Boston: What we learn from tragedy

The bombings in Boston remind us that just believing passionately in something doesn't make it right. We don't yet know who carried out these bombings or why but somebody or a group of people obviously thought it was the right thing to do.  
As we've been working through the book of Revelation in our sermon series I've been struck again by the way mankind is prone to being led astray and to being intoxicated with things that are not just bad for us but plain wrong [Rev 17:2; 18:3]. We are prone to delusion.  We worship the wrong things. 

It calls for regular self-examination in the light of the what God has said. The other thing that I've been reminded of was Jesus' word about the tower that fell on a bunch of people and killed them.  He pointed out that those who were killed were no more deserving of death than the rest of us; it was not God's punishment for any particular wrong. [Luke 13:1-5] 
However, things like this should make us all think about our forwarding address when this life is over. It should drive us all to making our peace with God through repentance and faith in Jesus.

- Bruce Dingwall

Women meeting Jesus: Equip Conference 2013

Before moving to the Menai area we had lived interstate and overseas for nearly 20 years.  When we returned to Sydney in 2008, I was so thrilled to learn that there was a Women’s Conference being held at Darling Harbour.  Where we had recently lived, it was hard to attend any Christian conference unless you organised it yourself or travelled many miles.  I had never attended a conference that was purely put together so that women could teach other women.  In fact it is Biblical!  Paul writes to Titus exhorting the older women to teach the younger women and I am sure, with this in mind the organisers of the Equip Conference work hard in choosing speakers that can teach women well.  

For me there are so many distractions and worldly voices that challenge me to water down my testimony of God’s love and forgiveness or to change my views because of strong peer pressure.  I wish to live my days making Godly choices and the Equip conference offers me Bible teaching so I am able to do so.  These Bible teachers have the ability to speak to a woman’s heart and to her world.  

Come and join me and other Menai Anglican Church(MAC) women who want to hear, meet and grow in our understanding of who Jesus is.  If you are new to MAC what a wonderful opportunity for us to get to know you better.  I look forward to this day because I love our harbour and praising God with so many other women.  I hope to see you there!

- Margaret Icke, Women's Ministry Coordinator

Find out more here about registering for and attending Equip as part of a group with other women from Menai Anglican Church 

How do you read it?

TEAR Australia (Transformation, Empowerment, Advocacy, Relief) is a movement of Christians in Australia responding to the needs of poor communities around the world.

Recently TEAR invited the well known and loved international speaker, CB Samuel, to the TEAR Annual Conference, and afterwards for speaking engagements around Australia. With one spot left on his schedule, our Justice and Mercy team was contacted with an offer for CB to visit us at Menai.

CB Samuel with Matt Anslow (TEAR) and Dave Gaskell.

CB Samuel comes with a long track record of serving God as a pastor, Bible teacher, missiologist, evangelical leader, former head of a major Indian christian relief and development agency and a passionate advocate for the poor. He is also known as "the smiling assassin", we were yet to discover why.

CB chose to speak on Luke 10:25-37 - the parable of the good Samaritan - very familiar to most of us, but his focus was not on the part of the story we expected. He drew our attention to this:

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus, "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "What is written in the Law," he replied, "How do you read it?"

He went on to explain that every character in the parable knew the Law to some extent, but they all read, and acted on it, differently.

1. The priest knew the law and how to keep himself ritually pure, but allowed his own spiritual wellbeing to over-ride his obligation to the injured man. (The blessing reading)
2. The Levite also knew the law, but was only willing to do what he was required to do in his job, which didn't include ministering to an injured man. (The job description reading)
3. The robbers - knowledge of the law didn't carry through to how they lived. Their lives were in two different compartments. (The robber reading)
4. The lawyer was only interested in asking an intellectual question, but not in obedience. (The intellectual stimulation reading)
5. The Samaritan knew the law demanded to be obeyed, and acted on it. Jesus obviously approved this way of reading the Law. (The obedience reading)
6. Jesus expects more than mere obedience. In Luke 4:14-21, Jesus said his ministry was announcing the kingdom of God and bringing good news to the poor, the oppressed and the suffering. He calls us to live the same way. Thus his teachings become "the script by which we live" - more than mere obedience, but living out the kingdom. (The fulfilment reading)

So far so good - but now "the smiling assassin" was preparing for his deadly attack.

CB drew our attention to the writings of sociologist Phil Jenkins, who in the 1990s predicted the demise of christianity in the 21st century. But by 2002 had completely changed his view, writing in his book The Next Christendom that christianity was indeed alive and well, but the centre of gravity had changed from the west (Europe and the USA) to the "global south" (Asia, Africa and Latin America). A hundred years ago most of world christians could be classified as white and rich, but now 90% are coloured and poor.

In his book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (2008) Jenkins maintains that the reason for this change and huge growth comes down to the way that they "read the Law" (the Bible).

CB Samuel continued with a story to illustrate his point:

"A Bible teaching missionary in Africa who established a church, appointed elders, and taught them the scriptures. One day a woman became sick, so the elders called the minister to join them in praying for her healing, as in James 5:14-15. He agreed, reluctantly, because he didn't expect her to get well. But surprisingly to him, she recovered, only to fall ill again.

The missionary awaited the call to pray again with some apprehension, but it never came. But a few days later, he saw the woman was in good health again. Upon asking the elders what had happened, they replied "after we prayed the first time, we looked among us for the one who had no faith in the Bible, and so we left you out."

It was then that the smiling assassin delivered his last lethal thrust, speaking to us very seriously, yet still with a smile, and challenging us with these words:

"It will depend on you christians and how you read the Bible and believe, obey and act upon it, as to whether or not the people of the west will see God."

A podcast of CB Samuel's talk is on the church website.

- Eric Hatfield, Justice and Mercy Team

FORGIVE AND BE FREE

An old Chinese proverb says “If thine enemy wrong thee, buy each of his children a drum.”, but have you noticed how unforgiveness hurts the wronged person more than the perpetrator?  

It can make us twisted and bitter.

SET FREE    In her book “THE POWER OF A PRAYING PARENT” Stormie Omartian writes  “…I finally learned that forgiveness doesn’t make the other person right, it makes you free.  I always felt that forgiving someone meant I was saying ‘What you did is OK’.  But that’s not the case at all.  Forgiveness is trusting that God is the God of justice and saying ‘Father, I won’t hold that person to myself with unforgiveness anymore.’  It’s acknowledging that God knows the truth and allowing him to be the judge, because he is the only one who knows the whole story.”

DESTROYING ENEMIES     An elderly woman once asked Abraham Lincoln, “How can you speak kindly of your enemies when you should rather destroy them?”

“Madam,” he said, “Do I not destroy them when I make them my friends?”

FORGIVE AND LIVE   If you’ve been hurt, don’t compound it by letting unforgiveness twist you.  To forgive is a good way to have the last word.

- Bruce Dingwall, Senior Minister

Thinking through the word "disciple"

There's a whole big exciting world of blogs out there, from pastors and churches all over the place. Devotionals, debates, methodology, theology and everything in between. This week we want to introduce you to our very own Zac Miles's ( Connections Pastor at Menai Anglican Church) new blog With God All Things Are Possible with this first taste, a re-post on discipleship....

My Mac dictionary (which I think is related somehow to the Oxford Dictionary) defines ‘disciple’ as ‘a personal follower of Christ during his life, especially one of the twelve Apostles’ or, more generally, ‘a follower or pupil of a teacher, leader, or philosopher’. The word is derived from the Latin discipulus meaning ‘learner’, from discere‘learn’. In the New Testament, the Greek word behind ‘disciple’ is mathetes. This, as in Latin, is derived from the verb ‘to learn’, manthano. So straightaway we see that being a disciple is deeply connected to the idea of being a learner – a student.

So unsurprisingly, in the New Testament, we see that the disciples of Jesus are people who are learning from Jesus. But their learning is not like the learning which is typical of our modern, Western schools and universities. My experience of uni was attending lecture theatres with hundreds of other students to hear various lecturers for a couple of hours per week and usually having no personal interaction with my lecturers. Moreover, the learning was usually done in abstraction – not in the context of everyday life.

By contrast, with Jesus we see him discipling his disciples ‘on the way’ – in the context of everyday life. Just to take a few examples from Matthew’s Gospel: We see Jesus take a boat ride with his disciples in which they experience a huge storm (ch. 8); have dinner with his disciples and a bunch of tax collectors and sinners at Matthew’s house (ch. 9); take his disciples along with him as he goes to raise a young girl from the dead (ch. 9); teach his disciples personally and also in the context of larger crowds (passim); give his disciples authority to drive out impure spirits and heal every disease and then send them out on a dangerous mission to the ‘lost sheep of Israel’ to preach the good news, heal, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and cast out demons (ch. 10); and commission his disciples to go and make more disciples – baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and teaching them everything he has commanded them (ch. 28).

Along the way, Jesus explicitly reflects on the disciple-teacher relationship in the following words:

‘The student [mathetes] is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul, how much more the members of his household!’ (Matt. 10:24-25)

The point being that being a disciple entails being like your teacher – including suffering the same kinds of things that your teacher suffers!

Discipleship comes with a great cost:

‘Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.’ (Matt. 16:24-25)

A disciple of Jesus is someone gives up everything to follow him – this is what denying yourself, taking up your cross and losing your life means.

So being a disciple of Jesus means being a student of Jesus – but not the kind of student we are used to thinking of. It means to learn from Jesus through following him everywhere, watching him, listening to him, hanging out with him, imitating him, suffering with him, and giving up everything for him. Being a disciple also means going and making more disciples.

There is a lot more to say but that’s a start.

- Zac Miles

Follow more posts like this at  http://zacmiles.wordpress.com

Behind the scenes: with the creative arts team

It’s 10.54pm on a Sunday night and somewhere in between dragging around an in-design layout for the next church magazine and thumbing through my rather tatty bible looking for a theme for this issue, inspiration has struck. Deepest waters, rivers, oceans, the sea, cast sins into the sea( Mic 7: 19), peace like a river (Is.48:18), even if I settle on the far side of the sea, there your hand will guide me (Ps 139),.…I am on a thematic quest, diving between verses, chapters, books and squashed up pages, unfolding metaphors large and small( and aquatic apparently).

It is perhaps one of my favourite aspects of this ministry, coordinating a creative arts team that serves our church, the challenge to navigate the gap between the written word and the visual, the idea and the metaphor, symbol, gesture, poem, all colour and light and flavour that is woven through or can be used to express it. The challenge to ever hope to precipitate even just a moment that expresses a millimetre of the abundantly creative God we serve. 

But I am sure for many, what we do is probably a bit of a mystery. 

Like lots of ministries.

In the interest of peaking your interest I thought I would take you though, for a little dip behind the scenes( oh no you didn’t -yes I promise more water-y puns to come), to uncover it’s much more paper, pens, ridiculous ideas and email chains than berets, easels and philosophy.

We meet as a team every 2 weeks, often around a messy table of snacks and art supplies, where we share an agenda that stretches from the next sermon series topic- ideas for artwork, performance, video, working with Stella- our amazing communications manager, planning projects in collaboration with other teams to promote their events and ministry, to tangentially discussing how much we would totally rock an artists studio caravan in the church parking lot, with an astroturf garden and a coffee cart window at the back.  We think out loud, we thumb through scriptures, we have thinking music and lots of scrawly paper that translates a myriad of wonderful ideas into a smaller number of actual tasks and a growing list of one-day-when projects. We pray a lot because mostly we are doing things we have never done before and have no clue if they will work out. And then we have workshops and project sessions - excursions for footage into the city, making objects into typography and photographing them, storyboarding videos, mass producing installation objects, trying to engineer structures that will actually hang them in record time, excursions to bunnings, lots of drilling, painting or on occasion just strolling around a stage posturing over the perfect intonation for a line.

Not many of us are professional artists, a few most certainly, but for the most part we learn along the way whatever it is we need to make happen the thing which we have imagined doing.

We are often more ambitious than we should probably be, but that keeps us praying harder and relying on God in his mercy and providence to make this pathetic human gesture into something that can be used for his purposes. It’s a pretty great place to be.  We believe greatly in the power of creative arts to facilitate learning, outreach, community building, and just to bring joy and beauty. What can I say, it is the best! We would love for new people to join who feel passionately about the potential of this area. And even more so we would be blessed to have you on board as a contractor, full time member or occasional volunteer if you have any experience in the arts.*  

But back to that magazine, Micah 7: 19 has won out for space on the first page, and the lyrics of a song playing in the background seem like they offer what we are looking for on the front cover, “grace abounds in deepest waters”. Yes. There are still many hours left to navigate on this  project but it seems to be sailing smoothly.  And all going well you get to see it in print next weekend! 

*You can find out about joining the creative arts team at http://snccreativearts.blogspot.com

Keep Walking!

Last April I began to think through the planning of the Women’s Conference for 2013.   I had heard about Jenny Salt and I decided that it would be a good idea to phone her.  To my surprise she invited me to Sydney Missionary & Bible College for a morning coffee.  We discussed many ideas of what to teach at the conference and to be honest I was just relieved that she said “yes” to my date.  The Lord knew exactly what we needed to hear and after another meeting in early December, Marg Hudson, Jenny and I were confident with the outline of the vision for the MAC Women’s Conference for 2013.  We prayed!

POWER WALKING – a life worth living!

Planning began, advertising arranged and workshops determined.  We prayed!  Caterer was booked, colour theme decided and music team sorted.  We prayed!  Registrations began. We prayed! Here are some reflections from our conference which was held on Saturday February 16.

• Walking into an atmosphere of femininity with hot pink being the colour theme.  
• Having our very own “women’s music team” and enjoying the singing together, reminding one another what Christ has done for us and living our life for Him.
• Seeing familiar faces and meeting new women from MAC all sitting together waiting in anticipation of what Jenny Salt will teach from Colossians 1 and 4.
• Seeing older and younger women learning together, being reminded that God uses the preaching, teaching and speaking of the Word to bring people into His Kingdom.  He uses us, feeble as we are but he uses us!
• Jenny Salt challenged us to devote ourselves to prayer.  That living each day was power walking in Christ - speaking to God about people and speaking to people about God with gentleness and respect. 
• The urgency of living every day; power walking with the Gospel on our lips! “Soak in the Word of God”.
• The chatter as the women returned from the workshops.  There was excitement and discovery in the air.
• Leaving the building challenged to have thankful hearts to God for everything He provides and to tell others of the grace He has showered us with.

KEEP WALKING – POWER WALKING in Christ!

- Margaret Icke, Women's Ministry Coordinator

Menai Anglican Women's conference recap from SNC CreativeArts on Vimeo.