The ultimate Yes

Two of the quotes Simon Carey Holt uses in his Easter Sunday sermon, Yes! reproduced in his blog.

‘We are a Bible-believing, fundamental, dispensational, non-ecumenical, non-charismatic, non-Calvinistic, anti-liberal, anti-feminist, anti-gay, separatist church.’

Jurgen Moltmann says that ‘True spirituality is the rebirth of the full and undivided love of life; the total Yes to life and the unhindered love of everything living.’

I sat through a sermon on Sunday that seemed to me to be more about the Cross, Good Friday and dying to life/self. Could have done with a bit more celebration....!

Stringfellow on Church

Jason Goroncy on the blog, Per Crucem ad Lucem, has been posting quite a bit of material from, or relating to, the theologian, William Stringfellow. In fact he may have posted the following, but I've just come across it on another site altogether. It's a view of church that might help how we view our own particular small piece of the Church Universal...

The Church exists for the sake of the world into which God enters and in which He acts and for which He expends His own life. One who is a participant in the Church, one who is incorporated into this Body, one who is baptised into this company has not only the personal freedom to expend his own life without guile or calculation or fear of death – or any more minor prudence – but also, characteristically, he is indifferent to whether or not the churches maintain an amiable reputation in society, or whether or not the churches have much wealth and a sound investment program, or whether or not the churches, or the ecclesiastical authorities, have much political influence. On the contrary, the Christian is suspicious of respectability and moderation and success and popularity. And this is so because the genius of the Christian life, both for a person and for the company of Christians, is the freedom constantly to be engaged in giving up its own life in order to give the world new life. All the questions of status and power and reputation, and all defensive, conservative and self-serving questions about preserving the institutional existence of the churches are matters of some indifference except insofar as they impede the ministry of the Body of Christ, entice men into false religion and a wrong understanding of what the Christian society is, and lure them into misleading notions of what the Christian life is all about.

William Stringfellow, A Public and Private Faith

Not dead - well, not yet

Richard Floyd wrote a short post on 'when blogs die' recently. This is an equally short post (in fact, considerably shorter) to let you know that this blog has not died, and doesn't intend to in the near future. I've been on leave for a week, keeping warm inside while the snow, hail, sleet, and winds buffetted the house outside. And that is my perfectly good reason for not having posted here for about a week.

We'll be back with a vengeance in the next day or so.

Palliative Care

We don't have to remind our regular readers that one of our main topics in this blog is the increasing 'grayness' of New Zealand, that is, the proportion of our population that is elderly is increasing.   This is providing challenges for those in charge of infrastructures and social policy.

A recent report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, entitled 'The Quality of Death' ranks New Zealand third out of 40 countries for our quality end-of-life (palliative) care.   (Palliative care means relieving or soothing the symptoms of a disease or disorder without effecting a cure.)    It says: It is no surprise to find countries such as the UK, Australia and New Zealand high in the overall ranking, given their relative wealth, advanced infrastructure and long recognition of the importance of developing national end-of-life healthcare strategies.

As the Maxim Institute notes: The report points out that palliative care makes financial sense, but perhaps more importantly, it challenges us to ask important questions about life and death.

They go on to say:
A doctor's job is, appropriately, to preserve life. But death is also a reality for every person, and must be faced. The "Quality of Death" report ranks various countries' performances in end-of-life care, using a few key indicators: public awareness about death; quality of care available; and cost and availability of that care. New Zealand comes in third behind the UK and Australia. Countries that rank particularly poorly tend to face the challenge of negative taboos or cultural perceptions about death that make palliative care very difficult. Some countries also are challenged by restrictions around the use of painkillers, resulting from concerns about drug trafficking and illicit use.

The remainder of the Maxim Institute's report is on their website and the full report (39 pages of pdf) is available online here.

Get ready Church!

In the most recent North & South magazine (August 2010) Mike White presents some interesting statistics and projections regarding New Zealand's population. Every one of these stats affects how we do church. Remember that Israelite king who knew that something bad would happen to his children's generation and basically said, why should I care? We need not to be like that.

Currently 4,369,977 according to NZ Stats today (19.7.10)
By 2027 our population could be up to five million
Another person is added every 20 minutes.
Some 700,000 NZeders live overseas.

In the year to March 2010, the population grew by 56,300, the fastest growth rate since 2004.
It wasn't the result primarily of migration.
In 2009 there were 62,543 births and 28,964 deaths with a net gain of 33,579.
Net migration only added 21,253.

An argument for increased population is that if we want to maintain our lifestyle without excessive cost, we will need more people. Our infrastructure at the moment is costing more than we can afford given how ‘few’ we are.

Auckland Regional Council estimated the region is growing by more than 50 people a day, requiring 21 new homes, and resulting in 35 extra cars on the road.

Auckland is predicted to grow by 570,000 by 2031, reaching two million (the equivalent of adding all of Wellington and Dunedin to Auckland).

Auckland needs to consider and fund several major transport projects:
• Second harbour crossing at $4 billion
• Underground CBD rail loop at $1.5 billion
• Rapid-rail link with the airport at $1 billion
• Completion of SH20 at $2 billion.

There's too much talk of migration making the difference to the population – bringing people in with money and then being able to charge them for living here – compared with making sure that young people stay here in the country rather than t go off overseas and not return.

In 2009 one in eight NZeders was over 65.
By 2061 it’s predicted that one in four will be - some 1.44 million people.
Life expectancy for men will be 85.6 and women 88.7 in 2061.

The median age in 1971 was 25. Currently it’s 37. In 2061 it’ll be 43.

In the late 1960s, children made up 33 percent of the population. in 2061 they’ll be just 17%.

Currently 67% of the population is working age; in 2061 it’ll be just 58%.

Facing change

When internal and external alignment is lost, the organization faces a choice: either adapt or take the road to slow death. Usually the organization can be renewed, energized, or made effective only if some leader is willing to take some big risks by stepping outside the well-defined boundaries. When this happens, the organization is lured, pushed, or pulled into unknown territory The resulting journey through the unknown is a terrifying experience, with the possibility of failure or death a reality rather than a metaphor.

From the opening chapter of Deep Change: discovering the leader within, by Robert E Quinn.

Does this sound like a church you know?

To those growing older and soon to part

The Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa NZ publishes a monthly magazine called Candour. While it's available online, it's only accessible by a username and password, and obviously I'm not at liberty to pass those onto people reading this blog.

However, I am at liberty to let you know about a particular piece that appeared in the Sept 09 edition. It was written by Rev Jim Battersby, a retired minister living in Auckland.

The piece takes the form of a letter, and is entitled, To those growing older and soon to part.
The letter addresses the issue of how to come to terms with the fact that eventually any couple will be forced to face the issue that one of them will die before the other. This is especially pertinent for those who have been together for many years, and may be in their seventies or eighties or older.

Jim lost his own wife when he was 72 and has been on his own for 11 years. He knows the pain of separation, and the how it feels to cope after the loved one has gone. Suddenly all sorts of household responsibilities fall entirely on one pair of shoulders. Things that were shared have be done by one person alone. Domestic duties effectively double.

But there are other things that aren't so obvious, things that Jim says should be looked at before one or other partner dies. These include where to find important documents (often one person looks after these); how bills are paid, where family records are kept, the addresses of people on one side of the family who may not be so familiar to the other side.

For the wife there may suddenly be issues of maintenance. (In my house this would be no problem as my wife is the one who does most of the maintenance!) For men who have seldom cooked meals, there is the issue of dealing with daily food requirements. There may be a disability one or other spouse has: how will they deal with that when they're alone?

Some people may find it hard to deal with arrangements for a future funeral, but it certainly eases the burden when the day comes if some things are already in place. And then there are those issues that have never properly been resolved. They may still not get entirely cleared, but talking about them before a person dies is better than having them still hanging over you once they've died.

In the space of a couple of pages, Jim covers all these issues and more. I've been given permission by him to email or post copies of his article to anyone interested. Send me an email if you'd like a copy: email mcrowl@gmail.com. 

PS. Or you can now find it on my other blog.

So you thought you just bought and sold on TradeMe?

TradeMe isn't just a place to buy and sell - it turns out that the message board area has a life of its own, quite unrelated to retail therapy. Stuff.co.nz tells us:

* Between 5000 and 20,000 messages are posted on the message board every day.
* The average age of someone who posts a message is 35-plus.
* The boards are largely self-censored, with 98 per cent of threads monitored by the online community and every member able to ''vote'' to remove a thread if they believe it is not suitable.
* Message topics are most active on personal or social issues, be they grief or happiness.
* There are 20 different categories for messages, from books to parenting. General and Opinion tend to be the most frequented.

Greer McDonald, in an article entitled, Web of support for the grieving, writes about the way in which Julie Adams happened on the TradeMe message board almost by chance, and discovered a world of fellow New Zealanders who were prepared to go the extra mile, offer support and encouragement, and even try and discover what had happened to Julie's missing husband. (His overturned car was eventually found on its roof in dense bush 50 metres down a steep bank just below the summit of Rimutaka Hill, Upper Hutt.)

It may not be 'church' as we know it, and it may not be 'community' as we know it, but it's certainly a place for Christians to be keeping tabs on.

So your church is dying?

Here's part of what Steve Taylor suggests on his sustain-if-able kiwi blog if it seems as if your church is dying:

Keep meeting at 10:30 am Sunday. Keep the doors open. Keep the coffee fresh. Keep the muffins warm. But stop the sermons and stop the singing. Take all that energy and reclaim the time for mission. Read a creed. Dwell in Luke 10:1-12. Initiate some listening experiments. Share stories. Foray into the community for simple acts of service. Return to share stories. Re-read a creed. Re-dwell in Luke 10:1-12. Initiate some more listening experiments. Share stories. Foray into the community for further acts of service.

You can read the rest of the post here.

Loneliness

How lonely are you? How lonely are the people in the congregations you work with?
You can check out your own state of loneliness by looking at the UCLA Loneliness Scale - it'll only take a couple of minutes.

Chronic loneliness is as unhealthy as never exercising, not looking after your heart or your blood pressure. Increasingly medical people are realising that loneliness may be a major factor in people dying younger than expected.

Salon.com published an article by Katharine Mieszkowski a few days ago on the subject. Even though it doesn't mention the spiritual side of life to any extent, it looks closely at the problems of loneliness and their physical effects.

How can congregations minister to the lonely? Can they be helped at all?

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

Child stats in NZ

The Otago Daily Times' editorial this morning uses a number of highly emotive words in its discussion of child injury and death in New Zealand. The writer tells us that two children die every week as a result of accidents, and that we are killing our children in their hundreds.

But a look at the Ministry of Health figures, rather than World Health Organisation or Unicef Report Cards (both of which have are flawed because they don't always compare like to like) show that between 1991 and 2005 the unintentional injury death rate for children under five dropped from 23.1% for males under five to 15.1%. The female figure, on the other hand, grew a couple of points from 12.8% to 14.14%.

In the 5-9 age range, both male and female figures dropped, from 12.8 and 9.5 respectively, to 6.7 and 6.3.

10-14 year-olds showed the same downward trend: males down from 20.4 to 8.7 and females down from 6.3 to 3.3.

Part of the issue of using international comparisons is that reporting is inconsistent. Reports may not relate to the same years or the same basic standards, and many countries take time to catch up with reporting on issues. The current reporting on bullying dates back to the early part of this century, not only in NZ, but also abroad.

In the editorial, Jean Simpson, of the Injury Prevention Research Unit, is reported as saying, 'compared with other wealthy nations our statistics are appalling.' Unfortunately, like so much else in this editorial real stats are not actually given, only an emotive statement.

According to my reading of the Ministry of Transport's graph on Road traffic injury and death rate per 100,000 population aged 0–14 and 15–24 years, 1985–2007, deaths from road accidents for the period have dropped, rather than increased.

The Ministry of Social Development report on Children and Young People: Indicators of Wellbeing in 2008 (Safety) states,

In 2006, New Zealand’s road death rate for youth aged 15–24 years (16.9 per 100,000) was just above the OECD median of 15.8 per 100,000 for that year. New Zealand ranked 18th out of 27 OECD countries, a considerable improvement compared to 2005, when New Zealand ranked 25th with a rate of 22.4 per 100,000. New Zealand’s 2006 rate was similar to that of Canada (16.4 per 100,000 in 2005) and Australia (15.8 per 100,000 in 2006), well above that of the United Kingdom (11.2 per 100,000 in 2006), but well below that of the United States (25.5 per 100,000 in 2005).
[This report can be downloaded from the Ministry of Development]

Stats are a useful tool, but always need to be checked, double-checked and possibly triple-checked. In one episode of TV series, The West Wing, Sam Seaborn commands his staff to find the stats on some obscure area, and to get three different lots of stats, so that he can compare what is being reported. Clarity is always an issue.

Equally, stats tell us nothing of the pain and anguish of those involved with the death of a child. The recent Nia Glassie trial was atypical in showing adults expressing little concern over the death of a toddler; most parents and relatives are deeply shocked in such circumstances.

Thus, while any decrease in deaths from unintentional injury is something to be rejoiced about, there are still many people out there who have lost someone precious to them. And that should always be a concern. Guilt trips from anonymous editors do nothing to help.

Pastors and dying churches

Regarding pastors being called to dying churches.

Some of us believe pretty strongly that churches in the inner city and the rural areas also deserve good pastors. We also affirm that many churches in some of the dying denominations deserve to have good pastors. Not every pastor is going to have the privilege of pastoring a thriving church, and not every church is going to thrive no matter who the pastor is! Pastors are primarily called to shepherd the flock. I believe that people at every stage of life deserve to have good pastoral care. Many of us are going to spend most of our pastoral careers in small- to medium-sized churches. Hopefully we can teach the Word of God and nurture the believers who happen to be part of that community.

There are plenty of churches that are going to hold on to some traditional ways of doing things. This doesn't mean that God can't use some of those old ways to nurture and protect His children. There are a number of us pastors who probably secretly, sometimes openly, admit that we yearn for simpler times and methods. We wish that we didn't have to keep up with all the new ways to reach people and grow churches. There are many people who wish that church was still a place of dignity and traditions because that is the way they learned to worship God. So much of our culture is changing so rapidly that many older people in the church wish that the church could be a shelter from all that change and that they could have some of those traditions to hang on to.

I do believe that God may call some of us to minister among people who don't want to change styles and we may be there to help them prepare for their dying. Sometimes, in dying churches, there is also the possibility of a resurrection as people return to a traditional church after being disillusioned with the trends of the contemporary church. My prayer is that we can be the shepherds who truly minister to the people whom God has given us at this time.

from the Pastors' Weekly Briefing newsletter, Dec 5th, 2008

Randall Prior

The keynote speaker at this year's Presbyterian General Assembly (in Wellington, New Zealand) was Randall Prior. Randall focuses a good deal on Gospel and Culture, on Church and the Future. In his addresses to the PCANZ, he spoke specifically about the Future of the Church. Although his talk had some Australian focuses, it was very applicable to the New Zealand scene (and in fact, to a much wider scene). You can download the talks here, or obtain them as audio files.

In one of the footnotes to his second talk, he notes: In my view there is still some considerable ‘dying’ of the present form of the church yet to take place. It is not a simple matter to anticipate a future shape of the church but the indications are that the church’s place in Australian [for Australian read, New Zealand, USA, UK - anywhere else where institutional churches are struggling] society will be:
as one faith group in a society of several faiths and religions;
the church will be marginal to the main interests and activities of our society;
there will be a diversity of forms and styles of church life;
congregations may be increasingly dependent on lay leadership;
there may be little interest among church people in denominational loyalty; there will be fewer resources to maintain the structures and activities and buildings which we have known in the past; for some church communities, there may be only a loose connection with buildings.

It would probably be unwise to takes these notes alone, without reading the rest of the talk, particularly because Prior is talking of the Future of the Church, not its death.

Review: Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright

Tom Wright has several things he wants to put across in this book, but there are two particular ones that stand out for me. Firstly he wants to encourage the church to change its view of what happens to us after death, and secondly, and even more important, he wants us to realise the extent to which we're affected, in every aspect of our lives, by Jesus' resurrection from the dead, and our own future resurrection in the new heavens/new earth.

I must confess I'm a person who likes to read books that speculate as far as possible on where (and what) we'll be in the post-death future. I sometimes feel a little alone in this, as, to my surprise, many Christians don't appear to care overly much. For them vague thoughts of 'heaven' are enough. However, Wright isn't prepared to let us away with any kind of vagueness. He spends a good amount of time dealing to the usual idea of 'heaven,' which he says is not only inaccurate, it's not even Scriptural.

For him the resurrection of Jesus is of utter importance in relation to our future. The resurrection will sweep up everything in this world and recreate it in the new. For Wright, everything that's of value here will have value eternally, and he's not just talking about 'spiritual' things, but about creative things, about work and love and kindness and relationships and all manner of other aspects of our everyday lives. The 'first' resurrection happened here, in this world, and it will ultimately affect everything in this world. The new creation will incorporate the old, making all the old of immense value.

But this is just part of the message in the book. Wright presents a wide-ranging and accessible theology of the resurrection, of Easter itself, of the Christian's hope as it was understood in the early church, of what Jesus' judgment of this world means, of whether Purgatory and Paradise have any relevance to us.

And in his final section, where some of the best material lies (in a book full of good material), he writes of hope in practice: how the resurrection affects the mission of the church.

If you've ever felt that we've lost the point of Easter, that the resurrection was a one-off and rather odd event, and that our deaths are fairly irrelevant in the scheme of things, read this book. Even if you don't agree with all Wright's theology – as some (plainly misguided critics) don't – I'll be surprised if you're not inspired by at least some of what he has to say.

reviewed by Mike Crowl

More from Tim Keel

Two more quotes from Mr Keel, and then I'll give him a rest:

I am discovering that our postmodern world is consumed with questions of creation—even if they are not framed that way explicitly. We can hear these questions whenever our contemporaries ask, "What does it mean to be human, especially as more and more of life is influenced by and even dependent on technology?" "How do we understand gender and sexuality and how both are expressed?" "How do we live in an ecologically responsible way?" "How might a just economy function sustainably?" Have you had these conversations? Have you talked to the teenagers among you who are verbalizing these concerns? These are the questions our culture is wrestling with.

People are not asking the traditional gospel question much anymore. Asking, "If I died tomorrow, where would I end up?" does not generate much life. But asking people, "If you had just a few years left, what kind of life would you want to live?" generates enormous energy. It is a question of hope, something our balkanized world sorely needs.

Our job on earth

The idea that the gospel has something to say about the eternal destinies of people has been drummed into them for a long time. But they don't see that we are equally concerned about what Jesus taught us to pray: "May your kingdom come, and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
Tim Keel, in An Efficient Gospel?

It's worth pointing out that noted English writer, N T Wright, has recently published a book called Surprised by Hope, which deals with a similar idea, as well as looking at what resurrection means for people, where we go when we die - and whether heaven really 'exists'.