My Adventures with God - Breaking into Church * Breaking out of Church

Chapter 24

At Lang Lang we had a flourishing Sunday School, a teenage Bible Study, and a large body of new converts. Actually many of the new converts had been fed into other denominations for a profound reason. Women who became Christians naturally wanted their husbands to find the joy they had found in Christ. So where their husband was Roman Catholic or Uniting Church they started going to that church in the hope that it would be easier for him to participate. It struck me then, and still does, as a very Christ-like attitude and so these women had our support and blessing in doing this. Interestingly God used this pool of Christians who had been converted through our ministry but who were now in other churches to help us greatly later on, but that is a story for later!

There still remained a large body of new believers who saw themselves as “Anglicans” who could not get past the “gatekeepers” to come to church.

So we, after much prayer of course, resorted to busting the blockade by force. Not every Sunday. Just on occasions.

The Sunday School kids wanted a means of showing their parents what Christianity meant to them. We had our own youth concert band so music was no problem. So for special occasions we put on “Family Service” with a difference. Not family service to entice young people along but family service for the young people to bring their non-churchgoing parents to!

When a normal Sunday congregation was 12 to 18 souls and an extra hundred people turned up – with Sunday School kids backed by social clout in the form of of Inez and Sue manning the door, the gatekeepers were totally powerless. They were reduced to retreating to the vestry and taking out their frustrations on me!

Jan, the chief gatekeeper threatened that if the Sunday School came to church once more she was leaving and going to the Anglican church in the next town. That was actually threatening to put us out of business since my salary was paid by the money they raised through the “Ladies Guild” and its fund-raising efforts. However on the other side it proved to be an idle threat. They did not do it.

On reflection part of the reason for this was also the reason she was so angry at new people not of her choosing coming into the church – it threatened her identity which was inextricably bound up with her status and roles in the church. Conversely she had waited decades for her turn at Guild President and Church Warden, and was not likely to give that up to go to another parish where she would start at the bottom of the guild hierarchy. (to be fair she was an extremely capable guild president, and chaired a meeting with an efficiency that most bureaucrats could have learned much from!)

While their hostility was very real and given vent, they did not act on it. And I don't think they did even carry out their threats to “go to the Bishop” at that stage. It is interesting that although they did bad things in opposing people being converted and added to the church, they were not bad people and they were in their own way indispensable. More of this – and especially the role of identity issues in church conflict later.

These family services were a thundering success, with an instrumental band (although usually not the full compliment) and so many voices it also was that volume-wise.

As I said these were different to most church's family service at that time. The conventional wisdom was that to entice children and young people to church you had to do a “Sesame Street” version of church. Our young people were already believers, but had no exposure to church services, so “church lite” or full liturgy were equally foreign to them. Their parents on the other hand often had some past exposure to church so expected a church service to be recognisable as such.

So while we had drums, trumpets, flutes, saxophones, clarinets and so on, we sang the old hymns as well as some of Rosalie's songs. My favourite was “Onward Christian Soldiers” to fife (flute in our case) and drum. But all the old favourites came alive to being played and sung with feeling.

Kids did the readings and prayers, and often presented prepared items, but we left the basic liturgy more or less intact.

The fear of new people coming to church was not just at Lang Lang.

Our other main church in this parish was at Koo-wee-rup. In many ways they were as a congregation much more advanced in the Faith than the congregation was at Lang Lang. However there were still serious problems. Some will come out in the next few blogs, one I will tell here.

This tale comes from a parish council meeting – which had six delegates each from Lang Lang, Koo-wee-rup and two from Balyes. I had for some time been trying to enthuse the parish council members with my ideas for evangelism and some of the “flavour-of-the-month” ideas of church growth which I gleaned from books and attending church growth conferences. Always to no avail. This time I wanted to start a ministry in the local high school. Ross and I presented our ideas but there was general opposition.

Then one man from Koo-wee-rup put their opposition in a nutshell: he burst out “But if you go into the High School, kids might want to come to our church!” His look of shock and horror was mirrored in many faces around the room.

None the less, Ross and I went ahead and started a Christian group in the high school. Week by week we went and met with kids who came to find out about Christianity. Some of them went on to attend the Bayles Fellowship meetings of a Sunday night.

At Bayles we tried the opposite approach – we broke out of the church mould!

As an Anglican priest I had taken vows to only use the approved liturgy in church. I know many priests did then and do now break those vows with impunity, and at that time I had certainly stretched them, but break them completely I would not

I truly think my fellow clergy who continue to throw out the baby with the bathwater by throwing off the principles enshrined in their liturgy and centuries of Christian experience should re-consider their behaviour. God was really severe in Old Testament times when Israelite leaders took oaths of obedience – even when it was to foreign pagan kings – and then broke their oath. We have taken an oath to use an approved liturgy. We cannot break that oath and pretend we are doing it for God!

However at Bayles we had only a Sunday School hall, not an actual church. So there I felt I could honestly hold services without using the Anglican liturgy. Actually I now think that even if my reasoning was correct – which in hindsight I confess is a bit doubtful – abandoning the liturgy was in practice a big mistake. But more of that later.

So our young people's Bible study which met at Ross and Robyn's house started to put on youth services in this Bayles Sunday School Hall.

We started out as a crispy evangelical youth service. The dozen young people from the Bible study were the nucleus of the new service. I think it was a “one-off” and when that went well a regular monthly event, then as it grew, fortnightly, and eventually every Sunday night. Over time it became progressively more Pentecostal. That was not itself a problem, but in time the church gained some fame, then people who were already pentecostal started coming to it and they brought their own baggage with them. That did become a big problem!

For now I will just sketch Bayles Fellowship at its height. It was a “Charismatic” style service – but naively Charismatic blended with with Evangelical passion for Biblical faithfulness and exposition.

It was a “team ministry” with members exercising their particular gifts. I preached. Ross led the worship. We had a music team – besides Ross on guitar - generally of drums, the two Johns on trumpets (they did some amazing improvisations ), Flute and clarinet, and sometimes saxophone. We had prayer support, and the whole team met beforehand to spend time together in prayer.

When I say it was naively Charismatic I mean in the good sense of “innocent”. We didn't try to act Charismatic – it just happened! When Ross was leading worship he would sometimes go off into a song we had never heard before – sometimes in English, sometimes in a strange tongue. When we had congregational praying in tongues it was not artificially set up – as I have seen in many places – it just happened. And most importantly it did not happen on a regular basis. To me that suggests it really was from the Holy Spirit as opposed to the humanly contrived version which I have seen in other places. As I will relate later, when Bayles became “known” among Charismatics, people came who were not content with that: they wanted their spiritual “fix” every week! That was of course the beginning of the end both of Bayles' innocence and eventually of its existence.

At is best Bayles was filled with excitement so that people who came came back and brought their friends.

We also broke out in many other ways – to reach as many people as possible.

We ran evangelistic outreach meetings – which I know is pretty standard for churches. But my point is that we did not neglect the tried and true methods. We had family BBQ's – again standard church practice. We tried to reach every part of the social spectrum. For instance Inez donated a really sweet little pipe organ to the Lang Lang church about this time. Yes I know that the conventional wisdom at that time was for churches that wanted growth to turn their backs on pipe organs in favour of music groups – which often only consisted of acoustic guitars. But my advice here is: “Don't be so enamoured of novelties that you neglect the traditional” We could beat most churches I've seen when it came to music groups – we had not just acoustic guitar – everything from solo trumpet or clarinet (which can be very effective) up to a full concert band, and every combination in between. But God, through Inez gave us a beautiful little pipe organ, and God used it to incredible effect (that is mostly a story for later).

However the organ provided two immediate benefits.

Our regular church organist was a mighty saint of God – but also a very frail old lady. (OK another story for later). She had struggled back from a serious stroke to provide music for the Sunday services. We then had a pedal-powered harmonium and the effort of playing it took a heavy toll on her. The new little pipe organ was naturally powered by an electric blower, then organ builder put in an extra feature with her in mind. It had some clever circuitry between the keyboard and the solenoids that fed air to the pipes. Flick a switch and Florence our organist could play with her good right hand and the one good finger of her clawed left hand and the organ played the appropriate pedal pipes by itself! (Naturally Jan and her fellow controllers had opposed the new organ and the diocesan hierarchy had sent someone to try to talk Inez out of donating it – but Inez believed God had told her that this was his way of collecting all the offerings she had not paid over the years.)

The organ and the contacts we had made with classical musicians while it was being built let us do some “highbrow” outreach. We had organ recitals and even hosted visiting opera singers - all to a packed church. It was all great fun and great team building. A number of men who frequented the pub came to each occasion – some because they actually liked classical music, others so that they could help out with things – even down to helping wash dishes.

Next post: The Devil Strikes Back

Morals Blog: Truth , Lies & Nietzsche

I may be crediting Nietzsche with too much.

Back in 1990 I was taking a sabbatical studying philosophy. One moral philosopher’s criticism of his contemporaries stuck: “They claim to be 'Fearless Moral Thinkers' challenging the old morality – but they are really only men of their time spouting the mores of their own social group” Nietzsche's philosophy may not be the cause – his notions may be just a co-effect of more widespread human foibles! This would be ironic justice since he famously rejected scientific tools such as 'cause & effect'!

So although Nietzsche has been hailed as a source of inspiration by such mutually incompatible groups as Fascists, Nazi's, Anarchists and Zionists it may just be that they resonate with some of his ramblings. And although some modern philosophies have popularized his ideas, the same perverse ideas may also spring quite independently into human minds.

With that caution, I will look at two modern problems under quotations from Nietzsche.

1. “There are no facts, only interpretations” (Nietzsche)

a) Climate change is a contentious issue. Lets not go there! However the debate has raised this concern about modern scientific method: Truth as paramount over ideology.

Novelists – and I think C. P. Snow wrote a classic novel on this – have depicted the primacy of truth in scientific research. The researcher who discovers a fact that contradicts the findings they are about to publish as the culmination of years of research is tempted to bury this fact. The one who succumbs to this very real temptation is – at least in fiction! - found out, pilloried and driven from the scientific community as one who has betrayed the very essence of scientific method.

Sadly the climate debate is replete with revelations of scientists who have done just this but still hold their heads up high – and hold their positions. They justify themselves, and are justified by other scientists on the grounds that the end of “saving the world” justifies the means – falsifying their results.

Recently in Australia a newspaper took our government Bureau of Meteorology to task for this. Apparently they had been caught out changing historic temperature records. Their mantra was: We believe there has been continuous temperature rise over recorded history, so old records of high temperatures must be wrong. In one instance the highest recorded temperature on record at one recording station was simply deleted on the grounds that it occurred on a Sunday, and records were not generally taken on Sundays. The son of the postmaster who manned that station reported via the newspaper: “Yes it was a Sunday but it was a heatwave and so my father went in and checked the temperature and recorded it.”

I am not here arguing either side of the debate. I am saying that fully considering the facts not just even if but especially when they contradict our theory is of the essence of scientific method. If we lose that we are in danger of losing “science” as the tool for human advancement it has been in the past few centuries.

b) I passed a sign in the window of a Naturopath's shop-front: “We practice evidence based medicine”. “No,” I thought, “you really don't” The rise in popularity of these so called “alternative” or even more misleading “complementary” therapies shows how tenuous is our hold on real science. OK I have a reason for bias, my wife is a real doctor, but I am still right!

Many medical doctors are hopeless as “spin-doctors” so their patients go away unconvinced of their treatments or with unresolved issues. That is most unfortunate. But they are still using scientific methods of treatment.

Pharmaceutical companies possibly do many of the things they are accused of. But they still do scientific trials (and we are rightly outraged if they fake their results or hide bad side effects!). They sell some of the same compounds as “alternative practitioners” - but – and this is a huge BUT – the pharmaceutical companies get rid of potentially harmful impurities and produce doses of a known and consistent strength. OK (once again) my late father was a pharmacist – does that make me biased? - maybe – but I remember him saying how much safer it was when instead of using medicinal herbs of unknown potency he could get the active ingredient purified and in standardized doses from the drug companies.

Just remember that in many of the parts of the world where “natural remedies” were all they had people died like flies until Western scientific medicine came to their rescue. Don't let's throw that away!

Losing scientific method and scientific thinking puts us on the road to a new and terrible dark age!

2. “Truths are illusions about which we have forgotten that that is what they are” (Nietzsche)

Years ago listening to a radio program I heard the late Baroness Thatcher – then Prime Minister of Britain – make comment that has stuck with me. I can't remember her exact words – which is a pity since she undoubtedly said it better than I can – the gist was this: When she was Minister for Education she had to deal with a Communist dominated teachers union. She came to realize that they, and Communists in general were blatant liars. They had no respect for any sort of objective truth: If a statement would suit their current purpose then that alone made it “The Truth”.

Communism is in a bad way around the world but in the West, Progressive Socialism, or “Progressives” are in the ascendant. The Communist's attitude to truth is part and parcel of Progressive ideology

However this is not a blog on politics. I have introduced progressives because they are proliferating and they have  the Communists' idea of truth: there is but one criterion: if a statement serves their cause then it is thereby “The Truth” conversely if it hinders their cause it is thereby a “Lie”.

I suspect that the common link here, and indeed a link with tyrants and dictators around the world is that they want to control people. Communists, tyrants, and sadly so called “progressives” in the free world want to control people. They are not necessarily averse to using force to control people – yet they use lies if they can by preference.

Lies become internalized and make the subject doubly subjugated: they obey their masters and also believe it is just that they obey their masters. Take a simple example lie: “you're just a girl, you can't do anything” if women accept that lie they are not only made second class citizens, but they come to believe it is right that they are treated as second class citizens. Becoming free involves first throwing off the lie and holding the truth: “A woman can … “

Progressives may be more subtle but their agenda is the same – to reduce the populace (apart from themselves who alone know what is best for everyone) to servile obedience. Lies and propaganda serve that purpose admirably.

Jesus said “the Truth will set you free”. He was of course talking about himself and the freedom he promised was from sin and death. However truth is a marvelous thing and it is also the case that in a more general sense knowing the truth rather than being befuddled by lies is a really good start.

So firstly, no matter how expedient it may seem to lie, we must ourselves tell the real objective truth.

Then we must reject the lies of those who want to use them to control us. We must search for the truth and not accept their clever lies – remembering the old adage that the most effective lie is the one that is true except at the vital point. I think the term is “a shaft of truth with an arrowhead of a lie”. Finding the lie in the propaganda may not be easy.

We must accept that truth may cost us. Pilate asked Jesus “What is truth”. Jesus answered, not in words but in deeds – suffering and dying (and rising from the dead) to save the human race. Truth can be a costly affair, but it is worth it.

When lies are being used as the method of choice to control people, exposing those lies may cause the propagandists to use the next method of control: force. Force may hurt, but at least when they have to use force we are only singly subjugated rather than the double subjugation of believing their lies. And that is a step towards freedom.

My Adventures with God Ch. 23

Ch 23 “Caring Christians”

With such an increase in people Sue and I could not keep up with trying to look after or mentor everyone. The downside of the “bring them up like you do babies” approach was that it takes huge amounts of time and personal contact, so it broke down when there were lots of new converts.

Some were able to go to church. For instance Inez as doctor’s wife with 20 years of community service and leadership in the town, could walk into church with impunity. But as I explained in an earlier post, the self appointed "gatekeepers" in the church made it impossible for most of the new converts to go to church.

The Sunday school was also functioning as a nurturing ground for women who came along as helpers, as was the band mothers ‘committee’.

But there were still gaps. “Caring Christians” was really a motto for what we were all trying to become, but we also used it as a name for one method God used to get his new spiritual babies looked after.

In some ways this method was reminiscent of olden day families of a dozen or so children where the older children 'mothered' the younger ones. In these “Caring Christians” solutions, it was very much new believers looking after other new believers. It was mutual helping. First it might be a slightly more advanced believer helping a newer one through a rough patch; but a bit later it might be the newer one returning the favor and helping the other through their next rough patch.

For the women. Rosalie led the way here organizing the newly converted women to look after each other. The ethos was “you’re down this time so I’m helping you, but were all on this journey together, next time it may be me down and you helping me.” I cannot give a lot of detail because I was not closely involved, I only heard the sort of things they were doing. But together these women struggled with adversity, in a situation where things like abusive husbands were common. They struggled to live a new life in Christ when they often had little more than childhood memories of Christianity to go on and many years apart from God but under the influence of their 'old life' and habits which they were now trying to undo. They failed often, but they had Christ, and they were there for each other.

They could also do things I could not. I tried calling on one woman whose kids belonged to our Sunday School. She had announced she was leaving her husband to go off with another man only to find that her in-laws (who were also parishioners) said “We're not taking your kids!” and her boyfriend said “I don't want your kids coming too!”. So she returned home – obviously feeling publicly humiliated as the whole town knew the story. She would never answer the door to me. One of the  “caring Christians” girls went. She knocked and, like me, got no answer. But she just went ‘round the back and shouted out “Open the door you silly bitch, I know you’re in there.” The door was opened.

That domestic tragedy had a good ending. She got her act together. She had in the past acted very superior which had alienated people. She swallowed her pride to go about the town in public. The townsfolk admired her courage and she actually went up in their estimation. It was remembered and discussed that her husband had had an affair a bit earlier. Finally she and her husband were reconciled.

Then there were the men. One was Ian. He was a long time church attender who grew tremendously in his faith during this time. No, I don’t suppose he had ever heard of “the 4 spiritual laws” I know he would never have expressed his faith in any of the formulae that slick evangelists are so fond of. But he knew “Whose he was and Whom he served”! With Ian we set up a practical branch of “Caring Christians”.

This was a dairy farming area. For a dairy farmer on his own, sickness was unthinkable – the cows had to be milked! (I remember burying one old man who finished the morning milking despite his heart pains and then crawled back to the house to die.) But the unthinkable sometimes happened. Ian as a retired farmer made himself available and several times I recall did the milking for days on end for some sick farmer who had no one else to turn to.

John, Rosalie’s husband did his bit.

I talked to John many times, he was all for Jesus “except”. Lots of people have there “except”. As an alcoholic, John’s was drink. If accepting Jesus as his Lord meant that along the line he was going to have to hand over his drinking habit, then it was “No thanks”.

At least John was honest about his “except” some people spend their lives fooling others and themselves that they are real Christians when all the time they have never surrendered the “except” part of their life to God. John's honesty paid off. True he continued as an alcoholic, and died a few years back far too young from alcoholic liver failure, But shortly before he died, God gave John's daughter Kylie, who is a devout Christian the pleasure of praying with him as he unreservedly gave his life to God and claimed Jesus as his Lord and Savior.

None the less back in the early 1980's John did some amazing things. He talked about God so much at the pub that he was nicknamed “the reverend”. He invited other men to sit around in his barn (drinking beer) to listen to me talk about Christianity.

When bush fires swept through the nearby Dandenong Ranges with considerable loss of life and destruction of houses, we were asked if we could fence in an area that was to be used as a child minding center in the disaster zone, because some of the people were so traumatized that they did not want to leave the area. It was John who picked me up in his battered old purple ute, collected fencing materials at his own expense, rounded up some mates and together we went and built the fence. (the downside of getting workers out of the pub is that none were sober, the fence they built wasn’t straight: but it served its purpose.)

Another anecdote about John helping the work was this. He was a good looking chap, and one of the barmaids made up to him telling him how bad things were for her at home. John replied: “Love you don’t want me. You want my wife; she’s one of these born again Christians.” And he took her home to meet Rosalie. (Yes, the barmaid became one of the Caring Christians too.)

John also helped solve a riddle with our R.E, classes in the local State School. Rosalie told him about the problems we were having with difficult kids. As Rosalie named child after child who were causing problems in class John was filling in the other side of the puzzle. He might say: “Oh yes his dad is a regular drinker down at the pub. and he beats his wife.” or “Their marriage is on the rocks” and so on.

What became clear was that were we not dealing with “problem kids” we were seeing the result of “problem families”

There were three lines of attack on this problem. John was working on the men – though with limited success because they were generally the cause of the problem and so resistant to change. Rosalie's “Caring Christians” new converts were doing what they could for the women – many of whom became Christians in the process but of course could never attend church. The third was to enlist reinforcements.

The girl who worked in the local milk bar had been converted, and was doing her bit with the kids who hung out there after school. The doctor's young receptionist had also been converted. Both of these took time off work to help with the R.E. Lessons. They and Rosalie would pray and also sit with disturbed kids while I was doing my talk, and help Rosalie during the singing. It made an incredible difference.

There were other people doing great things to, and I can only apologise to them that I cannot remember the details of what they were doing well enough to relate them here. But though my memory of what they did has failed, I say to them: remember what the Bible says: “Your labour in the Lord is not in vain” and God is the one who said “I will repay”.

Truth Telling & Multiculturalism

We have been assuming that moralists who may debate our conclusions at least start from an afterglow of Judeo-Christian ethics where lying (however defined) is bad and truth telling is good.

Now lets step into the real world! Our Western culture is increasingly being invaded by other world views. In some of these views truth telling is not valued, and lying is considered normal, even admirable .

In this post and the next I will talk about two of these invading influences. Multiculturalism today and the trickle-down effect of Nietzsche next time.

Multiculturalism has been the buzz-word in Australia for the last few decades. Now we are facing some serious unintended consequences.

1. “Multiculturalism” involved lies

Fault on both sides. On our side we have acted like over indulgent parents who never correct or discipline their children. The children grow up spoilt brats.

Our programs of “Multiculturalism” did not tell the truth. Not all the truth. We promoted acceptance and tolerance – which was good. We applauded diversity in minor cultural traits – dress codes, food and so forth – which was good. BUT we failed to say: “We have written and unwritten codes of conduct, and we have expectations of loyalty to your adopted nation – and these are not negotiable!” …. in short we lied to them!

We should have acted like good parents: our message should have been: “You are one of us now – and this is how we behave!” and enforced our social and moral values from the start.

On the other side some migrant groups have fully acted out the part of spoilt children. You might say they have lied to themselves, denying the inevitable social consequences of their behaviour.

The Bible says of us and God: “Or do you think lightly of his wealth of kindness, tolerance and patience, without recognizing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to a change of heart...” (Romans 2:4 NEB translation). Some communities of immigrants have – to their shame – failed to recognize that the wealth of tolerance and goodwill they have been shown was meant to win them over to the “Australian” way of behaving. The Moslem community and the recent outbreak of Islamist terror threats is a good example. Rather than Muslims being the most zealous to weed out terrorists from their midst, they complain publicly of discrimination whenever the police arrest a terror suspect or raid properties and seize weapons and terrorist propaganda.

I have no wish to see discrimination, let alone persecution anywhere! I am like a doctor trying to convince a diabetic patient that if they don't change their diet they will die. The doctor doesn't want the patient to die – I don't want racism to rear its ugly head. But I know human nature and I have been to countries where there is racial strife.

The text from Romans 2 continues “In the rigid obstinacy of your heart you are laying up for yourself a store of retribution for the day of retribution...” Like it not not, we do reap what we sow! We have been silly about multiculturalism and it is going to bite us. Moslem communities (for example) are acting like spoilt children and it will come back to bit them if they keep doing that. We need to acknowledge this fact ourselves and reflect the truth of it to others – it may just save them.

2. Other cultures view lying and truth telling differently.

Some cultures do not promote truth telling to everyone.

The recent calls by Islamic State fanatics for war against the world have opened our eyes to many things. One is that these people confine the duty of truth telling to their own group. For these Muslims to lie to an “unbeliever” is not considered wrong. This is a very sharp contrast to the Biblical ideal, where truth telling is an attempt as humans to be imitators of God – who is God of all the world, does not play favorites among nations and even "sends the rain on the just and the unjust alike". So it is wrong to make two groups: one to whom you must tell the truth (whether that be family, or comrades, or co-religionists) and another (the outsiders) to whom you may tell lies.

For the Christian, the obligation to tell the truth may not rule all situations (see last blog) but where it does it applies to all people.

I keep getting phone calls aimed at defrauding me. A very common one is this: “Hello, I am (insert Australian sounding name). I am from the technical department of Microsoft. There is a problem with your computer ...” I hang up about then, but more gullible people have given the caller their computer access codes and been robbed! The real Microsoft does not ring people! Always these would be thieves have foreign and I think “Indian sub-continent” accents. Of course there are many, many Australians who are lying thieves – but experiences such as these phone calls do suggest that in another culture the problem is even more endemic.

How do we deal with this? Jesus said: “be wise as serpents; but as innocent as doves.”

We must be alert to the fact that there are cultures where they believe there is nothing at all wrong about lying to us. Be cautious about believing what they say!

But we must still tell the truth to them – because that is who we are. More importantly that is like God, who we are trying to imitate!

Thirdly: we have to teach our standards of truth telling: because those standards are right!

My Adventures with God Ch 21

Ch 22. A Concert Band

Ian, the retired dairy farmer I mentioned earlier and his wife Leon invited us to a school concert in Melbourne because two of their grandsons were performing. It was a story that should have been a Hollywood feel-good movie. The school was in a down-town area. There had been the usual youth problems, and these two boys with a single mother had been no strangers to trouble. A visionary music teacher at the school had the idea of starting a concert band. Just as one would expect in a movie, the band worked its magic. Kids lives, even whole families were transformed. The school itself was lifted by identification with this success story.

The bans was fund raising – I think for a tour. Sue and I thought God was saying to give what we had saved up from our tithes, which made quite a large donation. The band offered to send a group out to do a performance at Lang Lang as a 'thank you'. We thought God had an even bolder plan: to start our own concert band.

We and others with kids who might be candidates prayed. We came to the conclusion that we should go ahead. A meeting was arranged of interested families, and Ian and Leon's grandsons agreed to come and talk about their experiences with the school band.

I was gardening early afternoon of the day of the meeting. I looked up to see a couple of young toughs coming through the gate. It was one of those moments when you think “Oh ho! Here's trouble.” then the elder said “Hello we're your new band leaders!” They thought it was a good joke, but not surprising that, I had mistaken them for thugs. They were in fact the nicest young men you could wish for, and were exceedingly generous with their time helping get the band going.

So a youth band started. All total beginners at first. There was fund raising to buy instruments, the weekly lessons and practice. While the kids were practising, Rosalie led the mothers' group in their own informal meeting. As many of them were new Christians it served as their support group as well as the band auxiliary.

As we had come to expect – though always treasuring it as something special when it happened – God had reinforcements ready and waiting. One church family who lived at Bayles but worshipped at Koo-wee-rup joined it. John, the dad was a truck driver and also a really good trumpeter and general musician. He took over as band leader and wrote some really memorable arrangements of traditional hymns. My favourite was “Onward Christian Soldiers” which he turned into a fife-and-drum piece. Lyn, his wife was a teacher and played alto-sax. Their two daughters played flute and tenor-sax respectively.

God turned up a brilliant young drummer. Today they would probably label him as 'autistic'. He had been brought up from a baby by his grandparents, and was the drummer in the nearby Packenham town band. He had an absolute gift for rhythm, and made a really valuable contribution both to our youth band and later to the Bayles Fellowship music.

Our first public performance came three months after the band started. We were to play at the Lang Lang Community Christmas carols – which was organised by Rotary and drew a big crowd.

We fielded a 23 piece band! OK there were ring-in's too. The two boys from town. Sue had a patient who played sax. In a dance band and she came. John brought in a friend, also John and also a trumpeter. This John was a pentecostal Christian and became a regular at band play-outs and at Bayles Fellowship.

As well as the band playing at those carols, we had a vocal entrant. Rosalie wrote a very haunting and beautiful hymn, which was sung by one of the young women from the youth Bible study mentioned last chapter. Its opening lines were: “My Lord is the one who loves me, my Lord is the one who cares. ...”

Our band made quite an impact.

The following year we entered a float in the should-be-famous Koo-wee-rup Potato Festival. We named our entrant “heavenly music” and dressed the band as angels! We borrowed a tray truck, Rosalie's husband – another John – drove it. Ian and I painted up the simple set.

Once again great fun and a feeling of achievement for everyone involved, and the bonus of public awareness that we were Christians, but not “church” as they had walked or drifted away from it!

Another success tale from the band was Elizabeth. She was in her late teens but had Downs syndrome. She was in a confirmation class, I don't think she grasped any of the theoretical theology – but she knew she loved Jesus, and that Jesus loved her, far more profoundly than any of the other confirmees – and really what else matters! Elizabeth joined the band and played triangle.

Our band was a success in every way for several years. But the time came when the High school decided to start their own band. Most of our kids were at the high school and were under pressure to join. Naturally we all prayed about what to do. The answer was that our band had served its purpose. So we didn't try to compete, we closed.

The adults who were not already part of the Pakenham band transferred. We were worried about Elizabeth, for whom band had become important, but we need not have been, the Packenham people made her very welcome.

Morals Blog: Truth telling in Hard Cases

What About Hard Cases?

The other enrichment of “truth” in the Bible is that in God it is acting accordance with the highest conceivable morality. So for us humans “telling the truth” requires trying to imitate this characteristic of God also. However, unlike God we are not infinitely powerful. So for us to act in accordance with the highest conceivable morality may involve compromises.

We live in an imperfect world, we are and are among imperfect people. We can find ourselves by chance, or be manoeuvred by people, into situations where we simply do not possess the power to achieve a perfect outcome.

Take an innocent engineering example: I learned in my university engineering days that the perfect propeller for a warship would have the best in these three things: speed; efficiency, and quietness. In this world it is simply not possible to maximise all three simultaneously. They are mutually incompatible. One can of course develop overall better propellers – the first steam turbine ship “Turbinia” experienced a 3 knot increase in speed when a large portion of her primitive screw broke off during trials! But it is still true that none of the three desirable traits can be maximised without sacrificing one or more of the others.

It should not surprise us that in this world we can sometimes face a situation where we can only chose between “the lesser of two evils”

PS when people confront one with the horns of a dilemma of any kind, the best move is often to refuse both the alternatives they put up. Go straight between the horns! Even so, this may still involve choosing “the lesser of (several) evils”.

Bonhoeffer, in his treatise on telling the truth which he wrote while the Gestapo were trying to get him to divulge the names of his co-conspirators against Hitler gave this example: A young girl is confronted by her teacher in front of the class with; “Is it not true your father is a drunkard”. She has been taught the importance of truth telling. She also knows that to tell it now would betray family loyalty. Bonhoeffer writes that when she lies: “No” the problem is just that she lacked the experience to satisfy these competing moral requirements. I think he is only partly right.

Experience can certainly help. I illustrate this from observation.

I was once talking with another clergyman. He explained how he was a late entrant into holy orders and had been an officer in a British tank regiment before ordination. I had been reading some “How it Works” type books with my sons and one of the chapters dealt with army tanks and mentioned reactive armour. Stupidly I blurted out “Oh, so does this new reactive armour really work?” Momentarily his face froze. Then he calmly said: “It may do” and moved on to another topic. Bonhoeffer would have been proud!

However I believe there are situations where not all the proverbial wisdom of Solomon would provide a way out.

In these cases I believe that a well trained moral conscience will pick the best course of action. I said in an early post that the human brain is incredibly adept at analysing complex social situations. This capability extends to moral judgements if we have been well socialised in moral choices.

Aristotle in Book II of his “Ethics” makes the important point that we study ethics not to intellectually describe morals, but to become people who act ethically!

Aristotle goes on to say that (he was writing in Greek) the word “ethics” comes from the word “habit”. The whole point of ethics is of oneself developing habitual norms of acting ethically!

If we have trained ourselves to tell the truth, particularly when we are tempted not to, we will not readily lie. If we have simultaneously trained ourselves to act justly, to love our neighbour as ourselves, and in our daily lives to imitate to complete moral character of God, we will not readily do other evils. Being human we will battle and occasionally fall to temptation. But we will grow stronger and more exercised in acting morally..

Such a trained conscience, I believe will provide us with the moral course of action in the split second which may be all the time we have.

So the person who by persistent action has trained their conscience, when merely insulted or wounded in their pride, will curb their temper and turn the other cheek. But should an armed assailant threaten the lives of her children she will be instantly prepared to kill the assailant, or die herself in the attempt.

My Adventures with God Ch 21

Ch 21 : Ross

The service had just begun at Lang Lang when I saw him come into church. Heavy boots, torn jeans, leather jacket, helmet under one arm, a face that modelled the joke “its not the years its the mileage”. Definitely not our usual clientele! He sat quietly through the service. When it came time for the collection I tried hard not to smile at Jan's obvious inner turmoil: should she pass the collection plate to him or not. Clearly she was thinking he might grab it and bolt!

He stopped to talk to me after the service. His story went like this. He had indeed been a wild lad. But 4 or 5 year back now he had got married. The minister who took their wedding was an on-fire Church of Christ pastor, and during the preparation sessions both Ross and Robyn his fiancee had become born-again Christians.

A year or so back they had moved on to Ross's elder brother's dairy farm where they had a cottage and Ross worked on the farm. Ross's brother was an elder in the local Uniting Church. Ross was very on-fire about Christianity had started to evangelise and had collected a number of people in their 20's who now came to a weekly Bible study at his home. The Uniting minister, being of the liberal theology persuasion was not interested in their Bible study group.

Ross and the others had recently been praying about their group. They believed they had a prophetic word that God would sent them a person to lead it. And I think there had been a Bible verse with a message like “I will send you a shepherd, my servant David”. That morning Ross had thought God was telling him to come to the Lang Lang Anglican church. He was skeptical – I think along the lines “Can anything good come out of an Anglican church”. But as soon as the morning milking was finished he had put on a clean T-shirt, hopped on his motorbike and come. He was amused to see on the noticeboard that my name was “David”, he nearly ran away when he saw the congregation, but apparently my sermon passed muster. So after a lengthy explanation he asked if I would lead their Bible study. Naturally I said “Yes”.

I just want to say it once more: When you are working for and with God, “coincidences” just keep happening. One is continually finding that even in one's tiny sphere of experience, God seems to be weaving an incredible number of threads together. But it is still really exciting every time you see his handiwork!

So for the next few years I spent Tuesday nights at Ross and Robyn's leading this Bible study group. They were already keen Christians. But studying the scriptures, talking and praying together - often late into the night - we developed into a dynamic cell. People were added as time went on. We started an evangelistic service aimed at teens-and-twenties that grew into the Bayles Fellowship. Ross and I started a Christian group at the local high school. Ross later came on the Anglican Parish Council where he helped open the minds of the “oldies” to ideas of evangelism. I still smile remembering one answer he gave. An old farmer, who was more comfortable talking about “church” than about “Jesus” asked him one time “How can we get young people like you come?” Ross replied without a pause “Just put on a keg of beer and a pig on a spit and I can get you a couple of hundred - but of course that won't make them Christians!”

Ross could spin a very amusing yarn about everyday events. One time he was doing this at Bible study when he mentioned that while he was working on the farm the day before a song had come into his head. It was a Christian song that had really catchy rhythm – Ross was a guitarist – and he thought for a moment “I've never heard that song before, but it is really good, I must try to remember it” but with pressure of work he soon forgot all about the incident until he got home, Then the song had gone completely from his mind. He tried but couldn’t figure out how it had gone.

As I remembered how Rosalie's song writing had started I said: “Ross, you idiot – that was God offering you the gift of song writing just like he gave to Rosalie! Now you tell God you are sorry for treating it lightly and ask him to give you that gift!” Ross did and sure enough over the next couple of years he composed a flow of songs. They were quite different from Rosalie's. Hers were mostly for younger children, and sung unaccompanied. Ross' were teenage music and went with guitar. His songs generally came out of his Bible reading. One time he was reading through the book of Joshua – and each time he read a new section of the book he got a corresponding new verse for the song.

More about Ross, the Bible study people, the high school group and Bayles Fellowship in later chapters.

Morals Blogs: Truth Telling

White lies or the plain truth?

Human language is rarely just made up of plain mathematical type propositions. We utilise poetic expressions, sarcasm, hyperbole, idiomatic phrases, customary ways of saying things and so forth to get our message across. This means I need to revise my initial premise of truth being mathematical as in “1+1=2” being true. This is OK as far as it goes, but it does not in fact cover the whole complexity of human communication. People who think it does then find themselves doing mental gymnastics to explain “lies” by otherwise honest people, and end up with the fiction of a “white lie”. I think we can do better.

First we need to tease out a few of the complexities of human communication.

If someone is being silly and ends up spilling their drink everywhere we could say: “well that was clever!” They and everyone else knows we are being sarcastic: we mean they were emphatically not being clever. If you ignore the fact we were using a familiar figure of speech and look at our words literally, then we told a lie. Of course we did not really tell a lie, but I use this simple illustration to highlight that we have to judge what the normal person speaking those words in that context would have intended to communicate and what the reasonable hearer would have understood their meaning to have been. If that shared meaning is true then we did not lie.

If most of our companions at work are off sick with the 'flu we might say: “everyone is off sick!”. This is called hyperbole. It is a figure of speech we all use and comprehend. We would not respond “Liar!” just because we knew of one person at that workplace who was not off sick.

The weather announcer says “the sun will rise at 6.35 am tomorrow” …. No! Really it won't. The sun is just going to stay put while the earth rotates. As a scientific explanation of the universe, the announcer’s statement is a lie. But provided you and she are interested in when, given a clear sky, the sun will become visible over the horizon, then the weather girl may be telling the plain truth.

So there are a set of statements which if considered in isolation as literal logical propositions are false, but which, in context, to the average person in the street will convey the truth.

Conversely there are a set of statements which are literally true propositions which if believed would lead to false, potentially ruinous conclusions. Shakespeare's “Macbeth” provides a classic example. The witches “lie like truth” to lead the main character onto an evil path and eventually to his doom. In the final duel he taunts his adversary with the witches' prophesy that: “I can be killed by no man born of woman”. To which the hero replies: No man born of woman am I for I was from my mother's womb untimely plucked” and he proceeds to kill Macbeth.

So mere literal truth of a statement is not sufficient for it to constitute “telling the truth” One must add the Old Testament requirement of faithfulness and reliability. Is the information it would convey to "the reasonable man or woman in the street" something reliable that they can safely put their faith in?

Taking these concepts of figures of speech and faithfulness in giving reliable information together helps solve the following cases.

Start with the easy one. Two strangers fishing on a pier. One says to the other: “Nice day” the other replies “sure is” and they begin to converse. Step back …. on that pier it is cold, windy and starting to rain. So they both told lies, right? ... Wrong. They were not primarily talking about the weather they were following a social convention. The first was actually sending the message: “We don't know each other but I'd like to talk to you” the other was sending the message back: “OK I'll talk”.

So you meet a stranger. “How are you.” they say. “Fine” you reply. In fact you have a slight cold. Did you just tell a lie? ... That depends. ... If the stranger was a medical examiner at the airport screening passengers because there has been a deadly 'flu outbreak in the country you just flew out of then yes! You just told a really bad lie! On the other hand if this was an ordinary meeting of strangers then no. He was offering a polite greeting not enquiring after the exact state of your health. You gave the customary reply. In the absence if felonious intent on your part towards the stranger, you were telling the truth.

Take this case: A man greets his wife who is all dressed up for a party. “You look lovely tonight darling” says he. But she is 70 years old and was always rather plain. Some moralists jump in and claim that therefore he told a lie. They soften it but saying it is only a “white lie'”

No! I call it telling the truth!

To him she is still the girl he fell in love with all those years ago: She is beautiful to him. She always will be. In terms of expressing his feelings it is both true and reliable. Second the appraisal is reliable in that context: Her attire and make-up is as good as she can make it – his statement that she looks lovely accurately conveys that she has not miss-applied her eye shadow or has a tear in her dress but rather has clearly made the socially requisite preparations for attending a party. His compliment completes her preparations by making her feel appreciated, as she indeed is, and with his affirmation, properly confident to face the world.

However I can turn that scenario into a real lie. Suppose he sees straight away that she is still wearing her house slippers. If he fails to warn her, then by commission or omission he is telling a lie. The information he is conveying is not true, is not faithful not reliable. If she trust him she will be set up for major embarrassment.

OK do you see the big divide between telling the truth and lying here.

So by broadening out our definition a little we solve the problem. We first acknowledge that language has shared meaning. That meaning then becomes the determinant of truth or falsehood. We next see that language is part of relationship. (Bonhoeffer was big on this – see his essay from prison “telling the truth”) here the tests of appropriateness, faithfulness and reliability come to the fore. Once we do this we see the term “white lies” as an artificial and quite unnecessary device. It was just honest people telling the plain truth.

NEXT: Thin Ice: when is it right ti deceive?