My Faith Is Going Wild

I played Hoods up, The Low-Down Technified Blues by theillalogicalspoon to my wife. "just listen to the first verse" I said. 

I don't wanna get up for church in the mornin,
church in the mornin, souls alive!
Heaven come to earth and there won't be no church
we'll meet down by the riverside,
there we'll swim with all creation,
never get tired never bored,
don't worry someday there'll be no dam between us and our Lord  

She listened, smilied and said "that is so me". It is also more and more me too. Not just the "I don't want go to church" bit but, the sense that nature is where we commune with God. That it was nature in it's raw state (the wilderness) that the Israelites fled too (away from the civillised egyptians) and where John Baptised Jesus outside of the established civillised religion. It is where Jesus the discovers his mission. The more aware of it I become the more I see it in scripture, from the Cedars of Lebanon (that were cut down to build civilisations) to the tower of Babel which saw people move from a concentrated city population to spread out tribes. Even Cain's offering, a result of farming, was rejected in favour of Abel's hunting and gathering offering.

This sense of returning to the wild as a central part of connecting with the divine is never explicitly stated in scripture. It's just a constant under current. Even domesticated Paul says that we all have an understading of God not because of what God has done through humans and how clever we are or, because of how Xns love each other, or even because of the story of Jesus but, because we find God in creation in the wilderness.

My faith is not longer just about caring for creation but going wild in it.

"Thanks for your prayers, I've upped my medication"

"Thanks for your prayers, I've upped my medication" is the summary of what a friend said to me recently in one of those brief "we gotta leave in 2 minutes" exchanges. I've got no idea what the medication was but I'm going to guess it was antidepressant medication. It's one of the few medications we talk about "upping".

In a recent Richard Fidler interview Ethan Watters suggested is that one of the reasons there are currently so many people diagnosed with depression is that this is how our generation and our culture exhibits psychological distress.

There is something about what he said that really resonated with me. I suspect that for many of us who have suffered depression it is much more than just the medical explanation of a chemical imbalance in the brain (although it is of course that too).

For me, I believe I experience a psychological distress manifesting in depression when my spiritual ideals do not match my material reality. Which being an affluent white male is quite often. Jesus strongly confronts my own way of life and change is hard. This is perhaps one of the reasons Xns are tempted to divorce the "spiritual" world from the "material" world.

Surely, if any group of people should be struggling with depression it should be Christians. As my friend said "Thanks for your prayers, I've upped my medication" my urge to take the kids home trumped my urge to say we (a collective of Xns) should do something about this. This is pretty normal, it's also pretty lonely. But, if you're a Xn and you're taking Jesus seriously, I'm going to venture and say, it should be expected. If we are called to swim against the tied of what our culture dictates as "normal" we will have to expect some level of psychological distress.

Love and grace to anyone on, upping or about to start medication.

Building A Church Building, I've Realised I Just Can't Consent To It

About a month ago I put my hand up to say "Yes, I support the idea of building a church building". Since then I've been feeling like this was not the right thing to do. Over a couple of weeks I trashed around some ideas and wrote this to the head cheeses of the church I hang out with.

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I’ve decide I can no longer support building a building. Not this building and probably not most other buildings. I have come to this conclusion not because of anything the leadership has done or decided but because of an evolution in my own thought about the issue. In other words  “it’s not you it’s me”.

In short, I have decided until such time as we have no other way of being church other than a way that costs us more than the cost of building a building; I would rather not build a building.

I have written a quick explanation of the thinking behind my decision which is mainly for my own benefit so feel free to skip it.

The church component of the building
In the past I have thought we have to build a building the question. I no longer believe we have to. The church in China, the early church and most of the churches I've been a part of have all thrived or at least survived without a building.

Not only is God of course outside of a building but God asks to worship God without a building. 

Exodus 20:24-26 You need make for me only an altar of earth and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your offerings of well-being, your sheep and your oxen; in every place where I cause my name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you. But if you make for me an altar of stone, do not build it of hewn stones; for if you use a chisel upon it you profane it. You shall not go up by steps to my altar, so that your nakedness may not be exposed on it."
The eventual building of a temple was inherently problematic. Solomon resorting to slave labour is but one example.

When Jesus set up his ministry he went outside of the temple system and was baptised by John in the wilderness.

The early disciples had no desire to recreate a temple like building for their own worship instead using their own houses.

Today, house churches continue to thrive in places like China, many churches meet without buildings.

The community centre component of the building

I realise the building is much more than a place of worship but also a gift to the surrounding suburban community. Simply, out of all the needs that our world has I cannot in good consciousness prioritise the need for the people of our suburb to have a community space above so many others. The opportunity cost of this gift to the community of our suburb is what could be gifted elsewhere, like a "gift" for a community in the third world.

Nothing would make me prouder than being part of a church community that owned property that generated income which was given to those in need. Each week we could hang a picture of the hospital, school or housing our money had bought with "Church Building" written underneath it.

When I look at the cost of the building and compare that to the cost and hassle of hiring space I just cannot justify it.

In Conclusion

I realise that this is not the view of the rest of the church community and I have annoyingly come to this conclusion "mid process" so to speak when the question of should we build has already been resolved (although perhaps not irreversibly so). Therefore in future meetings I will abstain from voting.

The Real Education Divide (It's Not Public Or Private)

A slightly off topic post today.

Post Gonski report I've seen a lot written about the "educational divide" in Australia. Almost all of these articles, I think, falsely put this divide between public schools and private schools. There is a divide but it is not here.

From 2003-2009 one of the roles I had in my job was to give seminars in high schools. The topic (drugs and alcohol) was pretty universal so it meant I got to visit and interact with students and teachers from the most elite private schools through to students in the most notorious public schools.

At the time I had very young children so I was often thinking would I send my child to this school? Having been educated in a public school I always thought that this is exactly what I would do with my own children. That was until I came across the education divide.

There is an education divide and it is not across the private and public divide but purely across the socio-economic divide. Really there are three tiers. Tier 1: Elite private schools: these are the ones with high fees, each kid has to bring their own laptop and the year 11 excursion will be somewhere in. Tier 2: Public schools in affluent areas and low fee private schools. Tier 3: Public schools in poorer areas.

In my job it got to the point where I was pretty confident I could be helicoptered in and could tell which tier a school fell into. I've seen 2nd tier public schools with architecturally designed facades, landscaped gardens, excellent IT resources and even a gym (one good enough to charge the public to use). Above all these schools (public and private) had experienced teachers and students who have grown up in a family where education was valued, it was seen as highly important that students do well and students were asked to think about what university course they will do.

On the other hand I've seen schools in the third tier where there was a 10cm floor to ceiling gap a the staff room. A staff room where the broken fridge was used as a cupboard and the microwave was used to boil water because the kettle was broken too. I've been told not to use words on a  power point presentation for year 11 students because "they don't read" (yes that is a quote). The teachers were a mixture of new teachers (you can't just get a job at a school in an affluent area), not particularly good burnt out older teachers, and experienced older teachers who choose to stay at a school in a poorer area. These teachers often have low expectations for their students trying earnestly to funnel them in to a trade. They are often exasperated, teaching students who come from families who do not feel that they benefited much from their own education and don't believe their children will benefit much from theirs.

This divide becomes even more pronounced with proliferation of low fee private schools. Many parents like me have chosen to put our kids in to a lower fee private school (a school chosen in part because it achieved similar Naplan results to the public primary school I went to as a child). This means that where there might have been 15 kids in a class who's parents have high expectations on what their child might achieve at school, there might be only 5. I believe this profoundly shifts the culture of a school. The greater the percentage of students who don't have a strong motivation to learn from home teachers either lower expectations or burn themselves out trying to motivate a whole class to do better. These burnt out teachers will eventually move to a school where this motivation is instilled in a higher majority of students - that is, usually a school in a more affluent area. As these things happen the reputation of a school falls and parents avoid sending their kids to the school. It's a spiralling ever widening divide.

Personally I am currently looking at moving out of the area I live in. Schooling is a big factor in the decision and when buying a new house I'll be adding the cost of two private school educations on top of the cost of any house outside the boundary a 2nd tier public school.

The Cheese Card: Christians Can't Write Scripts

I've seen some fictional Christian plays and watched some fictional Christian films in my time and they have all been bad. Last night I watched "The Grace Card". It had reasonable reviews, good production, reasonably good acting but the script... We (my wife who has a greater sympathetic tolerance to these things and I) couldn't bear to watch the end to see how even more cheesy things could get. The script was awful.

There were at least two problems with the script. Firstly, the inability to let the actors just silently act something out, without giving an extended dialogue including theological motivations for their actions. Secondly, and for me more striking, the Xn characters don't even remotely correlate with people I've met in real life. They are pious and serene beyond belief. Sure they'll often have some flaw to overcome but it's usually something others don't consider a flaw and by the end of the story you know how they're going to overcome it. Currently I have my fingers crossed for “Blue like Jazz” if that fails then I will only ever watch historically based films like Shadow Lands (CS Lewis), Amazing Grace, Luther, Romero and Molokai (these last two are brilliant). These films are often directed by non Xns who insist on catching the humanity of the people rather than the idealised theology of the people. Not only much more real but much much more compelling.

Victim Or Fighter?

A column in last weekend's Australian Newspaper gave the advice that people are either victims or fighters. This one central piece of advice was highlighted and put in bold in the middle of the article. I couldn't bring myself to read the article because this is exactly what I think is wrong with the world and exactly why I would rather opt out of those two options and be a hermit.

In every abusive relationship there is a fighter and a victim. Every victim is the victim of a fighter and every fighter is victorious only when there is a victim. It is a zero sum game. On average half the world will be victims and half will be fighters.

Obviously I don't want to be a victim but equally I do not want to be a fighter. I don't want to battle, to beat down, to victimise. Screw that. I'm happy to be a lover. I can do that. But if I can't do that I'll be a hermit a self sufficient conscious objector to the paradigm that says you must either be a fighter or victim.