At the first CCL event for the year (next week on March 17), our main speaker Lionel Windsor will be focusing on the many striking lessons that the book of Ephesians has for us on how we should speak as Christians in an online world.

My contribution will be a short talk on ‘Building with words’, which is a funny way to build when you think about it.

What does Paul mean when he says “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building” (in Eph 4:29)? What sort of thing do you build with the right sort of talk? And how is this done?

I can easily see how you build sheds or houses or bridges by putting their different components together. I can envision how you can build an organization or a team or even an empire by assembling and mobilising the necessary people and resources and products and activities.

But what can you build with vibrations in the air that our ears pick up and our brains interpret—that is, with words? How can something as insubstantial as a word ‘build’ anything of concrete or lasting value?

Mind you, it must be possible, because the New Testament says more than once that we can and should build with words. Jesus says that listening to his words is like laying a foundation on which a solid, storm-resistant house is built. And Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, says that the one essential criterion for working out which words we should speak in church is that they build (or ‘edify’ as the older translations put it).

If we’re going to follow Paul’s instruction in Ephesians 4, and speak online in a way that is “good for building”, we need to understand how words build, and which words build. And that’s what my words (next Thursday night, March 17) will be about.

Look forward to seeing you there.

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A lot can change in a year. 12 months ago today, Tony Abbott was Prime Minister, Bill Shorten’s approval rating was 45%, Sepp Blatter was head of FIFA, Volkswagen had an impeccable reputation, Germany had about 1 million fewer people, and Australia was confident of keeping the Ashes.

12 months ago today, I was not only without grand-children (now rectified!), but was just about to start a new role at Moore College’s Centre for Christian Living.

My first year at CCL has flown by, and in God’s kindness it’s been a productive one. The Centre is back up and running (after a bit of time in mothballs), and is once again providing regular, valuable input on ethics and Christian living to Sydney and beyond. Nearly 1000 people came to our five public events throughout 2015, and the sense of interest and engagement at the events was very encouraging.

Now 2016 is upon us, and it is shaping up to be an even better year.

Firstly, we’re more organized, and have already finalised our program of public events for the year (in no small measure due to the organizational talents of Emma Newling). So that you can plan ahead, here are the details:

• Thursday 17 March: Learning to speak Christian in an online world (with Lionel Windsor and Tony Payne)
• Wednesday 4 May: Jesus Now (with Peter Orr)
• Monday 1 August: Pursuing Unity: What is church unity and why should we care? (with Ed Loane)
• Wednesday 19 October: The Psalms in the Christian life (with Andrew Shead)

Secondly, after experimenting with Livestreaming at one of our events last year, we’ve decided to Livestream all our CCL events in 2016. This means that you can choose whether you want to come and be part of the fun in person, or (especially if you live further afield) get a group of friends together and watch the Livestream.

Thirdly, we’re aiming to roll out much more content on our website this year, both leading up to and following on from the events. Keep an eye out for regular short articles, QandA’s, audio and video clips, and more.

And lastly, to help you keep in touch with what’s happening, we’re going to be sending out a monthly email update with a summary of everything that’s been happening on the website, and the latest news about our events. If you don’t already get regular emails from CCL, head over to our home page and sign up.

It’s shaping up to be a great year. Emma and I look forward to catching up with you at one of our events.

Tony

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I sat down this morning to write a serious post about the ethics of love, compassion and social policy. In particular, I wanted to talk about how Christian love, in order to be real and not just a pious gesture, must expose itself to the risks of deliberation and practical action within the field in which it is concerned to act.

But somehow, instead of that serious piece the following little parable came out. I hope that in its silly way it raises the issues that a more straight-laced piece (still to be written) will need to cover.

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It all started simply enough. A homeless guy called Jim turned up on my doorstep one day asking for money to buy food.

Now I’ve been round the block at least once, and wasn’t falling for that one (‘food’ … yeah right). But I did feel very sorry for Jim. In fact, more than that, I felt angry that the system had so let him down, and that he was forced to go house to house for food. It was typical of the lack of compassion and commitment from the government. It was OK for them to fly around in helicopters to fund-raisers, but their heartlessness towards the poor and the homeless made me ashamed to be Australian.

So I offered Jim some actual food, not really thinking he would go for it.

To my surprise, Jim said, “Sure, whatcha got?”

As it turned out, not much. Shopping day was tomorrow and the cupboard was bare. But my wife had baked a cake for Bible study, and I didn’t think she’d mind—so I offered Jim a hefty slice.

He accepted with a smile, and I took a selfie with me and a grinning Jim. Up it went to Facebook #cakeforJim.

And that was that, or so I thought.

The next day, Jim was back with ten mates.

“Got any more cake?”

Since (according to my wife) the way I had “hacked the cake to pieces” had rendered it no longer worthy of Bible study, there was plenty to share with Jim and friends.

This time the Youtube clip of me handing out the cake was tagged with #cakeforeveryone (Jim’s idea). And I was pretty pleased (just quietly) with how much engagement it got. Quite massive numbers of views, likes, shares and tweets.

But the next day, three disturbing things happened.

First, I was out driving, and saw a card table set up outside the local Woolworths, manned by a somewhat cleaned-up looking Jim, with a sign saying “Great cheap cake: $2 a slice”. I slowed down to stare, and Jim smiled and waved.

Second, when I got home, 115 scruffy looking people and a TV news team were on the front lawn. Three thoughts flashed into my mind in this order: “If they damage that newly laid Sir Walter, there’ll be hell to pay”; “This could be huge—I’ll be on TV tonight!”; “We have no cake”.

I elbowed my way inside, and headed in panic for the kitchen. The wonderful smell of baking greeted me, and there she was (the trooper!), cutting up two massive slabs of chocolate cake. “Nice of you to turn up, Mother Teresa”, my wife said. “They started arriving three hours ago.”

I gave her a grateful peck on the cheek and carried out the cake to the waiting multitude.

But then the third disturbing thing happened. I noticed that Jim had turned up, and was talking intently to 12 or so of the group, who then shouldered their way to the front and took three slices of cake each before I could do anything about it. I also noticed that five of the ‘homeless’ people were in fact uni friends of my son who lived in student digs around the corner.

This was getting complicated. Clearly if this was going to continue I would need to put some rules and guidelines in place. But in the meantime, the cameras were rolling, and so I kept smiling, and even found the nerve to give a little speech: “I don’t consider myself a hero. Just an ordinary person with a few ounces of compassion for the homeless. What I want to know is why the government can’t find even a shred of humanity in their cold hearts. I’m only giving out cake because they refuse to!”

The cake was soon gone, and very shortly thereafter so was the crowd, although a dozen who missed out on cake hung around for a while looking disgruntled.

I went back inside and sat down to do some hard thinking. Obviously I’d started something, and there was no backing out. It wasn’t worth thinking about what social media would do to me if I bailed at this point!

But if this was going to work longer term, I’d need to get organized and have a system. I didn’t want Jim and his gang reselling most of my cake outside Woolworths (and doing who knows what with the money); I didn’t see why I should be supplying cake to those student bludgers around the corner; and I definitely didn’t want the lawn cut to ribbons any more than it already had been.

And there was also the problem of cost. It this kept growing, we wouldn’t cope. Cake doesn’t grow on trees! A modest bit of cost recovery would clearly be necessary.

So the next day when the crowds started to assemble, I was ready for them. I met them outside the front gates, which I’d closed and bolted. I’d set up a little rope line so that people would have to form an orderly queue, and I’d made a sign saying, #cakeforeveryone, $1 a slice, 1 per person, genuine homeless people only (no students!).

This seemed extremely reasonable to me, and still very compassionate. But there was a fair bit of muttering—more than I expected—and a decent number of people drifted away.

When Jim got to the front of the line, he paid for his piece (I know where he got that money from), and asked whether he could take six more pieces for mates of his who were too sick to make it. I said absolutely not, and he fixed me with a bitter stare and said, “You heartless, bureaucratic, little &*$#@!”.

I was shocked by this. But not nearly as shocked as when Jim pulled out his mobile (where did he get that from?!) and snapped a photo of me frowning next to my sign. It was all over social media before I’d even run out of cake #moredashedhopes #cakeifyoucanpay #capitalismwinsagain.

This was a disaster.

I tried to explain the complexities in a post on Facebook, but no-one wanted to listen. You wouldn’t believe the comments I got. All of a sudden, people just hated me. It was unbelievable.

But not as unbelievable as what greeted me next morning, when I went outside with the cake and the money tin.

There was a smallish line of somewhat defeated looking people waiting for cake. Across the street, however, a massive crowd was shouting and chanting on the nature strip. Jim had rounded up his mates, the uni students had brought along most of the arts faculty, and a TV news crew was filming the whole thing.

I stared in horror as they held up their banner.

#freecakeforeveryone.

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Surely the ‘conscience vote’ is one of the most disconcerting phenomena in the generally disconcerting panorama that is our federal politics.

Only rarely, and apparently only on certain kinds of ‘moral’ issues, individual members of a political party are given leave to vote according to their consciences rather than according to agreed party policy. But what does a ‘conscience vote’ imply?

Does it mean that only this particular issue has a moral component that individual politicians might genuinely feel differently about?

That’s hard to believe, given that so many issues that governments deal with touch on ethical issues. To take just two obvious ones:

• What is the nature of our obligation to care for the poor and suffering in our community, and how might this be best reflected in our welfare system?
• How should we balance compassion and just process in responding to asylum seekers who arrive by boat?

There are in fact very few public policy issues that do not have moral or ethical dimensions, if we scratch even slightly below the surface. What is the role of the policy-maker’s conscience in these circumstances? Is it parked at the door? (That’s disturbing.) Or are MPs required to follow the party line in violation of their consciences? (Even more disturbing.)

Just as disconcerting is what the ‘conscience vote’ says about the way our leaders think morality or conscience works. About more ‘normal’ issues (like welfare settings or asylum seekers), there is debate, discussion, weighing of alternatives, consideration of principles and consequences, and (we can only hope) a reasoned and thoughtful policy decision. But about some questions, everyone is allowed to consult an elusive inner umpire called the ‘conscience’, and then vote.

What sort of umpire is this, and why does it tell people different things? And is the democratic rule of the majority the best way to resolve the very real differences people have over what their inner umpires say?

The disconcerting phenomenon of the ‘conscience vote’ show just how confused our society is about how to think morally. We don’t really know what morality is, how we might know it when we see it (or feel it), and how we might resolve genuine differences over what might be the ‘good’ or the ‘right’ in a particular circumstance.

In popular culture, this confusion is often cast as a battle between the head and the heart—between what on the one hand seems conventional, rational and effective, and what feels intuitively right or authentic on the other. And in our Disneyfied world, unlike in Jane Austen’s, ‘sensibility’ is almost always to be preferred to ‘sense’.

It’s hardly surprising that Christians living admist such rampant moral confusion would suffer some confusion too. Just what is our ’conscience’, and should we listen to it? How do head and heart figure in the moral decisions we make? And what if they are in conflict—if intellectually we know that something is right or wrong, but emotionally we feel a powerful pull in the opposite direction?

These important questions are the subject of our next Centre for Christian Living event, to be held at 7:30pm next Tuesday, May 26, at Toongabbie Anglican Church. I will be talking mainly about what ‘conscience’ is, and how we should understand it (and our experience of it). Peter Bolt will be speaking about the closely related subject of our ‘minds’.

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At our recent CCL event on ‘Can we talk about Islam?’, I suggested that one fruitful way to talk with our Muslim friends was simply to invite them to read one of the Gospels with you — especially since Muslims revere Jesus as a great prophet, and regard the Gospels as revelations from God.

But nothing is ever simple, and invitations like this don’t always go according to plan. Someone who was at the CCL event contacted me afterwards with this question:

Often recently when I have invited a Muslim friend to find out about Jesus by reading one of the Gospels with me, they have refused because they say that the Gospels are ‘corrupted’, or that the Quran is a much superior final revelation and that the Gospels aren’t worth bothering with.

 

What should I say or do in response?

 

I put this question to a few ministry friends who are much more experienced in Muslim ministry than me. Their advice was that this is a pretty common response, but is usually a means to close down the conversation quickly or avoid the issue, rather than a seriously thought-through or well-founded objection. How you respond to it would depend on your relationship with your friend, and how acquainted your friend was with the Bible (or the Qur’an for that matter). But the kinds of things you could say would include:

“No, the Gospels haven’t been deliberately corrupted. If they had, do you think I’d base my life on what they say about Jesus?”

“Who told you that? Have you or they really looked into the history of the Bible?”

“Can you tell me who corrupted it and when? Doesn’t God/Allah promise to protect His word from corruption?”

“Why don’t we read one of the Gospels together, and you can point out to me where the errors or corruptions are. We might both learn something.”

“(Unlike the Qur’an) the Bible couldn’t have been corrupted like that because it was originally written down in many different places and times, and spread out from those places to all around the ancient world. So it was next to impossible to change all the copies. Also there is no record of copies ever being deliberately changed.”

Obviously there is a lot more that can be said on this, but these sorts of answers can often deal with the smoke screen or ignorant objection, and lead on to helpful conversations and (God being gracious) some time together reading a Gospel.

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In the few short weeks I’ve been working as the Director of the Centre for Christian Living (CCL), I’ve been asked the obvious question numerous times by friends: “So what exactly is this Centre thing and why are you working for it?”

Here’s the answer I wish I could give if I was thinking clearly at the time, and if something didn’t always interrupt the conversation after about 15 seconds.

I’d want to say that it all stems from Moore College’s aim and mission, which is to “serve our Lord Jesus Christ by equipping men and women to know God better”.

As part of this mission, the College runs ‘Centres’ that explore the implications of the knowledge of God for different areas: for ministry practice (the Centre for Ministry Development), for women’s ministry in partnership with men (the Priscilla and Aquila Centre) and for the everyday Christian living (yes, the Centre for Christian Living).

So the Centre for Christian Living exists to serve the Christian community by exploring what the knowledge of God in the Bible means for every aspect of our lives: for our character, in our homes and families, in the workplace, at church, in our neighbourhoods and in society more broadly.

Now that’s a pretty broad brief, but so is the Christian life. With so many issues confronting us, we need all the encouragement and input we can get to keep shining the light of the gospel into all the ethical nooks and crannies of our daily walk. I want the CCL to address anything and everything across the spectrum of Christian living—from what forgiveness means in our personal relationships, to how we can navigate their way ethically through our increasingly complex financial system; from the place of conscience in everyday ethics, to how we can contribute to a truthful gracious discussion about Islam in our society—the subject of our launch night on March 11.

In all of this, the idea is to bless the broader Christian community with the riches that God has blessed Moore College with — in particular the deep biblical wisdom of the College faculty. I certainly won’t be doing all the talking at CCL events. A key aspect of my job is to take the world-standard scholarship of the faculty and tug it out into the broader Christian community, and bring it bear on the issues that we confront every day.

In 2015, the work of the CCL will revolve around five public events spaced throughout the year:

• CCL Launch on March 11 at Moore College
• May 26 at Toongabbie Anglican Church
• August 26 at Moore College
• October 22 at St Michael’s Wollongong
• October 28 at Moore College.

Feel free to drop me an email (at [email protected]) with any requests or suggestions for topics that you would like the CCL to address.

And finally, as CCL gets back into swing and as I find my feet in this new role, please pray that through it all God would be pleased to bring people to know him better through the Lord Jesus Christ.

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