The New Testament pictures life in this world, for Christians, as a spiritual war, and it also tells us how followers of Jesus should participate in that war. When Paul writes about ‘the armour of God’ in Ephesians he says “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the […]
Search Results: “christian lobby”
Maybe we could try not treating LGBTIQA+ people and their allies like the enemy (or, doing what Jesus said to do to our enemies)
Victoria passed its Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill yesterday and the online reaction is predictably polarising. I’ve written about why I think this was a bad Bill, but also why Christian opposition to the Bill was misguided and doomed to fail previously. I don’t have skin in the game on this fight (though […]
On first converting the church (some thoughts on the Conversion Therapy legislation)
A few people have asked my thoughts about Victoria’s Conversion Therapy bill, including how I could imagine a church operating in Melbourne under the conditions the Bill seems to present to those who are theologically conservative on issues of sexuality and gender expression/identification. Conversion Therapy has already been banned in Queensland, though the Act that […]
How the comfort offered by companies is pig slop, and why the church should stop lying down with pigs
Once upon a time there was a boy. He believed the bright lights of the big city and the experiences on offer there would allow him to be truer to himself than the life he had been born into. He was born to a farmer, all his life to this point he’d been playing out […]
Why Special Religious Instruction should stay in secular public schools
On Wednesday afternoons each week during school term I head along to a local public school and teach a bunch of public school students about Christianity in curriculum time. I had been quite reluctant to do this initially because I know the curriculum is jam packed, and though I think helping kids grapple with religion […]
The church of the excluded middle
If there’s one thing we learned in the recent Australian election, just one ‘take home’ message, it’s that there aren’t just deep fault lines between religious and non-religious Australians, but, increasingly, there are fault lines running through the Christian community. I’m not sure ‘right’ and ‘left’ in Australian politics — or within the Australian church […]
Religious Freedom and reaping the whirlwind
Everybody wants to be a weatherman. There’s great money to be made in being able to accurately predict the future — and reputation or influence to be won. Especially if you can predict a cataclysm. There are two narratives circulating, like cyclones circulate (that is to say with great destruction) to explain the current debate […]
Yeah, the government doesn’t understand the secular/sacred divide or public faith… but that’s on us.
Did you hear the one about the government that didn’t build religious freedom legislation into its amendment to the Marriage Act? I did. I can’t stop hearing about it. If you follow the Christian blogosphere in Australia you’ll be seeing plenty of posts following the parliamentary debate in the senate overnight; a debate passing the […]
10 Reasons why I won’t be voting in the postal plebiscite (or telling people in my congregation how to vote)
So we have a plebiscite. A non-binding postal plebiscite where MPs will still ultimately get to vote based on conscience. And I don’t know about you, but my newsfeed and email inbox has gone nuts. It feels like D-Day has arrived on the same sex marriage thing in Australia, and that there’s a certain inevitability […]
Hungry Hungry Hippos: The danger of modern politics as a zero sum game, and the need for a more hospitable public square
Did you ever play the game Hungry, Hungry Hippos? It goes a bit like this. Only with more punching and tantrums. It’s a mildly fun competitive board game for kids; my fear is that this is pretty much what has trained today’s adults in how to participate in the public square. Nobody plays Hungry, Hungry Hippos and sets […]
It’s time for the church to rediscover her prophetic voice; here’s what that might look like
Image: Jeremiah speaking truth to power There’s a phrase I’ve often heard bandied about in conversations about how the church should engage the world; it’s often said that there’s a place to speak to the world with a ‘prophetic voice’ as though this is somehow different from all other forms of speech to the world. […]
A letter to our Immigration Minister re: #Abyan
The debates around asylum seekers and the complex nature of the global refugee crisis often involve more heat than light. This is me trying to throw a little bit of light into the mix. The story of the suffering Somali Refugee Abyan has gone through at our hands has led me to shed tears, and […]