Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

Record business: these vinyl trick shots are amazing

Wow. No seriously. Wow.

Who sits around and says to themselves “you know what we should do, we should throw our records from all sorts of angles and get them to land on a record player”…

Awesome mad scientist makes Tesla Gun

I kid you not. According to the interwebs. This guy’s name is Flickenger. His life as an awesome physics defying mad scientist was nominally determined. Here’s how he did it. But seriously. Don’t try this at home. Unless you’re happy to make two.

And look. Video.

Dress sharp for the pulpit with PastorFashion.com

This website has been around for a couple of months now, and I’m still fairly sure nobody knows if it’s actually a joke or not. I mean. It’s a joke. But I’m not sure if it’s intentionally a joke, or if we’re laughing at it.

PastorFashion.com is celebrity preacher Ed Young’s gift to the world. It features fashion tips to help pastors teach the Bible while being really, really, ridiculously good looking. Or at least well dressed.

The latest post is called “Skinny Jeans and testosterone” and contains this video for your edification.

Hardcore (probably Canadian) farmer looking old guy opens beer with a chainsaw

Because sometimes the simple, non-petrol powered, ways, aren’t the best.

Apparently paramedics talk about cases, trivial cases, where they get called in, as “chainsaw-bonsai” cases. I reckon this guy could prune bonsais with this sort of precision.

Bottle Bidet: For those emergency moments when you need one?

Just $10. Money well spent.

Crucially, there are several colours.

The blurb seriously says this:

“The most important feature is the angle of the nozzle, which is designed to provide a direct flow of water to the desired wash area. The shower-head nozzle produces a gentle stream of water that is more effective than using toilet paper alone.”

Just remember to take a spare bottle of water.

David and Goliath for the YouTube generation

QTC’s preaching course got high tech this year. The people doing it had to upload a video to YouTube as part of a portfolio. My friend Brian smashed it out of the park with this little sermonette on David and Goliath. It’s laugh out loud funny in a couple of parts, but such a great example of preaching narrative in an engaging way – one of the limitations was a 6 minute time limit, and having spoken to Brian I know the ending would have been a little more fleshed out had he more time. But wow. Brian has skillz.

You can read the preaching class’s blog here.

Community Season 3 on iTunes in Australia

Because I like to get my media legally, I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for Community Season 3 to come out in Australia. I searched on iTunes today. And lo and behold. There are new episodes (though some might consider the price tag a little on the expensive side).

Let me remind you why you simply must watch this show.

“Ken Lee” by Mariah Carey

Twice today I’ve had people tell me to watch this. So I did. Thanks Joe and Jenny, and Arthur and Tamie.

How to graciously hijack someone’s stage to correct bad teaching

For some reason this video feels relevant today. .

There’s an interesting back story.

Via the Contemporary Calvinist.

@FeedToby: Pavlov’s Dog feeder powered by Twitter

Send a tweet to @feedtoby between 9 and 9 GMT, and you give Toby the dog a treat.

What’s wrong with the Australian Christian Lobby: Can “lobbying” even be Christian anyway?

A little while back somebody on Facebook suggested that I seemed to not like the Australian Christian Lobby but not say why. I thought that was odd, because I thought it was self evident. I don’t like the Australian Christian Lobby because by not talking about Jesus and talking about issues, they are presenting a message that is not the good news of grace, but the bad news of law and morality.

But that challenge got me thinking, as did a question raised on my last Christian/politics rant, asking whether I’m suggesting there’s no place for Christian lobbying. Other people have previously also suggested it seems by being opposed to the ACL, careful when it comes to trying to “protect marriage” by legislation, and wary of government funding for school chaplaincy, that I’m advocating some sort of political quietism. My answer to this suggestion has always been that I’m not pushing for quietism, but that I think we need to be careful with how we raise issues. I think our priority, in any public “Christian” statements, should be to be Christian. To be clear about the gospel, and not making the gospel unclear by adding layers of morality. As it stands, most Christian contributions to public debate are incoherent because of several fatal methodological and philosophical/theological flaws.

First, the ACL seems to me to be a modernist organisation speaking to a post-modern world. They’ve got no sense of needing to use narrative or stories, rather than proclamation of absolutes, in order to change people’s thinking. This is why it appears that the gay marriage issue is splitting a generation in the US, and in Australia. This is also where I think the ACL ultimately fails on the communication front – their proclamations of right and wrong are too abstracted from real life, they never show the human face of what they’re talking about, but rather engage in high fallutin logical arguments about where society will head if changes are made. People want to know how an issue will change life for them. The pro gay marriage lobby has made the issue all about real couples who are wanting their real love recognised by the government. We haven’t been able to combat that because our arguments are just “this is wrong therefore don’t do it,” or perhaps worse “(the) God (you don’t believe in) says this is wrong.” This is why I’ve argued elsewhere that not only is it important to show how a moral stance relates to the gospel, because that keeps the gospel clear, it’s also important to show how the moral stance comes from a cohesive and legitimate worldview. Otherwise we’re just playing politics like it’s a numbers game, and the numbers are going to change (I’ll get to this below).

Second, the ACL comes from a pseudo ecumenical standpoint, aiming to speak for all Christians. Which is problematic because while Christians might broadly agree about moral issues, they’ll have some pretty fundamental disagreements about the root cause, and how to fix it. So, for example, reformed Christians believe that all people are totally sinful, that sin is natural, and that choosing to follow God requires divine intervention, while Catholics have a much higher anthropology where people are essentially a blank slate, and can naturally choose to follow God. There’s no way we’re going to articulate the gospel the same way when we’re talking about issues – as we saw from George Pell’s appearance on Q&A. If the ACL’s stakeholders can’t actually agree on what the gospel, or the Christian message on moral issues is, then the so-called “Christian” case is never going to be clearly presented.

While most theists, even Muslims, will agree on issues of the sanctity of life, and sexual morality, once you chuck Christian in your name you’d want to start speaking from the points of common ground for all creedal churches, which means sticking to Jesus. The fact that Catholics and protestants, and even types of protestants (so your Liberals, your Arminians who have a slightly more Catholic understanding of human nature, your fundamentalists who want to enshrine Old Testament Laws) disagree so completely on what it means to be a human, and what it means to have a relationship to God, or to live as one of his people (ie a Christian), means anything beyond this common ground is going to become incredibly difficult to articulate in a convincing, cohesive and winsome manner. If the Australian Christian Lobby isn’t speaking about Jesus then they can’t really claim to be speaking for Australian Christians, after that point we’re a very broad church, so broad that even speaking about Jesus doesn’t necessarily represent those who claim the moniker. This the fundamental reason I don’t think an ecumenical approach to social action works – but I can see that in order to mount a convincing political argument in this poll driven iteration of politics, that suggesting you’ve got a big bunch of voters who vote in a block standing behind your statements is politically expedient and a good strategy for lobbying. Which again leads me to my next point…

Thirdly. I don’t think Christians should be lobbying. The role of special interest groups in distorting the political landscape, where better organised and funded activists produce non democratic results, is a blight on the modern system, no matter how well intentioned the lobbyists are. Decisions should be made on what is the right thing to do, on the strength of an argument, whether there is one voice behind it, or a thousand. By participating in lobbying we’re not speaking against a broken system, but using it for our own gains. We’re perpetuating the broken, market driven, approach to democracy, a system the social tide is slowly turning against. And it’s seriously going to come back to bite us – either if “lobbying” becomes vastly unpopular quickly, or if a well organised anti-Christian lobby led by people of my generation as they come into positions of power run a cleansing campaign to finally remove Christianity from public life in Australia.

The idea that Christians should somehow be using political clout, obtained through numbers, to enshrine our worldview, might seem appealing in the short term, but, given the two objections outlined above – namely that there’s a whole generation of people who are watching how the church does politics, and being turned off church, and a whole generation of people listening to what the Christian voice is saying, and not hearing the gospel, we should probably be rethinking how we do political engagement anyway.

I’d argue that employing the language of “lobbying” presents a really harmful message for the non-Christian. We don’t like the tobacco lobby. We don’t like the gun lobby. We don’t like the gay lobby. We don’t like the climate lobby. We don’t like people putting special interests ahead of the common good – which is exactly what “lobbying” implies, it speaks to a strategic organising of people to push their own agenda. It speaks of an unhelpful approach to power and the state which I don’t think is really consistent with the counter-cultural message of the gospel. Particularly for those in my camp, the reformed evangelical types, who think that human nature has been broken by sin, where sin is the natural state of affairs for all people, and the Holy Spirit is required for real change of behaviour, we’re never going to be starting from the same presuppositions as other people in society, and we’ve got to work harder at defending that worldview before legislating from it.

Lobbying isn’t adopting the old Christian maxim of speaking truth to power. It’s trying to speak power to power. It’s playing a numbers game, enforcing the idea that might makes right, that somehow a majority view is what should determine how legislation gets passed. How does this work when the numbers aren’t in our favour? Though the dictionary definitions are almost identical, I wonder why the ACL didn’t choose advocacy as a definition of its work, advocacy at the very least is free of some of the special interest baggage. Especially if our advocacy is framed as protecting the innocent (which we tried with gay marriage after the horse had bolted by arguing about children needing a mother and father – this was a good argument far too late, and on the wrong legislation). Advocacy would free us up to work a bit better with people we disagree with broadly but agree with on specific issues, because it’d be more issue driven than based on arguing for some mythical cross-denominational Christian unity. Scott Stephens, the editor of the ABC’s Religion and Christian Ethics page, gave a really insightful critique of this distinction, as it relates to the gay marriage debate, in a conversation with Steve Austin on mornings last week. I don’t think the answer he puts forward to how Christians should participate in public life is on the money, it’s a little too wishy-washy, and doesn’t start with Jesus, but his diagnosis of the problems in this debate are spot on.

So there, in three nutshells, is why I “don’t like the Australian Christian Lobby” and why, when well meaning members of the ACL (and they are all well meaning, and generally lovely people, who are generally interested in serving God and his kingdom) tell me that I should join the ACL and help them do better, I answer that I’d rather stand apart from them and do my bit to speak truth to the power they’re trying to wield. Basically their policies aren’t good for Australia in the long run, because they’re going to damage the church and the understanding of the gospel for the average Australian, and they’re employing a political methodology that I think is fundamentally antithetical to Christian witness. So [pq]I pretty much think the ACL should change every word in their name to something else.[/pq]

If we are going to do social engagement well, and, as history demonstrates, I think Christians have an incredible role to play in the public sphere, then perhaps we should learn from our successful forbears, who relied on the strength of their argument, building support for change from the ground up, not relying on some powerful numbers play (Wilberforce), and relied on demonstrating a better way rather than simply telling people they were wrong (so the early Christians who cared for abandoned children, and the sick, in a way that made the empire feel guilty), who participated in the process of policy making from within the system rather than holding out the carrot and stick of a voting block (Wilberforce again). Or perhaps we should sacrificially seek out the minority groups who already feel vulnerable, showing that we love them, in a way that opens us up to persecution from the government rather than expects the government to bow to our whims (like, say, Jesus), rather than shouting from our lofty perches in a way that further alienates them from Jesus, who came to make broken people whole, by grace, and only through the Spirit, not by law and holding out the false hope that a moral life, other than the perfectly moral life of Jesus, counts for anything.

Dub step tap dancing thing

This is quite mesmerising.

How to make Dropbox even more awesome


Image Credit: This not really relevant image is from the Dropbox Blog.

[pq]I heart Dropbox. It is incredibly useful, but an automated Dropbox is even better.[/pq] There’s no point me giving you my referral link because referrals are full. But other people might like to share theirs in the comments to get a little bit more space. Also. To get more space you should do Dropbox’s nine step introductory challenge thing.

I’ve been trying to make Dropbox the central point of getting my life organised and a bit more automated. I also signed up for Google Drive this week, which means I’ve got another 5GB of cloud storage to play with, it seems pretty integrated with the Google services I use anyway, but I don’t think it’s a Dropbox killer.

Here’s what I’ve been doing to make Dropbox awesome.

1. Send to Dropbox – ever get an email with an attachment that would be handy somewhere in your Dropbox managed life? I know I do. Especially PDF files of journal articles that I email myself from the online journal database we use at college. I’ve set up a rule so that any email from this service gets forwarded to the email address that Send to Dropbox provides, and then this file magically appears in my Dropbox folder, which is called “Attachments”…

2. If I start sending stuff other than such essays to this folder, things are going to start getting confused in that folder. So I use Wappwolf’s Dropbox Automator to move everything in that attachments folder into a folder called Sortbox. Wappwolf does heaps of stuff, Lifehacker has some cool tips.

3. Sortbox is a sorting tool that is pretty much made redundant by the incredible range of tools available on Wappwolf, but it allows you to make rules based on specific file types and names, it’s a bit simpler than Wappwolf, and might be a good starting point if you don’t want to spend time figuring out what you can get done with Wappwolf. Once a file is in Sortbox I have a rule that sends all my files from the journal provider, which start with ATLA into a folder called Essays. Wappwolf then takes over again, and uploads any file in essays to google docs. Also in a folder called Essays. I’m not sure that this step is necessary. But I also save the working versions of my essays, in word, into this folder, and this gives me a backup on Dropbox, and Google Docs.

4. If this then that is a fun automated tool that helps you make life awesomer and more automated. It lets you do all sorts of fun stuff with Dropbox and other web services. So, for example, if somebody tags me in a photo on Facebook, ifttt shoots it to a folder in my Dropbox. This is a pretty useless little recipe, but there are all sorts of ways to use this. Also, when I take a photo with Instagram, it goes to a folder in my Dropbox. Ifttt has 21 different channels that you can play with, some are more friendly with Dropbox than others.

5. I also sync my Dropbox, particularly my essay folder, with my favourite iPad annotation app, GoodReader. Which means I can read and take notes for my essays on the road.

6. Stuff I scan using my Doxie Go also goes into Dropbox, and one day, when I’m feeling really organised, this will lead to more awesome automated rules.

Robyn’s (and Sophia’s) first Mother’s Day

Today was fun. On the back of an incredibly busy weekend we spent the afternoon painting with Soph. This was Robyn’s Mother’s Day present.

Well. The painting, a photo, and a creatively paint stained white onesie. Which I’ll frame or something.

We appreciate that this day is both a) very commercial, and b) hard for many people, but there’s something nice about the opportunity to recognise mums.

I think one of the things that being a parent has taught me, in these four and a bit months, is the sort of emotional investment, love, and energy, my own parents made in me. So thanks mum (and dad).

I’m also incredibly in awe of Robyn’s transformation. She’s such a natural at being a mum. It’s incredible.

More Gotye covers

I mean. Why not?

Still not as good as the original, or the original covers (five people one guitar, and the a capella one).

I still think this is actually the best Gotye song around…