Podcasts now available

I'm back on deck at the National Mission Office, at least until the end of February. The Office is officially closing at the end of January, but John Daniel and I will be continuing to work for another month, clearing up. The blog may continue on, depending on what I do with the next stage of my life....

Meanwhile, thanks to Anne Thomson for letting us know about the following podcasts:

A number of people were interested in Jim Wallis's visit to Dunedin in September last year, but were unable to attend the event, it being so close to Assembly and all.

You can now watch and listen to him, via the University of Otago's podcasts - after clicking on this link scroll down to "Howard Paterson Memorial Lecture 2010" and to "A Conversation with Jim Wallis".

And then if you want to explore further, last year's Thomas Burns Lectures are also available, given by Prof. John Coffey on the theme ‘Let my people go’: Exodus and Deliverance from Calvin to Obama.

Booze and Bethlehem meet

I'd heard something of what went on recently in Tauranga when Jim Wallis' Bethlehem church put up a sign echoing the Tui ads which said, “Jesus was just a man…Yeah Right.”

The last I heard things had got a bit edgy with the Beer Company, with them saying that the expression 'Yeah Right' is copyright.

However things went from somewhat awkward (as opposed to downright bad) to remarkably good.   A US site called Church Marketing Sucks picked up the story and goes through the details in a nice orderly sequence. 

Well done, Jim!

Faith, Ethics and Public Life

The Centre for Theology and Public Issues at Otago University is delighted to announce that Jim Wallis, founder and CEO of the Sojourners Community in Washington DC, will be in Dunedin on Tuesday 28 September. He will be keynote speaker at a conference on 'Faith, Ethics and Public Life' that afternoon, and deliver the Howard Paterson Memorial Lecture in Public Theology. The venue is First Church, Moray Place.

Jim Wallis is a leading author, speaker and international commentator on faith and public life, and one of President Obama's advisers on religious and ethical issues. He has written ten books, the most well-known of which, 'God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It', helped change the US political landscape and was on the New York Times bestseller list for four months. He is in high demand internationally as a speaker, and this conference in Dunedin - his only speaking engagement on the South Island - will be a rare opportunity for us to hear him in person.

Full information about this event can be found at www.otago.ac.nz/jimwallis, and tickets for the full conference, priced at $20 ($15 students, beneficiaries & U-16s) can be booked online at this address. The price includes afternoon tea, coffee and home-style refreshments. May I encourage you to book early, as the event is being advertised across the South Island and we are expecting tickets to go quickly.

The Howard Paterson Lecture, like all University Open Lectures, is of course open to all, but if space is tight priority will be given to people booking for the whole conference.

There is a special e-mail address for enquiries relating to this event: jimwallis.event@otago.ac.nz (phone enquiries: 03 479 8450). If you hear of someone who would like to attend this event but simply has no way of accessing the internet, please ask them to call this number or write to the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054.

Jim Wallis on young evangelicals

"Young evangelicals really think that Jesus probably would care more about the 30,000 children who died today because of poverty and disease than he would have about gay marriage amendments in Ohio. This is a new generation of abolitionists, you might say. And they are applying their faith, using their faith, addressing their faith to the challenges we face: the moral scandal of poverty; the degradation of the environment, which they call 'God's creation'; the threat of climate change; human rights; Darfur; pandemic diseases like HIV/AIDS; war and peace issues - the exclusive use of war to fight evil and the foreign policy disasters that has led us to. Their agenda is much wider and deeper."

--Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and author of The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America

Jim Wallis

As I speak and listen to large and diverse audiences in every part of the nation, I find a deep hunger, especially among members of the younger generation, for something worth committing one's life to.... The two great hungers of our time are the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social justice--and the connection between the two has great power to motivate people to action. The world is especially waiting for a new social and political agenda drawn not from bickering partisan loyalties, blatant ideological bias, or corrupting special interests, but rather from our deepest moral values.

Jim Wallis
The Great Awakening

Perseverance

I’ve lived with a broken back for 40 years, and I never let it stop me. Don’t let what you cannot do stop you from doing what you can do.

New Zealander, Sir Tim Wallis at 70. From a report in the ODT 10.9.08

Sir Tim says his life has been one of perseverance and persistence, two qualities that have always accompanied him. He's had a fair share of setbacks and life-threatening accidents, including breaking his back in a helicopter accident in 1968 and crashing a Spitfire in 1996.

Kevin Rudd and Religion in Australia

In a blog post on the 7th August, Jim Wallis (of Sojourners) writes:

One of the stories I first heard on my recent visit to Australia was about what helped swing the vote last November to Kevin Rudd, the new Labor prime minister. I read some new political data by veteran pollster and researcher John Black, who is respected across Australia's political spectrum. Black reported that the pivotal swing vote to Labor this time was among evangelicals and Pentecostals, especially in some key seats in the states of Queensland and South Australia.

Kevin Rudd [is] a new kind of Labor candidate who speaks openly and comfortably about his faith. Rudd is a Catholic, is theologically articulate, and even likes to write articles about German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Though Jim has apparently got it wrong about Rudd being a Catholic - he was brought up as one, but is now a practising Anglican, that doesn't change the point. Here's a practising Christian in Australia's top job, and social justice issues are one of his major concerns.

Read the rest of the article here - it has some other good things to say about Australia (!)

And one other word about social justice:
Social sin is the crystallization ... of individuals’ sins into permanent structures that keeps sin in being and makes its force to be felt by the majority of people.
- Oscar Romero
Salvadoran archbishop, assassinated in 1980

Christianity and the Social Crisis,

Walter Rauschenbush, whose book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, I wrote about in the previous post, is now available in a centenary edition, which came out last year. There is an introduction by Paul Rauschenbusch, and essays in response to each chapter by Tony Campolo, Joan Chittister, James Forbes, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Phyllis Trible, Jim Wallis and Cornel West.