Tag: neighbouring

Church, in Australia, during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Yesterday I posted about some parenting stuff in the age of Corona Virus. Today we had our first Sunday service after the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic and the Australian Government brought in social distancing measures to limit large gatherings.

We aren’t a large gathering, but our congregation meets in a facility we share with multiple congregations, including one made up of a substantial number of people in high risk categories. It’s a building we don’t operate, so our ability to conduct appropriate cleaning measures between uses is limited.

I’m convinced churches need to participate in flattening the curve, even if our gatherings aren’t large, I think we have a responsibility to love our neighbours, especially the vulnerable. I’m struck by how wrong this can go — Patient 31 in South Korea was an individual responsible for a drastic uptick in Corona Virus infections because of her participation in church events.

I’m convinced that we should act ahead of government advice. The call from Jesus to “love our neighbours” comes with the caveat “as we love ourselves” — it’s important that we be healthy so that we can be in a position to provide good care to others. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to opt out of our service, to non-anxiously (or anxiously) self isolate, without judgment, from this point on. Even if the government doesn’t step in to limit interactions for weeks or months (probably until winter).

I found Andy Crouch’s piece on love in the time of Corona Virus profoundly helpful (I also linked to it yesterday). I’m convinced that we need to find ways not just to virtually connect as church, but to keep meeting together. But this requires careful management of physical spaces and personal hygiene, and our circumstances with our building and the other congregations that meet there mean we’ll probably be encouraging small groups to meet together during our church broadcasts, and to find ways to care for and support one another.

I’m convinced that we need to be prepared, and careful, so that we can love our neighbours well in this time of crisis as a faithful presence in the world — a people committed to taking up our cross and following Jesus. I’m struck by what’s happening in Italy, where hospitals are confronted with making treatment decisions that will determine who lives and who dies. Here’s a quote from a journal article I filed away once for a time such as this.

“Medicine involves faithful presence to those in pain, even—perhaps especially—when hopes for “cure” prove illusory and the provision of care throughout a longer or a shorter span of life becomes the sum of what medicine can offer. This is no easy task. Our helplessness to effect a hoped-for cure can too easily turn to hatred: hatred of sufferers for failing to get well and of ourselves for failing to make them better. In the face of this temptation to impotent rage and to the punitive abandonment of the sick and suffering, medicine needs the church, whose experience of the faithful presence of God in the midst of suffering undergirds its own willingness faithfully to be present to the sick. Only so can the hospital—and the practice of medicine more generally—be, in Hauerwas’ words, “a house of hospitality along the way of our journey with finitude . . . a sign that we will not abandon those who have become ill simply because they are currently suffering the sign of that finitude” (Hauerwas, 1986, 81–2). If anything, Hauerwas may have understated the dependence of the practice of medicine, thus defined, upon the moral community that is the church. In a recent monograph, historian Andrew Crislip (2005) links the emergence of the hospital in the late antique period to the health care system of Christian monasticism. According to Crislip, monastic health care stood in stark contrast to pagan health care in its commitment to care for the crippled, the infirm elderly, and the chronically and terminally ill (Crislip, 2005, 9). “It was standard among ancient physicians at all times to reject chronic or hopeless cases. To treat a patient he could not cure would only diminish the doctor’s reputation, even if it might enrich him somewhat” (Crislip, 2005, 114). Thus, where pagan medicine emphasized prognosis, which allowed the physician to identify hopeless cases and refuse to take them, monastic medicine emphasized diagnosis, which allowed for appropriate healing and caring measures to be taken on behalf of any sufferer (Crislip, 2005, 18–9). There is, in other words, no abstract discipline called “medicine” that offers nonstigmatizing, compassionate care throughout the life cycle. In the West, at least, such medicine originated in specifically Christian communities and was undergirded by specifically Christian moral commitments

M.K Peterson, ‘Salvation and Health: Why the Church Needs Psychotherapy,’ Christian Bioethics, 17.3, (2011), 277-298

Get that — before universal health care in western countries; in the Roman world; doctors would treat people based on who they’d boost their stats from, and who would make them the most money. Christianity turned that on its head because Christians kept caring for vulnerable people, and thus, the modern hospital was born. In the third century AD, a Roman emperor who hated the spread of Christianity, Julian, wrote a letter where he gave an account for the popularity of the religion of the ‘impious Galileans’ amongst the people of Rome. He gave instructions for the creation of something like the modern hospital.

“Erect many hostels, one in each city, in order that strangers may enjoy my kindness, not only those of our own faith but also of others whosoever is in want of money. I have just been devising a plan by which you will be able to get supplies. For I have ordered that every year throughout all Galatia 30,000 modii of grain and 60,000 pints of wine shall be provided. The fifth part of these I order to be expended on the poor who serve the priests, and the rest must be distributed from me to strangers and beggars. For it is disgraceful when no Jew is a beggar and the impious Galileans support our poor in addition to their own; everyone is able to see that our coreligionists are in want of aid from us.”

Here are some steps we’re taking and the way we’re approaching decisions around Corona Virus. I’d love to hear what you’re doing.

  1. I’ve put together something of a crisis team, this team includes a few well positioned medical professionals, including one doctor in our congregation who is a medical advisor for a senator, and two GPs, but also our small group leaders, kids church coordinator, committee of management and elders. We’re discussing steps to take, and this group will allow us to make decisions quickly as information comes to hand. It’s really important that Christians, who are people of truth, build our decisions and our attempts to be wise, and to love our neighbours, from the truth. So good data and information is really key — both receiving it, making decisions from it, and sharing it — but doing so non-anxiously (again, see Crouch’s article). I’m also an asthmatic, which is a personal risk for me, but one our church leadership team needs to manage too. It’s probably a good thing for pastors of churches coordinating crisis management to make sure their own risk factors are known and that work arounds are possible.
  2. We’re communicating regularly to our congregation via our Facebook group, and looking at how to communicate to those not on Facebook.
  3. We’ve asked those who are sick or symptomatic, or potentially exposed, to self isolate, and to let us know so that we can care for them.
  4. We recognise that meeting together is vital for the Christian life, and loneliness is deadly, and social isolation has the potential to undermine our spiritual and emotional well being, so are working at solutions (in line with the Crouch article, and this useful document he linked). Our small groups, meeting in homes where some of the tips in that document will be easier to manage, will be part of continuity of community and care during this time. Even those groups can embrace technology — various members of our Growth Group have face timed in for weeks where they couldn’t make it already this year.
  5. We’ve been preaching through Luke’s Gospel, and today were reminded, as Peter denied Jesus, of Jesus’ call for his disciples to take up their cross and follow him. We broke up into small groups to talk about what this might look like during the pandemic. It’s interesting that the quote from the journal article above uses the phrase ‘faithful presence’ — this is common language for us as a church, the idea that this is our calling, along with the idea of a faithful presence being a non-anxious presence because our hope is secure.
  6. Meals together have been a feature of our gatherings since the beginning. We’re not catering for post-service community lunches during the pandemic, but are instead encouraging people to eat at nearby restaurants (or go home) to avoid handling food/cross contamination.
  7. We are providing soap and sanitiser on site for people to wash their hands as they arrive. Ideally, we’d be wiping down surfaces and equipment before and after use (we are doing that for our bits and pieces, but there’s uncertainty about which groups that use our facilities use what).
  8. We’re encouraging parents to make decisions about how to approach church with kids; whether they sit in family groups practicing some reasonable social distancing in our facility, or sending them to kids church and managing hand washing. Again, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to opt out to flatten the curve, while still belonging to and participating in our community.
  9. Today we ran our first ‘online’ service using Zoom. We’ve got access to a paid account, but like Zoom because should we move to totally online services we want multiple people to be able to contribute to the service. I sticky taped my phone to a mic stand. It worked.
  10. Presbyterians aren’t typically ‘every week’ communion/Lord’s Supper types here in Australia, but we’re changing our practices to minimise handling of the bread by those preparing it, and we don’t share a common cup (we have little cups of grape juice).
  11. On the home front, we’ve been doing some careful preparations, putting together a dry food supply that will last us through a period of isolation, but that will also allow us to meet the needs of others. We’ve started freezing meals in containers labelled with their ingredients (to manage intolerances) so that we can share these with those in need.
  12. Our street already has a thriving Facebook group, but people in our church liked the idea so I’ve knocked up this postcard template (pictured below) they can print off using a photo printing service (or their printer) to drop in to neighbour’s letterboxes. Feel free to shameless steal it. The text is (for those who might want to easily adapt/print using word:

    Hi neighbour,
    As we enter a pandemic where lots of us are predicted to catch Corona Virus, our church has encouraged us to love our neighbours and to find ways to care for those who are sick or isolated.
    We thought a Facebook Group for our street would be a good way for us to stay in touch with each other and offer support during these times (and grow our connection beyond this crisis). We have set up this group, you should be able to search for this name ______________.
    If you can’t find it with the search, please add me as a friend and I’ll invite you to the group. My name is _________. My profile picture looks like _____________. You can contact me by ______________. Our church is hoping to help with groceries or practical needs as they come up. Please let me know if we can help you.


  13. There’ll be an economic impact of Corona Virus as well as a health one; people in church congregations will be facing uncertain employment situations or losing their jobs, in a bad economic climate. We need to risk manage that as churches with our own budgets, but also want to be in a position to be caring for those affected. This is tricky, but it’s something I’ve flagged with our management team and the crisis management group to be part of our conversation. Another church I follow online mentioned maintaining giving during lockdowns as a good way to care for church staff, and to sustain the church’s ability to serve the community. I thought they did this well.

Over to you — hit us up in the comments on this post, or discussion on Facebook, to let us know what your church is doing, or things we’ve missed.

March 15, 2020

Learning the Aussie (and spiritual) virtue of hospitality from and for the outsider

Halal_Snack_Pack_served_on_ceramic_plate

Image Credit: Wikipedia article on Halal Snack Packs

On election night in Australia, in the midst of the chaos and the commercial networks clamouring for ‘worst possible election graphic/metaphor’ and Laurie Oakes’ tie-switching gazumping of the gambling industry there was a moment of pure beauty; a beauty that some may have interpreted as political pointscoring if it were disingenuous, but that I choose to see as a glimmer of something both transcendent and fundamentally human; a reminder that we, as Aussies, whatever our differences, should be able to share something in common. A literal, and metaphorical, place at the same multi-cultural, multi-faith table. Part of being Australian, I think, is operating in the realisation that hospitality is a central virtue, and in the practice of hospitality we’re to be both hosts and guests; and that nothing kills hospitality as fast as fear.

This revelatory moment came when Labor senator Sam Dastyari, of Iranian heritage, invited the newly (re-)elected Pauline Hanson, famous for her anti-Islam ‘no halal’ platform, to join him for a halal snack pack in the western suburbs of Sydney. According to the SMH story on the invitation, “a ‘HSP’ is a styrofoam box filled with kebab meat, cheese and chips covered in chilli, garlic and either barbecue sauce or hummus.”

I’ve never eaten an halal snack pack, but his guide to making the perfect pack makes this invitation particularly inviting.

Hospitality: a lost Aussie virtue

For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair. — Advance Australia Fair, Verse 2

Dastyari’s offer was an attempt to practice the foundational ‘Aussie’ virtue of hospitality; one we no longer sing about in our anthem because we don’t sing the second verse, but that is there nonetheless (an ironic ‘foundational’ virtue in some way when white settlers ignore the way we forced first Australians to show us ‘hospitality’, but I’ll get to that).

Hanson rebuffed his invitation. She committed what I think is a cardinal Aussie sin, she rejected his offer of hospitality and mateship, an offer to share in part of his vision for human flourishing — not the snack pack itself, but the hospitality he offered. The invitation to share a meal at a shared table. To share life. To understand each other. This sort of hospitality is so vital to life in a multi-cultural context. Our nation will fall — it won’t possibly be one nation — without a rediscovery of the cardinal Aussie virtue of hospitality; of being able to share a table with those who are different. And this is extra true for Christians — because it’s not just an Aussie virtue, but a Christian one; and we’ve got a particular interest, as Christians, in both taking up the invitations of others, and inviting those whom society can’t find a place for at the table to join us.

There are implications in this pursuit of hospitality, in the context of Islam in Australia, for how we think of such things as enabling the building of religious space for Muslims as an extension of our desire for religious freedom, what we think of halal food and its place in Australia (and our pantries, which I’ve written about elsewhere), but also for how we think of what it really means to ‘belong’ in Australia (which I’ve also written about elsewhere); what we unite around as Australians.

There’s lots at stake here, because Pauline Hanson has a view of what our unity as Australians should be found in and that view now has a place at the table in the parliament, which ostensibly legislates towards particular views of what being ‘Australian’ looks like. Hanson’s view, a reaction to terror and change sounds so appealing to those of us who are looking at the pace of change in our world, and our nation, and who are afraid. Fear is a totally understandable response to change (and ‘terror’ the intended response to acts of ‘terrorism’), and she taps into it, and has built a platform that, in a circular way, escalates the fear as she speaks the fear into reality for many other people, while offering solutions that cause fear for others. I think it explains much of Hanson’s popularity, but it also explains much of the damage Hanson is doing, whether deliberately or as collateral. Her appearance on Q&A last night, and the associated contributions to the discussion by Muslims in the audience, and Dastyari who shared the platform with her, shows that we can’t take her lightly. She’s been elected by a constituency who share some of her fears (and proposed solutions), and she (and they) have a right to have their fears heard.

The antidote to these fears, where they’re unfounded, is hospitality.

This is the answer for both Hanson (and voters who back her), and the Muslim community. The answer is rediscovering the virtue of hospitality; generous hospitality that seeks to make a place for and to understand the other that will allay Australia’s fears about the Muslim neighbours we have nothing to fear from (and might help us identify those we do, should they not be interested in the exercise of hospitality), and hospitality that will allay our Muslim neighbours’ fears about whether they belong in the Australian community or not.

If we want ‘one nation’ we need to practice hospitality as both guests and hosts. Which is interesting, because for white Aussies like me, that’s what I am, historically. I’m both a guest — in that I am a descendant of those who settled having ‘come across the seas’; and a host, in that my family has been here for generations and I’m now in a position to show hospitality to others. One might say I’m morally obliged to do that either because of the (largely ‘inherited’) cultural wealth I enjoy as an Aussie in a world where such wealth is rare, or the story I participate in as an Aussie enjoying the boundless plains I did not create, or just that I have more wealth to share than most people alive today. I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable with welcome to country ceremonies at public events because they remind me of some truth that this isn’t really my home, or that it wasn’t first my home, but another peoples’; but this extension of a welcome, an act of generosity from another Australian people — our ‘first Australians’ — should model something to me that I then pass on to others. It’s the articulation of a fundamental Aussie virtue that stands in the face of past fear, injustice, and terror — the stuff that European settlers perpetrated on others, and if we can’t learn from this welcome as modern Australians and be true to our national anthem, then we’ve lost any hope of being ‘one nation’ as others join us from across the seas. My discomfort in welcome to country ceremonies — the discomfort of feeling a sense of forgiveness and hospitality in the face of inherited guilt — is a powerful reminder that we are all, as people, both guests and hosts in this nation, and this world. In a sense, as Christians, we also understand first nation people to be guests in God’s land, as an extension of our role as God’s image bearing stewards who are placed in an embodied sense, in his world, to do the work of caring for it (in a Genesis 1 sense)… or as Paul puts it in Acts:

From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ — Acts 17:26-28

We are both guests and hosts. 

This is part of the Australian story — because it is a part of every Australian story, from the first Australians whose relationship with the land was predicated on some sense of being guests and stewards, to all those who have joined in the call to share our ‘boundless plains’ with others — being an Aussie means being both guest and host; hospitality is a foundational Aussie virtue, if not the foundational Aussie virtue. And fear is the enemy of hospitality. It leads us to put up walls, to build ghettos, to demarcate the ‘other’, to attempt, as Hanson, Andrew Bolt, and TV host Sonia Kruger have, to limit the extent of our national hospitality to those who don’t bring anything new or different (or dangerous, because all danger is apparently found in this difference) to the table. Ultimately a failure to practice this virtue leads us, as a nation, and individual Aussies, to practice exclusion rather than embrace. And both our past and our future have to be built on embrace if we’re to survive as a multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic nation. It’s simply too late to return to ‘white Australia’ and Australia was never really white to begin with…

The way for us to recapture a lost virtue, and to be schooled in it, is to practice it. We have to recover this practice in our homes in order for it to be recaptured in our parliament. This starts with you. If you think this stuff matters — you need to practice it.

If you don’t like what Hanson is on about, or the politics of fear, if you want Australia to be defined by what it is or could be — a truly hospitable nation — not by what it isn’t, then start habitually practicing hospitality. Not just as a host, but as a guest. Get out to Western Sydney. In this we have much to learn from both the welcome to country we’re offered by the indigenous communities at public events; and from ‘new Australians’ like Sam Dastyari and other Muslim Australians who have responded to the rhetoric of fear and exclusion with hospitable invitations. Just like on election night, the moment that stood out for me on Q&A last night (apart from Hanson’s apparent epiphany that Dastyari is actually a Muslim), was not the Muslim voices who expressed how deep the cost of this rhetoric is for their community (though that was striking) but the hopeful invitation a young Muslim man extended Hanson, not to eat a halal meal (on his terms), but simply to eat with him and seek common understanding.

My name is Mohammed.
I love my religion Islam and have been to more mosques than I have the supermarket. Perhaps the greatest influence for our family members to becoming hard working and focusing on education and hoping to be good citizens was the emphasis placed on it by Islam.
I believe the best way to increase understanding and mutual respect, is through interaction. Would you be willing to take my offer to inviting you for lunch or dinner, whichever suits you, with me and my Muslim family? And in respect to you and your beliefs, while we have something halal, we will ensure your food is not halal.
Would you accept this invitation now? — Mohammad Attai, Q&A

We won’t have one nation without practicing this sort of virtue.

We are both guests and hosts.

This guy, and Sam Dastyari re-taught me a truth that I should know both as an Aussie, and as a Christian. Hospitality is a virtue, and our survival as a nation (and as a church within a nation) depends on it.

So, I’ll be looking for Brisbane’s best Halal Snack Pack, if anyone has any recommendations.

But I also have to step up my hosting game, not just hosting those in my church community (though we have to do this as Christians if we’re going to live out our Christian story and display the Christian virtue of hospitality in our communities), but hosting those who are not like me, especially those from the margins; and those who live in fear in our changing world — both the Muslim community, and the One Nation voter, because hospitality isn’t just an Aussie virtue, it’s a core Christian virtue too. It’s part of us living our story.

Hospitality: A lost Christian virtue

Hospitality is at the heart of the Christian story — which begins with the hospitable God making a place for us, a beautiful world, and a place for us to enjoy a relationship with him. But our fear, and our failure to be hospitable — guest or host — is also at the heart of the Christian story. We fail to be good guests, as humans, when we live as though God isn’t hosting us, as though the world isn’t his. We behave like bad tenants, or terrible guests in a hotel room who trash the joint, or worse, like a house guest who comes over the threshold of your home and systematically attempts to eradicate any trace of your ownership, your life, or your existence until you’re driven from your house. That’s what we’ve done to God. That’s the story of sin; our act of remaking God’s place — the world — comfortable for us, by removing him. We aren’t great guests. And, as John puts it, as a result, we humans are terrible hosts…

 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. — John 1:10-11

This is, in a sense, John’s summary of the parable of the wicked tenants — the parable where the owner of a place that has been trashed sends his representatives, and finally his son, to talk to the inhospitable tenants, who kill the owner’s son. This story — and this statement in John — is about the Cross. The word who made the world became human flesh — a guest of the world — we hosted him here in ‘our world’ and we killed him. The story of the Gospel is that God is the great and generous host, but that we, by our own god-rejecting nature, are bad hosts and bad guests. There’s something in the image of God that still remains in us that means, by his grace, we are still hospitable to others even if we’re not deliberately following him, but this characteristic — this divine virtue —is something we take up anew when we take up the invitation to be his people in a hostile world. We become the representatives of the great host; but we also realise that we live in a world that is hostile to him — the world that killed Jesus — and that part of the invitation extended to us in being his people is an invitation into the new creation; where the hospitable God will again make a place for us, even after we trashed the last one. This new creation is so new that the world now isn’t actually our home… and so we live as guests. Peter captures this tension in his first letter:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. — 1 Peter 2:9-12

This letter is one of many parts of the New Testament that expresses the connection between the hospitality God shows us — the mercy we’ve received changes the way we treat each other, and the other. So Peter says:

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. — 1 Peter 4:8-10

This isn’t just to be love that we show to other Christians, but to strangers and the marginalised, this is a Christian virtue, one that participating in this story and remembering the Cross, points us to over and over again. Hospitality is a Christian virtue. A way of living out who we now are. We are both guest and host. We model this in the way we love each other as brothers and sisters, but also in the way we love our world, free from fear.

“Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” — Hebrews 13:1-3

Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. — Romans 12:13-16

The hospitality will go far beyond eating with others, but it will essentially include that — both as guests and hosts.

I think the logic of 1 Corinthians and especially the outworking of what it means for Paul to ‘be all things to all people’, Paul also wants Christians to receive hospitality — especially to eat with — from those who are living out different stories in our world — the ‘other’ — our neighbours. There’s some good stuff I’ve cut out in this passage about food sacrificed to idols that I think is relevant to the halal thing, but it’s worth reading what Paul wants Christians to do with their eating and drinking…

If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience… So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God — even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved. — 1 Corinthians 10:27, 31-33

Are you practicing and receiving this sort of hospitality?

Because our Muslim neighbours, like Sam Dastyari and Mohammad Attai, are inviting us to (Attai specifically invited ‘anyone’)?

If you’re not, what is stopping you? Is it fear? That’s actually a failure to love, or its an indicator that you fear people and what they might do to you more than you fear God, and that’s a problem because as Christians, those who stand with Jesus, relying on his hospitality, and so following his way of love, we’ve got no reason to fear those who might hurt us (Matthew 10:28-29), or the God who judges us (for trashing his world and killing his son).

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us. — 1 John 4:16-19

Hospitality — giving or receiving it — is not just a powerful antidote to hate and fear, but a powerful testimony to our story.

Hospitality is a virtue, because hospitality is an act of love. It’s an antidote to fear — the fear of God, or the fear of the unknown ‘other’ (be they someone not to fear or someone who might ‘hurt’ us). Practicing these virtues will teach us who we are, and continue to make us who we are, people who are like Jesus (who, in his life, kept getting into trouble for eating with people the ‘religious establishment’ didn’t like).

So, where is Brisbane’s best Halal Snack Pack? Anyone got a lead?

 

 

July 19, 2016