Wife Swap USA

I was watching tv last week and happened to start watching 'Wife Swap USA'. Now this is not regular progamming for me but this episode caught my eye. For the uninitiated out there the premise behind this show is that two families at polar ends of a spectrum swap spouses for two weeks. For the first week the exchanged spouse has to abide by the family's rules but in the second week they get to impose their rules on the family. In the instance of the show I watched it was a traditional Christian family, father, mother, and 3 boys and a gay family, two father's and two biological daughters.

In the Christian family the father ruled the house. The boys were kept in line by the use of a wooden paddle affectionately known as the 'butt-basher'. The mother did all the cooking and cleaning (as well as worked fulltime as the father at that time was unemployed). The father was emotionally separated from his sons and wife and found it difficult to communicate with them.

This was contrasted with the gay family. No one was better than anyone else. Any problems were discussed together and decisions reached as a family. Everyone helped with chores and cooking the two girls did not even need to be asked. Both father's were working professionals and their daughters felt comfortable talking to them about anything.

This was quite a thought provoking show for me. In the family typically thought of (at least in Christian circles) as a bastion of Christian example the gay couple were leading the way in how a family should operate. It saddens me that people can live in a family such as that and at the same time be following Jesus. The man is the head of the household in the same way that Christ is the head of the church. And when Christ came he did not come with a butt-basher.

What angered me more than anything else were the Christian's responses to the gay man. The father called his pastor when he found out that the spouse he was receiving was a gay man. The pastor came over and counselled the father saying that the bible is very clear on the topic of homosexuality, they are like lepers, we are to treat them as if they had the plague (and not in the nuturing sense). The father ended up continuing in the show but did not allow the other guy to sleep under his roof! This disgusts me from a Christian and worse a minister of the Word. If G@d is a G@d of love then this as far from a godly action as I can imagine. People justify this sort of thing by saying "I'm rejecting the sin but still loving them". Bollocks! It looks like that you're rejecting the sin, and despising and loathing the sinner.

While sadly people might use examples such as this to justify their opinions of Christians I still found this episode worth watching. I found it heartening that the mother who went into the gay household used their example to set her family arights. She began to see the family as just other humans rather than those people. At the end of the show she judged them by who they are rather than judging them by what they are.

Happy Anniversary

Wow its hard to believe but tomorrow the Coffee Table will be 2 years old. Its kinda surreal to have had my life in cyberspace for so long. There have been many interesting posts and a long faith journey in part explored here. I don't know where I will end up or if ever end up anywhere but I don't think I care anymore. I'm just enjoying this journey with the Lord. I don't think I'll end up as non-Christian as some, or as anti-Christian as others, nor do I think I'll end up as 'Christianese' as others. There is a hope of the future.

The Other Blog

This is going to be my new personal blog here. But this one will still be ongoing on a similar vein to the way it has been going. However, I don't know how often I'll be able to update either as I have yet to convince the flatties to get internet let alone broadband :)

The Light in Humanity

As one of my going away gifts my Youth Group gave me for some unbeknown reason the book Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas. I found this excerpt quite insightful:

Harry Belafonte is one of my great heroes. He's an old-school leftist and holds on to certain principles like others hold on to their life. He told me this story about Bobby Kennedy, which changed my life indeed, pointed me in the direction I am going now politically. Harry remembered a meeting with Martin Luther King when the civil rights movement had hit a wall in the early sixties: [impersonating croaky voice of Belfonte] "I tell you it was a depressing moment when Bobby Kennedy was made the attorney general. It was a very bad day for the civil rights movement." And I said: "Why was that?" He said: "Oh, you see, you forget. Bobby Kennedy was Irish. Those Irish were real racists; they didn't like the black man. They were just one step above the black man on the social ladder, and they made us feel it. They were the police, they were the people who broke our balls on a daily basis. Bobby at that time was famously not interested in the civil rights movement. We knew we were in deep trouble. We were crest-fallen, in despair, talking to Martin, moaning and groaning about the turn of events, when Dr. King slammed his hand down and ordered us to stop the bitchin': "Enough of this," he said. "Is there nobody here who's got something good to say about Bobby Kennedy?" We said: "Martin, that's what we're telling ya! There is no one. There is nothing good to say about him. The guy's an Irish Catholic conservative badass, he's bad news." To which Martin replied: "Well, then, let's call this meeting to a close. We will re-adjourn when somebody has found one thing redeeming to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that, my friends, is the door through which our movement will pass." So he stopped the meeting and he made them all go home. He wouldn't hear any more negativity about Bobby Kennedy. He knew that there must be something positive. And if it was there, someone could find it.
It turned out that Bobby was very close with his bishop. So they befriended the one man who could get through to Bobby's soul... Harry became emotional at the end of this tale: "When Bobby Kennedy lay dead on a Los Angeles pavement, there was no greater friend to the civil rights movement. There was no one we owed more of our progress to than that man"... And whether he was exaggerating or not, that was a great lesson for me, because what Dr. King was saying was: Don't respond to caricature--the Left, the Right, the Progressives, the Reactionary. Don't take people on runor. Find the light in them, because that will further your cause.
-Bono on Bono, Michka Assayas, pg 86-87

I think this is a lesson that we should all listen to. To continue it on, do not criticise people for what they are doing wrong. Seek to congratulate them on what they are doing right and then seek to show them how they can do it better.

Environment

Below is a copy of a brief talk I gave on Sunday about what I am going to be doing in Dunedin. It was thrown together at 1 in the morning and only gives a brief synopsis of my view of the relationship between Christianity and Environmentalism, but here it is anyway.

As some of you may be aware I am leaving for Dunedin in the very near future; in fact next weekend. This is because just over a year after graduating from Canterbury I have finally got a job as a Chemical and Process Engineer, well to be precise an Environmental Engineer, with a Dunedin based consultancy company called Waste Solutions Ltd which is a subsidiary of Duffill Watts & King. Some of you may have seen Campbell Live a couple of weeks back in which they looked at PPCS Timaru dumping their waste straight into a local bay and the Gisbourne City dumping its untreated municipal sewerage directly into the sea. An Environmental Engineer is the person who is brought in by these companies or cities to examine the waste, the location, and what is required in order to get a resource consent and then recommends the best possible solution to the problem. The Environmental Engineer can be involved right from the modelling of the problem through to actually building the treatment plant.

In spite of the fact that in moving to Dunedin I shall have to leave everything and everyone I know and love I am excited about this opportunity. Ever since I did a paper on Pollution Control in 2^nd pro or third year at Uni I have loved the field of waste treatment. Living in New Zealand I have found it very easy to appreciate and love the beauty of creation, thanks in part to my parents taking me camping every summer. And yet humans haven't had a very good track record of keeping this or any country pristine, we pump pollutants into the water. I remember watching the news just before I graduated and I saw a piece about this city in Russia in which the death rate was higher than the birth rate. This was because the amount of pollution that processing plants were pumping into the air. I don't know about you but I find this absolutely shocking and I began to pray that God would put me into a position where I would be able to use my skills to help in these sort of situations.

Going to Bible College last year gave me an insight into God's heart for the world. Not the world as in its inhabitants, but the earth itself. The very first chapter of the Bible tells us that God created this world and saw that each part of it was ' good' and that the whole of creation was very good. This in fact is one of the central points in the whole of that creation narrative. Looking further into the first chapter of the Bible we find God blessing humanity and telling them to subdue the earth. This subduing is not to rule over and abuse as this passage has on occasion been used to justify. Rather it speaks of a subduing to care and look after, as some have put it, to be stewards of the earth. Finally, throughout the Bible people point to creation as a witness to the glory of God, Psalm 19 especially:

Psalm 19:1-6 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. ² Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. ³ There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. ⁴ Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, ⁵ which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. ⁶ It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat.

The chorus of the song Blown Away by a New Zealand band Magnify captures it for me,

I take a step outside
And I open my eyes and find
That I can't take a breath
Without You being on my mind
There's nothing that I can do
There's nothing that I can say
I've fallen flat on my face
And I've been blown away

I want to keep this witness alive for future generations.

Velvet Elvis

I have just finished reading the Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. For those of you that don't know, Rob Bell is one of the founding pastors of the Mars Hill church in America, one of the fastest growing churches in American history and the star of the Noma videos. This was the best book I have read to date this year. It is subtitled Repainting the Christian Faith and he argues that Christianity needs to be repainted for the world that she now finds herself in. In art there is never a pinnacle of art so great that there need never be another artist likewise Rob Bell argues there is never a pinnacle of theology or Christianity so great and so complete that there need never be another theologian. It is impossible to describe my enjoyment of this book, within it I found described and portrayed the very things that I have come to understand Christianity to be about, and the ideas that I have been considering to be concisely written in black and white.

Rob Bell goes from pointing out that Christian doctrines are not so much bricks in a wall (threaten one brick and the wall may collapse) but springs of a trampoline in so much that they can bend and stretch and are not in fact the point in themselves but an aid to the point (to jump :). He goes on to point out that all truth is G@d's truth. Christians should not be threatened if they find truth in a place that is not in one of the redefined sources of truth because wherever it is found it is G@d's. From here he goes on to point out that the word 'Christian' "is a great noun but a terrible adjective" that something can be called Christian (ie Christian music) and not be the best possible form of that thing in fact in some cases it is a disgrace to the art. Just because something is done in church or marketed in a Christian store does not make it any more 'Christian' than something done in the 'secular' market. He also points out that the bible is more concerned with bringing heaven to earth than it is with taking earthlings to heaven. He points out that we can choose to bring heaven or hell to earth and Jesus provides much condemnation for those that do the latter. Rob Bell finishes by saying that being Christian means being the best possible humans that we can be and try to bring heaven to earth for everyone, everyday; that is the good news for the whole earth. No more hidden agendas, no more trying to convince people to be Christian, just to live a life like Christ's. Do not think that this is even close to a complete overview of the book there is heaps of detail and major, awesome points that I have missed. I cannot even quote my favourite sections from this book as it has so many that I absolutely love (and also I have just packed it away and probably won't see it until I reach Dunedin unless someone convinces me to lend it to them :).

Finally, I highly recommend this book for anyone who finds themselves at odds with the church on details of orthopraxy (right action) and maybe orthodoxy (right understanding) but still identifies themselves as a Christian and a member of the church. A person who sees the ideals of the church but despairs of the actuality of the way it has turned out. This book provides a powerful unifying understanding that keeps the best of the past but seeks to reinterpret, repaint them, so that the original image of G@d and desire of Christ for His disciples is retained.

Praying For The Sick

Those of you who read the Dilbert blog will have recently read his post so entitled (and those that don't you can find it here). I found this article interesting because in one of bible college one my lecturers gave an example that proved precisely the opposite (the article is located here). So what happened? Did God decide that the group of patients that Scott Adams cites were not worthy to get better while those cited by my lecturer were? Is one test better than the other? If so which one, the one that had a greater group of patients or the one that used the triple-blind method (neither the doctors nor the patients knew if they were being prayed for and the prayer groups only knew the first names of the patients and never met them)?

I don't think I can answer these questions. I just have a few reactions to this whole thing. Firstly, the statement by the chief chaplain at the Mayo clinic, "The sense of community was not there. You could call it impersonal prayer rather than intercessory prayer." I don't like this reaction. Is he saying that the prayer groups didn't or weren't able to pray hard enough because they didn't know the people involved? Or was the effacy of their prayers somehow lessened for the same reason? Or maybe because the people being prayed for weren't Christians (and therefore part of the community) God decided they weren't worth saving? This doesn't fit with the G@d I know. I would see this as almost as a cop out answer, trying to get off the hook from not performing.

And that is what it is at the end of the day after all, performing. Bring G@d out of the box and get Him to dance on His hind legs. "He's not a tame Lion". We are trying to make God perform to make a point to the world that He is real. Somehow we have got the mistaken idea that if we can just prove that He exists then people will believe. They won't. People might use studies as Scott Adams does to prove that G@d doesn't exist or isn't thoroughly involved. Even if every study in every discipline shows incontrovertibly that G@d exists I doubt that any of these like Scott Adams will come to faith. As Jesus put it "Do not put the Lord your G@d to the test" (Matt 4.7). And at the end of the day this is what these people are doing. They are trying to test the Lord to make sure that He is there.

However, conversely, even if people are doing it for the wrong reasons the patients themselves are still sick so why wouldn't G@d heal them? Just to prove a point that He isn't subject to the whims of His people? This doesn't sound like the actions of an all-powerful all-loving Creator to me. At the end of the day I'm not going to rest my faith on any medical research. Not because I don't believe in their methods or what they are trying to do. Rather there are too many unknowns. I do not know the mind of G@d, I do not understand why He acts the way that He does. I do not understand the human body and the way it works. Just because we may be able to prove in this circumstance that G@d did not move in the way people expected or desired Him to does not negate His existence or the effacy of prayer.