed - but it is through grace that we have been blessed, not through our own righteousness, it is the gift of God. And Christians should be asking themselves 'what do we do with this gift?'

My own perspective is one of a new society - yes, rooted in the value of all human beings, rooted in the value of the environment that God has given us to steward, rooted in the principles of justice and fairness, equality and righteousness. I envision a society and structure when people don't need to fear that they'll be left behind because they've fallen unexpectedly pregnant, and the bounty that we have in excess can be shared around to everyone who needs it. I want to see abundance and plenty, generosity and community, kindness and, yes, the understanding of God's grace upon all people.

No, I don't think that's going to happen.

As I noted in the earlier half of this post, I think part of that is because of our hard hearts - not just to the news of God's grace and justice and mercy, but our hearts hardened to the equality of our fellow man, and the inherent unfairness of our society which is dressed up in a false fairness: a self-righteous sense of entitlement. "We have all this because we deserve it," which even Christians think, when they should know otherwise.

The thing which changed the world of the Roman Empire was Christian love that expected no benefits, had no hope other than the return of Christ and the knowledge that to serve him meant serving those with no means of paying back. I feel like Western Christianity struggles deeply with anything even close to this graciousness: the idea that the people whom our sense of self-righteousness condemns might be turned through our love of our fellow man.

I don't know how this can be accomplished by the church. I don't know if it can be accomplished by "the church" or if it's something that individual Christians must work at, until the impression of 'the church' (the ecclesia, the body of Christ, the saints called to righteousness in the blood of Jesus) is not that of judgement for being less righteous, but simply the love of our Creator and Lord for his Creation.

On Justice: Social, Legal, Divine

There was a thread on someone's FB post, about how the power to protect 'our way of life' drives so many Christian voters with little thought of what our neighbours need from us in practical terms before they'll even think of listening to our proselytising.

I feel that a lot.

Reading the people who are all "but what about the millions unborn who die every year", I think "but do you care about the people who are living now? or just those who haven't yet been born? Could you prove it by your defence of them?" Reading the people who talk about "the right to teach Scripture in schools", I think, "Paul himself listed qualities like love and gentleness, faithfulness, kindness, self-control, and said against these things there is no such law; do these people know that you love them any other way apart from your insistence that they should be told the gospel"? Listening to my church friends talk about "people who haven't heard the gospel"...too often the people I know have listened to the gospel, heard it, but they don't want it for themselves, and logic and the witness of Christians provides no reason that they should.

We argue theoreticals of slippery slopes without ever noticing that those around us are shivering with cold while we have a pile of blankets at our feet. And yes, those blankets are formed from the threads of the good news of the love of Christ, but a hunk of thread isn't going to warm someone. Better to use that thread to make a blanket to warm our neighbour and, yes, cover their nakedness.

Maybe it's just that my family came out of China to the west - some Christians when they came, but some converted over here. We've always mourned for China's restrictions on practice of religion: yet their churches were never stronger than while under actual governmental persecution.

Maybe it's b/c I have no children to protect in a 'Christian way of life'. My friends worry about the world their kids will grow up in - that they might be disadvantaged because of their faith.

I'm more worried about the things let slide b/c they're not 'central' to our faith. Things like care for the poor, for the left behind, for the dismissed and derided and mocked. Protection for the abused and the betrayed and the shamed. Concern for and defence of the environment which the Lord our God left to us to manage shrewdly, and which we have squandered.

The early church had no power, no politics; but they humbled empires by caring for the ones empire wouldn't touch.

State-operated healthcare/support systems? Were instigated by Christians in the Roman empire, because the Roman authorities were worried that the Christians' love and devotion to the care of the unwanted was converting people to this bizarre monotheistic cult.

Every youth group I've ever known talks about hills to die on, but I feel that what Jesus's love calls us to do is flatten out the hills that our fellow human beings stumble upon: unfair work practices, bigotry and prejudice, inequality of opportunity.

In short: act justly & love mercy.

--

Ravi Zacharias died last week.

He did great things from all accounts; I'm sure that my teachers and people I respect have benefited from his work. But I'm also absolutely sure that he's hurt people along the way, perhaps even sinned in very deliberate and considered ways.

It raises a lot of questions in my head.

Including the question is how you deal with sin, repentance, and forgiveness in a culture where behaviour can be very performative. What does repentance actually involve? And 'cancel culture' is absolutely a thing within the church as well as without. Can someone who's fucked up ever do anything right again? And if not, what about redemptive grace? What about leaders who head up ministries: is the entire ministry to be 'cancelled' when the leader turns out to have been a sinner?

Do we have space to hold truths in conflict with each other: that someone did good works helping people and also did bad works hurting people? And if we don't, is there hope for any of us? Can you swear to me that you've never hurt another human being, intentionally or unintentionally? Can you say with a straight face that you don't benefit from stolen ground, stolen lives, stolen work, when we live in countries that were colonised in blood and bullets, built on the backs of slaves and criminals, and wear the clothing made piecemeal by those paid considerably less for making it than you paid to purchase it? There is no-one righteous, not even one.

And this is the problem with cancel culture; if we are true to the idea that hurt must be repaid or else all good be cancelled, we must also cancel ourselves and all that we have done or shall ever do. Because nothing can repay what has been taken from others by those who built the society that we now live in, and even benefit from.

No, it's not a nice, neat thought. But humanity and living is not nice and neat. Compromises have to be made, and I'm not sure that many people are capable of making those compromises anymore - at least, not making them for other people...just for ourselves.

--

I guess what both these thoughts tie into is the concept of justice. Social justice. Worldly justice. Divine justice.

There is no divine justice that Christ takes the consequences of my sins and I go free. Only divine grace.

There is no worldly justice that can make things right - most particularly not when my life is lived at the cost of others and I have no way to stop this without disenfranchising my opportunity to help others.

There is no social justice that can heal the ills of our society, but we can make a change for the betterment of situation for all people, instead of hoarding the good things for ourselves and people like us. Yes, wealthy societies are more likely to reject God, but wealth inequality in societies with freedom of religion only highlights the hypocrisy of the church and the people in it.

why we can and should try to change the world

I believe we live in a world that is presently at once already redeemed and in the process of being redeemed - that we are at once beloved of God and in the process of becoming 'beloved of God'. Maybe like a marriage (although I have no experience of such): where you love the person that you marry, but neither of you stay at that point if your marriage is going to survive. You continue to love each other, every day, every hour, every action-word-thought.

As such, I think that while Adam tilled the ground and it produced thistles and thorns and rocks, in this time of redemption, we have the tools and the knowledge to make that work easier, simpler, less consuming. It still needs to be done, it still takes effort, and there's plenty of failure along the way. But in the same way that freedom for slaves and voices for women and the idea that all people are equal only started being a thing after Christians rolled up their sleeves and started working for change at the ground level, learning easier ways to do things, tools that could be used for the benefit of many, even things like democracy and so forth - all that had to come once God had set the world to rights. Once God made it possible for us to help Him set the world to rights.

I think that we had to know redemption from Christ before we could start redeeming the world.

And no, it won't be done before Christ comes again; but that's no reason to sit back and say the world is doomed.

I guess it's a variant of social justice Christianity (and man, the number of times I've heard Christians talk about social justice like it's a dirty thing to want a better, fairer society in this world) - the idea that we can make things better for the vulnerable and fragile, and that we also should.