Saturday 30 August 2014

My Adventures with God Ch.15 - Revival Begins

Ch 15: Revival Begins

We did a great deal of praying. We had this new personal zeal for God, and we were trying to open every part of our lives to the Holy Spirit.

Sue had run a ladies Bible study in Morwell using a book that was popular then What Happens When Women Pray and saw an opening for one at Kooweerup. A group of women there of all ages seemed keen to grow in their faith. A couple of them were already very mature Christians although they went about their service of God without any fuss and without drawing attention to themselves.

So this group got under-way. Sue was expecting God back up the message about his son Jesus by giving demonstrable answers to prayer. God did.

The ladies would all nominate particular situations – usually family matters – for the group to pray about. One lady asked for prayer that her daughter who was childless might conceive. So the group prayed about this and God answered their prayers: the daughter became pregnant. The woman instead of being overjoyed revealed a further problem. Her daughter – who lived in another state – had indeed been told by doctors that she could not become pregnant because of a medical condition. But that was not the full story. She had also been told that even if she did become pregnant, there was a very high risk that the baby would be deformed. So the ladies prayed about this also.

We underestimate God continually. One salutary story I remember from college days was this: One of our friends, whose husband was in my college year suffered terribly from Crones disease. Praying one day, God said to her: “If you ask me I will heal you of the Crones.” She replied: “but even if you do – the steroids I take for the Crones are masking … (I can't remember the name of the additional condition).” To which God replied: “Naturally I would heal that too!” She was healed. She stopped taking the steroids and there was no sign of the other condition surfacing. God healed completely just as he had said!

So Sue's Koo-wee-rup ladies prayed for the next problem. In due course a healthy baby was born to the daughter.

This and other answers to their prayers did much to build the faith of these ladies. There is, however a sad ending to this particular miracle. You recall how Jesus found when he was on earth that even when people saw the miraculous signs which were God's way of confirming that Jesus was indeed his beloved Son, not all believed. You remember in the Ten Lepers story – all were healed – only one came back to thank Jesus! So even now, even when God does do miracles to confirm the message that Jesus is risen from the dead and is Lord of all, not all believe. Some proudly turn away from him.

In this case although the faith most of this group of ladies was strengthened by God's answers to their prayers, not all believed. The lady who had asked them to pray for her daughter – even though what God did was medically beyond reasonable hope, put it down to “coincidence”. After all God did, she chose to close her heart against Jesus. Naturally having made her choice she gradually drifted away from the group who were devoting themselves to the teaching about Jesus and growing in their relationship with him through his Holy Spirit..

Exciting things started to happen in Lang Lang too.

One day a lady telephoned me to say that her father had just died and she wanted to make funeral arrangements. This is unusual for people outside the immediate congregation. The fact is that generally the first a minister hears about a bereavement is from the undertaker – who has already seen the family and made the arrangements. In country towns with a good local undertaker this does have an up-side. Our local undertaker always gave me a sort of “situation report”. What state the family was in. Who was related to or having a feud with who. The family's attitude to religion, and so forth. Going to see a previously unknown family in a state of grief was much easier with this sort of preparation!

So when Rosalie rang I talked a bit on the 'phone and made an appointment to call on her. We organised the funeral service and I talked conversationally about the things God had done in Sue's and my life. The funeral came and went. A few days later Rosalie knocked on my door and said: “I've decided to become a Christian – what do I do next.”

God had just given us our (well no, not 'ours' … his) first convert from outside the church. I didn't know what to do!

Asking her to come to church was an obvious “No!” With one exception she was about half the age of the youngest of the congregation. Also spiritual and welcoming temperature of the church was still sub-zero. What Sue and I hit on was to ask to her hang out with us and learn apprentice style.

She hung out, so to speak, talked with Sue and me about Christian things, saw how we lived our lives as Jesus' followers, and how we dealt with the problems of everyday family life.

This developed into a way of growing baby Christians.

You recall how Jesus told Nicodemus “You must be born again!” It seemed to us that as people decided to put their faith in Jesus as their Saviour and to commit to obey him as Lord they were the spiritual equivalent of new-born babies. They needed what babies need: Food. Warmth. Protection. Socialisation.

In new Testament times the local Christian congregation provided these – plus apostles like Paul protecting and nurturing a whole number of congregations and their ministers.

At Lang Lang this was not the case. Sending a new Christian to church would have been like throwing a newborn out into a blizzard! God helped us find ways around this problem! When, in the mercy of God we see revival in this country this will likely be a widespread problem, so in coming posts I will further describe the solutions which we found worked.


Excursus on my grief at the present state of churches

The reason I believe the poor spiritual state of congregations will be a problem when revival comes is this:

It is a plain fact of history that “the church” became corrupted in the decades after Jesus died and rose from the dead just as in the Old Testament times its equivalent did.

There is this constant refrain running through the Old Testament to this effect: “the priests are only in it for what they can get out of it, the official prophets are making it all up so they can stay in a job and when God sends real prophets they kill them!” Ultimately when God sends his own beloved Son, it is the religious establishment who oppose him and demand his death!

Church history paints a bleak picture of organised religion.

By the grace of God the light of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus was indeed handed on from generation to generation down to us, but at many times the light burned very dimly!

During my own lifetime the size of congregations of mainline churches in Australia (and many other western countries) has dwindled. As a proportion of the population the number of regular church attenders has plummeted! These are facts no one seriously disputes.

The “why” is a matter of debate. The conclusion I am now coming to believe is this: Every generation needs its own revival and reformation. I am of what they call the post WWII “baby-boomer” generation and just too young to remember the Billy Graham revival that swept the English speaking world. Our generation has resisted revival. We have let the fire of faith burn down to embers.

My theory is that even among religious professionals – priests, bishops, theologians and the like there has been a loss of belief in the reality of God, the power of Jesus to save, the moral right of Jesus to command our obedience, and the reality of everlasting judgement: that some will rise to eternal life; others will rise to hear their doom.

This loss of vision of God's reality has left a spiritual vacuum. Consciously or unconsciously we Christians, “the Church” have looked for something other than God to fill this vacuum.

I have recently been re-reading Exodus. While Moses is up on the mountain talking to God the people of Israel lost their vision of God's reality amazingly fast. Within weeks they said to Aaron: “We don't know what has happened to this fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt; make some gods for us...” So Aaron makes a golden calf and announces: “Here are your gods that led you out of Egypt”

So my generation lost its vision of the reality of God and looked for some convenient “golden calves” to fill its place.

We have worshipped every “...ism” that came along. My former denomination, the “Uniting Church” took up socialism, pacifism and aboriginal rights-ism. The Anglican church that I am now part of was slower to fall away by a couple of decades. However it followed a similar course and added feminism, multiculturalism and environmentalism climatechange-ism and assylum-seeker-rights-ism to the list of things it has become passionate about instead of the one true God.

Today political activism has replaced proclamation of salvation and new life in Christ.

One way and another, the problem of churches being so dysfunctional that they would either turn away or kill the faith of any new believer who joined them is still with us. Hopefully the solutions we found at Lang Lang may help in the future.



Next Post: Schools and Miracles


Tuesday 26 August 2014

Morals Blogs: Capital Punishment: Let the Punishment fit the Crime

Let the Punishment fit the Crime

The Greentree brothers, from one of whom I am descended, came to Australia in the early 1800's. They were at the time just teenagers. Arrested I their native England for stealing a sheep they had originally been sentenced to hang. On the day of their execution the sentence was, because of their extreme youth, commuted to “transportation for life” to Australia. Here like so many convicts they were initially slaves in the new colony but once freed became model citizens. I suspect that ironically the life chances for a convict sent to the new colonies was often much better than they faced free in England at that time.

The Greentree brothers, as it turned out, were fortunate. However many went to the gallows for crimes which would attract only a short custodial sentence today and many more were flogged mercilessly for petty offences.

It is easy to dismiss the past with comments such as “those were brutal times” and the like. Easy but wrong. Those who made and administered those draconian laws were human beings just like us.

Those in, for instance, England were at that time professing Christians who had every opportunity to study and apply the Bible to their situation. Bible reading their native language was mandatory in church – which most attended – and by all accounts daily Bible reading was common in the home. In fact since many educated people read ancient Greek, and some Hebrew as well they were possibly in a better position than most in our day to study the scriptures in their original languages.

Yet for all that they had laws, and particularly use or abuse of capital punishment which we now condemn and look at with moral disgust.
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So If we enjoy less brutal times it is only because enlightened people have laboured to make it so. Like all the freedoms we enjoy it has been hard won and could easily be lost. If things we now abhor happened in a society which claimed to be Christian and studied the scriptures, what is to stop our society – particularly if all pretence at a Biblical underpinning for morals is swept aside – becoming even worse.

I have already pointed out the merciless persecution in social media of people who transgress the new “political correctness”. It is a very slippery slope from this to the witch hunt and the lynch mob. We humans are, as the old Prayer Book used to remind us “miserable sinners”. Truth, justice and above all mercy are very fragile virtues which need to be zealously protected and nurtured.

I have in these blogs built a case for re-introducing capital punishment. Some crimes are indeed so vile and so great that for the reasons deduced from the Bible a society should  execute the criminal. However the dangers of capital punishment being abused must not be underrated. In this final post on capital punishment the danger I raise is of society killing people whose crime does not warrant this extreme punishment. Be sure the punishment fits the crime and forget not mercy!



Thursday 21 August 2014

My Adventures with God Ch.14

Lang Lang

February 1981. There is a heatwave and even at 8pm in the brick church which has been soaking up the sun all day it is an oppressively hot. The Bishop and diocesan dignitaries duly arrive, the church fills with both the regular parishioners and the curious, the ceremonies begin and I am inducted as “priest-in –charge” of the parish of Lang Lang.

“Priest-in-charge” is a probationary situation normally for two years in a priest's first post.

Jump forward nine years. It is our farewell from the parish. Doug Hodgson, a parishioner and one of the most senior Freemasons in the state is giving one of the speeches. He says “David and Sue were all on fire for the Lord when they came to us, but we soon knocked that out of them!” .

He was not quite correct, they did not knock the fire for God out of us, but that was certainly not for lack of trying!

In the first eighteen months or so we trebled the size of the church. Then it all collapsed. We spent some years recovering personally and working out why it all went wrong. Then we started to rebuild something more stable.

I will go through what we did and the lessons we learned in some detail because it has great instructional value for any one who wants (under God) to see their church grow spectacularly.

If we had left after 18 months we would have looked like “super-ministers” and the inevitable explosion would have looked like the fault of the unfortunate who followed us.

Had we moved on after the initial success might have repeated our success and mistakes in parish after parish and we would have learnt nothing. As I suspect some “successful” career clergy do, and don't respectively. But God protected us from that particular pitfall - we had to live through the explosion, pick ourselves up off the floor, work out what went wrong, the pick up the pieces and rebuild. It nearly killed us. But now we actually know something about church revival.

The church we left behind after those nine years was stable, full of spiritual vitality and financially viable.

Before we left, as an exercise I sat down one day and wrote from memory the names of people who regularly received ministry. I counted 413 people.

When we left the age distribution of the people in the church mirrored the age distribution in the surrounding community.

In the years after we left much of what we had rebuilt, particularly the ministry to young people was dismantled. Other parts of the ministry we had painstakingly rebuilt were allowed to die from neglect. Both of these, I fear, the result of deliberate choices made by those in power in the diocese who had no passion for Christ. They were not interested in saving souls and certainly not interested in 'the un-churched' and especially not interested in reaching young people who had grown up outside the influence of the church.

This meteoric rise, crash then painful recovery is the exciting tale that will occupy the next series of blog posts.

To set the scene: what did we find when we arrived in Lang Lang.

St. John’s Lang Lang, a very pretty brick church with beside it a small but delightfully “Arts and Crafts” brick house, all on an acre of land in the township. There were generally about 12 people at church. All old. There was an active “Ladies Guild” The current president had patiently waited her turn for the previous president to die. They worked very hard to raise enough to pay their share of running the parish. There was no Sunday School, no youth groups, really parish life began at 70! The town had 703 people so the signboard proudly proclaimed. It was centre for a hinterland of dairy farms. There was a single (sealed) main road lined with shops, and a residential area each side with (then) dirt roads and wide grassy verges. Being a kilometre off the highway meant that Lang Lang was comparatively quiet.

10Km down the main road towards Melbourne then a 1 Km sidetrack brought you to Kooweerup. Once impenetrable swamp, the hinterland had been drained in the early 1900's to reveal very fertile peat-like soil which now supported intensive asparagus and potato farming and rich dairy cattle grazing.

St George’s Kooweerup was a smaller but pretty brick church with a public car park between it and the railway. It was on the end of the shops on the main street. (actually Kooweerup boasted two main streets). The congregation was larger; I think 18 or 20 on a good day. There were families as well. There was a Sunday school. This had been the previous incumbent’s “favourite” church.

The town population was about 1,200, but largely Dutch and Italian so Roman Catholics accounted for 50% of the population.

Kooweerup had the only high school in the district and also a little 15 bed public hospital.

From Kooweerup another 10 Km inland along “Main Drain Road” brought you to the tiny village of Bayles. Really just a collection of houses with a couple of shops, a CFA (fire brigade) shed, and the famous “Bayles fauna park”

Bayles had been an important centre before the little soldier settlement farms of twenty or so cows were agglomerated into viable sized ones. It even had a railway branch line and its own station for taking the fresh milk to the Melbourne market. That of course was long gone. However it was a pleasant village and about 200 people lived there. In more hopeful times a “Sunday School Hall” had been built. When I arrived it was unused except as a venue for combined parish services.

5 Km or so from Bayles along side roads with romantic names like “No. 5 Drain Road” and “No. 3 Drain Road” brought one to a cute little wooden church standing forlornly in a paddock. This was St. Saviours Yallock. There had once been a town there, but it had disappeared. There were fortnightly evening services there which three to ten people attended.

Ministers generally stayed two years – 'though one cut and ran after 9 months and my predecessor stayed 4 years. Then there was a usually a longish vacancy while the parish saved up its pennies to pay the next minister. Churchmanship seemed to vary, with always the previous minister’s being the best in the opinion of the parishioners!

Memories were long. St. John's treasurer Vera Glover told me how she walked into the vestry in the interregnum before I was appointed and saw a relieving minister who had been rector there many years before. She matter-of factly told me: “We hadn’t seen each other in 25 years, but I took up our last argument right where we left off!”

Next Post: Revival begins



Tuesday 19 August 2014

Morals Blogs: Capital Punishment 5: Historic Abuses

Historic Abuses of Capital Punishment

One reason our generation – right around the Western world – has turned against the very idea of capital punishment is the awful historic abuses of it. We are now only just climbing out of some dark days of draconian punishment.

Because of this I wish to emphasis that I am in no way advocating turning the clock back to those dark days!.

I think that the abuses of capital punishment broadly fall into two classes:

1. Condemning the innocent and 2. Punishment that outweighs the crime.

1. Condemning the innocent.

This is a thing which throughout the Bible is said with great emphasis to be both abhorrent to God and totally contrary to his moral nature. He will never condemn the innocent. He will not leave unpunished humans who condemn the innocent. It is, unfortunately a very common sin committed by humans. It is always evil when intentional. It demands reform of our system of justice when it is accidental. Let us quickly survey its various faces:

a) Judicial murder.
This one is near the top of the list for individual scale human evil. When the very system intended to produce justice is perverted to perform murder it is a whole degree of magnitude more evil than straight out murder.

In the Old Testament one classic instance is depicted in the story of Naboth's Vineyard.

Nearly three thousand years ago the king of Israel wanted the family vineyard of a citizen named Naboth for a palace veggie garden. Naboth wouldn't sell. The King's wife, a foreign lady called Jezebel, told her husband that in her culture kings don't take “No” for an answer. She sent a letter under King Ahab's seal to the leaders of Naboth's town. They were ordered to falsely charge Naboth with blasphemy and sedition, fake the necessary evidence, then try, convict and execute him.

God's anger at this abuse of the justice system should scare even the most ruthless tyrant. The prophet Elijah was sent to tell Ahab that (among other things): “Where the dogs licked up Naboth's blood they will lick up yours!” Years later when Ahab's army commanders saw the blood from Ahab's fatal wound being washed from his chariot and dogs licking it up they recall those words, and realise that this is indeed the very place where Naboth was executed. God could hardly have made his feelings any clearer!

Jesus' crucifixion is the great example of a judicial murder in the New Testament and the unequalled instance of human evil.

Throughout history people in authority have resorted to murdering people who got in their way by perverting justice to condemn the innocent. It indeed is a very great evil and we must fight it wherever it rears its ugly head.



b) Mob Hysteria

Another perversion of justice is where mob hysteria rules. It is like, but different to judicial murder.

Classic cases are the infamous witchcraft trials. Mob hysteria fuelled the hunting down, baseless accusation, phony trial and execution of totally innocent people.

We should indeed be revolted by these. But transferring our revulsion on to “capital punishment” is not the right response. It also happens in jurisdictions where there is no capital punishment. True the victims are not executed, but the harm inflicted on them may be almost as great!

My point again is that these historic abuses are indeed great evils. They are wrongly used as popular considerations against capital punishment. They are abuses – deal with them as such.

c) Failure of Due Process

In the Old Testament the rule was laid down “do not convict anyone on the evidence of only one witness.” and as a strong deterrent to false witnesses: “anyone who gives false testimony in a trial must suffer the punishment that the wrongly accused person would have suffered.”
of Daniel devising a way to show that two scoundrels who accused a woman of adultery were lying. In the story the lying witnesses are then stoned to death and the innocent woman exonerated.

The Old Testament was, even in civil cases, very strong on the ideal of a fair trial. With commands like “Do not side with the mob” : “Do no favour the poor, or toady to the rich in their court case” “Judge fairly and do not accept a bribe”

Outside the Bible, even one Roman Emperor persecuting Christians instructed one of his provincial governors: “Do not entertain an anonymous charge against any person”

In the English judicial tradition there has over many centuries grown up rules of fair trial – often termed “due process”. Things like the presumption of innocence and the right to remain silent are well known. Others like rules of evidence are more of a puzzle to the general public. They have grown over the centuries from practical experience that on the whole they give the best chance of avoiding a wrong verdict.

Together these things add up to a “fair trial”.

In jurisdictions where due process is not guaranteed we rightly feel motivated to oppose capital punishment.

d) Mistakes Happen.

Even where there is a tradition of a fair trial, mistakes happen. Guilty people walk free because they have a good lawyer; sometimes innocent people are wrongly convicted.

One way jurists have tried to balance the need to have a justice system that does function with the need to minimise miscarriages of justice is to change the burden of proof with the harm that would be caused by a wrong verdict.

In popular terms, we don't make a federal case” out of something trivial. In court civil cases are often decided on “the balance of probabilities” while criminal trials require the case to be proved “beyond all reasonable doubt”.

For capital crimes the bar should be set even higher. One Judge Blackwell famously said: “I would rather release ten guilty murderers than hang one innocent man.However, historically, capital cases have not uniformly required a greater degree of certainty than that for imprisonment.

Nothing in human affairs is perfect, nothing is certain. Opponents of capital punishment are quite right to point to the numerous cases where even after a fair trial, an innocent person has been convicted. An innocent person imprisoned can be released, and some compensation for the harm done to them can be made but wrongful executions cannot be remedied in this world.

My conclusion is: when capital punishment is re-introduced it should require strong safeguards against all these abuses. Including for instance a higher standard of certainty even than required in the best jurisdictions at present for 'life' imprisonment.

That this must be achieved is a matter we ordinary citizens can decide.

How this can best be achieved is however a matter for experts in jurisprudence and drafting laws to consider.



Next Post: Does the punishment fit the Crime?


Tuesday 12 August 2014

Morals Blogs: Capital Punishment: Expunging Communal Guilt

Capital Punishment Pt. 4

3. Expunging Communal Guilt

This reason was often described in the Bible as the result of heinous crimes “polluting the land”. However it seems to me best explained in modern terms as something like:“expunging communal guilt”. The point seems to be that dealing with the moral aftermath of serious crimes actually requires repudiation of the crime by the community. In practical terms this generally means that the community must punish the offender.

Consider Numbers 35:33: “Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed except by the blood of the one who shed it.”

Even those who may dispute what I have said above must admit that this text is giving a further reason for executing the murderer. Granted it may be debatable exactly how that applies in our modern society, but it must alert us to dimensions of crimes such as murder with which we are, in our present post-modern reverie, unfamiliar – or to put it bluntly: there is much more to 'crime and punishment' than the anti-punishment lobby understands!

This concept of the community repudiating the actions of a murderer is further explained in Deuteronomy 21. Here what is described is the community's response to an unsolved murder. There is an elaborate ritual in which the community leaders must swear before God (once again an action that us moderns treat with contempt but which ancients who possessed a far greater fear of sacrilege held inviolate) that they did not do it and are not concealing evidence of who did. “They shall declare: 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. … do not hold your people guilty of the blood of an innocent man.' ... So you will purge from yourselves the guilt of shedding innocent blood.”

Certainly there is a recurring theme in the Bible of God punishing an entire nation or society for its sins. This is disturbing to us moderns. Even if we rise to the idea of any punishment for sins, we want to see it as strictly individual. We look with horror at our forebears carrying out “punitive raids” against communities from which individuals had committed atrocities. But what if the truth actually lies somewhere between us and our forebears? What if there is a communal or corporate dimension to evil which we are overlooking?

From my reading of the Bible to date – and the texts cited above are examples – there certainly is a societal dimension. It seems to be tied – particularly in the above texts – to whether or not the community distances itself from the evil done. I am guessing a bit here – but suppose it is like our modern concept of being an “accessory” to a crime. If a person aids and encourages a criminal act then they become an “accessory before the fact” and in most jurisdictions liable to the same punishment as the person who actually committed the crime. Someone who helps cover up the crime becomes an “accessory after the fact” with lesser penalties.

So as a society, if we all collude to create the pretence that something God regards as very evil is not evil, are we not acting together like an accessory before the fact? There was a popular sociology book some decades ago entitled “The Social Construction of Reality”. As I recall its thesis was that a great deal of our “world taken for granted” is actually something generated by our society and instilled during our upbringing. So my extension of that idea is that if as a society we are “soft” on really evil crimes, then we are conspiring to create a false reality. A reality which encourages evil thinking and by that route encourages evil crimes to be committed. (I mean as a separate route or enabling factor from failure of fear of punishment).

In this case the idea of communal guilt is at least plausible. Conversely, reinforcing social practices that discourage evil, could plausibly be termed expunging communal guilt.

I think it is probably “Sociology 1.01” that strong social taboos are only maintained when the communal abhorrence of breaking them is reflected the punishment of any offenders. We easily see that if the worst thing you can do in some “primitive” society is to tear down the town's idol: we don't need two guesses to work out that the locals will kill you if you do!

Significantly, in modern society crimes once seen as truly evil such as rape and murder attract relatively lenient punishment. But 'sins' against social-progressive dogma – such as making homophobic, racist or sexist comments even in jest, are punished via both the new social media and the established media (generally without any opportunity for defence let alone a fair trial) most severely – public humiliation and hounding from society, even loss of employment.

This suggests to me that the movement against capital punishment was just one pincer arm of the movement to destroy traditional morality and replace it with the new and terrible morality of their “brave new world”.

It is certainly “Ethics 1.01” that what a society punishes and to what extent reveals its moral values. Further, the extent to which truly evil deeds can move a society to moral outrage reveals reveals that society's own moral fibre. I will say again that the quote I put in earlier where progressives claim that “No community which executes criminals can be called 'civilised'.” or the punchierversion: “any society which executes evildoers is itself evil” are in fact stating the exact opposite of the true situation.

If there is no crime that can be done which is so terrible, so shocking, so depraved, so evil in a society that the people decree: “for that you die!” then that society has lost moral feeling. And that society is morally an accessory before the fact. That is I think the truth seen both by the Bible and ancient ethicists like Aristotle.


Conclusion: Yes! There is a place for capital punishment. … But as to what that place is … That is quite another thing.



Next post: Historic abuses of capital punishment




Thursday 7 August 2014

My Adventures with God Ch 13

Ch. 13   Bishop Delbridge's Parting Gift

Nearly two years after Bishop Delbridge had invited me to come to his diocese, we were holidaying blissfully in Sydney when we heard the devastating news: “Bishop Delbridge is dead”.

The Bishop had lost one eye to cancer and so always had someone drive him at night. This particular evening he was returning from visiting a parish and his 21 year old daughter was driving. She pulled out to overtake straight into the path of an oncoming car. They were both killed instantly.

We took the news hard. True we had only known him for two years, and his daughter hardly at all. But he was a truly outstanding man of God. I remember one time he rang me at home and started the conversation: “I was just walking to my study, half thinking, half praying – you know how that is – and your name came to mind ...”

At the funeral Archbishop Loane of Sydney diocese came up to me. In his trademark gravelly voice he said just: “You can come back now.” It was very kind – and very prescient. I think he foresaw that under succeeding bishops the little diocese of Gippsland would drift into liberalism and then social-progressivism. I was touched but replied that I thought I should stay with Gippsland Diocese.

In the following months two things happened: Mrs Delbridge offered the bishop's books to the clergy; and I was posted to my first 'solo' parish.

The parish was a little town with the double barrelled name of Lang Lang. Before taking up the post Sue and I and little David Jnr. borrowed a caravan from one of the parishioners at Morwell and had a travelling holiday.

Mrs. Delbridge's kind offer was readily taken up by the clergy as the bishop had an extensive library. Also laid out in the study for any who might want them were some tape recordings of sermons. The ones I picked were from a Charismatic conference Bishop Delbridge had attended in England while he was at Lambeth for the 10 yearly meeting of Anglican bishops from around the world.

So as we drove along on our holiday we listened to these tapes. They were all by David Watson an English Anglican priest. We had never heard of him, but he was a world renowned figure in the Charismatic revival movement. His most notable feat was to take on a city church with so few parishioners that it was slated for closure and transform it into a mega-church.

Some things he said struck a chord with us as being something we had never really done. One was to invite the Holy Spirit into every part and every moment of one's life.

As I recall one analogy was of a householder greeting someone at the door. A familiar Christian image in one sense – from the passage in Revelation where the exalted Christ says: “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if anyone opens the door I will come in and dine with them and they with me.”

David Watson took it further. Many people, he said, have indeed invited Jesus into their lives – but then led him into the special visitors room. There they have enjoyed his company on Sundays and special occasions. That is really, Watson said, not enough. Not nearly enough! Jesus wants to be invited not just into the guest room but everywhere. He has more in mind being invited in. Just as the new owner of a house does. So he wants access to all the rooms – yes even the junk room we would rather not have anyone see! He even wants to be invited to rearrange the furniture, and even knock out a wall here and put a new window in there ...

He went on with this image to say that Jesus would only knock – we had to invite him in. So in the lives of many Christians Jesus just stayed in the guest parlour.

Watson's call to action was: “Will you start inviting him – perhaps into the kitchen-family room where we spent most of our time and enjoy fellowship with him there. Then as the relationship grows invite him into every room, then to take over as the new owner of the house?”

His prediction to those who did was that they would find like many others over the millennia, that they would still get to live in the 'house' – but in an ever so much better house with Jesus as owner-in-residence!

Watson's other call to action was the “every moment of our lives”. Not just on Sunday. Not even just the 10 or 15 minute daily prayer ans Bible study time. Every part every moment of our lives!

After Sue and I listened to this driving along, we talked it over and then prayed (eyes open – I was driving!): “Yes”.

A third strand was his recipe for revival in a church. Speaking to clergy who wanted to see revival he said this: “Draw a circle on the ground. Stand inside the circle. Now pray: 'Lord send revival in this circle'!”

Sue and I decided we would do this too. We would ask the Holy Spirit to come into every 'room' of our lives. We would try to live every moment of every day with Jesus as our companion and lord. Starting ministry in our first parish we asked God to revive his life in us and then use us to revive the parish.

We did not anticipate just how dramatically God would answer those prayers.




Tuesday 5 August 2014

Morals Blogs: Capital Punishment: Deterrence

Capital Punishment Pt. 3

2. Deterrence

At the mere mention of capital punishment as 'deterrence' a swag of intellectuals and their acolytes will sagely nod their heads and chime: “But we all know that deterrence doesn't work!.” Do we know this? We know it is loudly claimed by social progressives. But do we know it is true? I think not. However that is a debate I will in main leave to others.

In this blog I am looking, like Kant, more at a metaphysics of the groundwork of morals.

So far I have established that the only valid foundation for moral theory is God's moral character. As to insight into God's character: I have established that the Bible is the best thing we have going for us.

For turning insight into answers to modern problems:

a) I have rejected the fraught method of debate called “proof text”-ing. This is a method whereby opponents who are usually equally flawed specimens of humanity scour the Bible to find convenient verses which seem to support their case. They have already decided that their case is “right” with little or no reference to God's moral character. And they hurl these texts like javelins at each other to try to score points.

b) In its place I suggest that we need all the resources of the “expert in the field” - be it jurisprudence, medicine, business or whatever field of human endeavour we have under the microscope, combined with the workings of a fully formed moral character. Such a character, or conscience, can only be formed by long exposure to and habitual shaping into the character of God as revealed in the person of Christ and the record of the Bible. In old fashioned words: a god-fearing person.

My search in this post is simply this: Does the Bible have anything to say about “deterrence” as a reason for capital punishment.

I found the answer in some passages dealing with ancient Israel. Their situation was different to ours, and so the prescription God gave for them does not apply to us. That is important to remember! However the reasons given do have a life of their own.

The book of Deuteronomy is set as Moses' farewell speech. Part of it deals with the very real danger to the life of their theocratic nation of turning away from God to the pagan religions of the land they are to enter.

In 13:1ff the case of the false prophet is dealt with. Verse 5 instructs: “that prophet or dreamer must be put to death … You must purge the evil from among you”

In 13:6 ff the issue of loved ones suggesting worshipping other gods is raised. “If your very own brother or your son or daughter or the wife you love or your closest friend entices you saying 'let us go and worship other gods' … Show him no pity, do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. … Then all Israel will hear and be afraid, and no one among you will do such an evil thing again.”


Again in Chapter 21 a command to execute a class of criminal is backed up by the reason (v.21) “You must purge this evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.”

No, these prescriptions do not apply to us, but, and this is the point I am making: clearly God is saying that one valid reason for capital punishment is its deterrence value.

My conclusion is that where a crime is so evil and depraved that all people cannot help but say: “such a thing must not happen in our land!” then one reason for making it a capital crime is that it will deter others from committing it.


Next post: Purging communal guilt