Songs of Sydney - 11

The Cicada that ate Five Dock, would you believe...

Songs of Sydney - 10

The Skyhooks, and Somewhere in Sydney

Songs of Sydney - 9

The best of the lot: Gotta Love this City...

'my city is a whore...'

indeed.

Songs of Sydney - 6

Sydney, nights are warm, daytime telly, blue-rinse dawn..



At least, you won't have time to be bored...

Songs of Sydney - 4

The Miracle of Marrickville!

Songs of Sydney - 8

King St - well, now, this is the King St of my youth... Coles New World is now the Dendy cinema.

On King St, I'm a king...

Songs of Sydney - 2

Songs of Sydney - 3

Songs of Sydney - 7

Where else could this come from?

Songs of Sydney - 5

The sweat, the desperation, and the lure of a better view of the harbour...

Gender-neutral language

There has been some discussion recently at Sydney Anglicans about gender-neutral or inclusive language and bible translation. Some are holding out, saying that the tide of trendy political correctness is turning, and that we should hold on to the use of 'men' to mean 'humankind'. Certainly, the structure of the English language makes this more convenient.

I remember thinking this through some years ago. What changed it all for me was reading an early 1970s study (so pre-the 'gender neutral language revolution' of the 1980s) that suggested that indeed a majority of women felt excluded when gender-exclusive language was used. Suffice it to say, I haven't been able to track that study down this morning... I read originally in (shock, horror) a book. Remember them?

Since much gender exclusive language is unneccessary to make the meaning absolutely clear, and since I don't wish to give offence except over the gospel (which is offensive enough and does need my offensive behaviour to add to it) I don't think obliging at this point is too much to ask. Indeed, it may even be a good thing: after all, Christians have led the way since the beginning in treating and accepting women as fully human. Shame we have to drag the chain now. And if many, many women report that they feel excluded by such language (and probably the ones NOT in church, so clergymen don't go off and ask your wives!) then it seems important to make a change. True, I went to uni in the late (as opposed to early) 80s and 90s when this was a cause in a way it isn't today, perhaps. But I - even I - find it embarassing and jarring and distracting when I hear an old 1978 NIV passage read out that translates anthropos as 'men' or adds a 'man' when it is unnecessary.

Especially, I feel that this is imperative for those of us who hold more complementarian positions on women's ministry. The accusation is always going to come that this theological position is just a mask for sexism. If it isn't, then wherever genuine sexism is present we need to eradicate it and to show that we are serious about it. This isn't caving in to the culture anymore than having proper procedures for dealing with child abuse is caving in to the culture... don't you think?

[Added later] - It seems to me there are different levels of acceptability for gendered language. You can slip in an occassional 'man' or 'mankind' (meaning 'the human race') and no-one seems to mind too much, especially if you are quoting ('one giant leap for mankind'). But using the male pronoun to represent both is much less acceptable - though a nice alternative to the gendered pronoun in English is harder to find.

Is your pastor a reader?

I was once involved in interviewing some candidates for the ministry as part of a panel. I decided to ask each candidate (as the representative of the academic training institution rather than of the denomination) 'would you call yourself a reader? Do you read for pleasure?'

Of ten articulate, well-above average intelligence, gifted candidates (all males), nine said 'no'.

What is the meaning of this? Should we be concerned?

'a gentle answer turneth away wrath': the place of polemical speech

Over at Giraffepen we have been discussing the place of offensive (I don't mean swearing!) and aggressive language in Christian debates.

This is something that has concerned me for a while: I recognise my own love of a fight and try not to indulge in it (not being a particularly good arguer helps!) and also the apologetic disaster such speaking is. In Australia, some of our politicians are quite brutal and colourful in their speech on the floor of parliament almost by convention. However, these men are those who have most spectacularly crashed and burned: Paul Keating and Mark Latham spring to mind. They were popular, but also deeply unpopular. I guess they could say Jesus was too...

It concerns me that Christians will speak in a rude and offensive manner and then claim to be martyrs when people respond in kind - when in reality, they have just brought in on their own heads by being rude. That is not to say of course that flattery or obsequious speech is any better - this if anything is a more English vice!

Nominalism: no, not a post about medieval philosophy

I have been a fan of St George Rugby League Club in Sydney since 1980 (they were champions then, and have failed to win since). However, I own only one piece of club paraphenalia (a beanie I sleep in sometimes), and I have been to perhaps three games in the last 27 seasons. I am not aware of their current form, nor of the names of their current players. Their coach is Nathan Brown (or was last time I looked). I don't watch their games on TV (even when I am in Australia). However, I do want them to win, and if they are in a major game it is them that I barrack for (that means 'support' in Australian). St George RLC is certainly not aware that I exist - but I think that they could make a better effort to flush me out.

Am I a St George fan?

Well, I think I am. But a diehard, every game attending fan will most likely despise me for my lack of commitment. But how dare they!

It strikes me that this is how many, many people think about their membership of the Anglican church, at least in Sydney. Apparently, there are fewer of them than five years ago (see here), but it is still a whopping 20+% of the population - more by far and further than support St George, even more than support Rugby League!

Evangelicals have in the last thirty years seen such people as a bit of a nuisance, because they asked for baptisms and funerals which took a lot of time but in many cases didn't really believe what they are doing - it's a horrible feeling performing a sacred ceremony when you know people are basically perjuring themselves before God, believe me. Or, perhaps they lingered on as Christmas and Easter attenders who complained when anything changed, but didn't really care about what happened the rest of the time.

But: some 700,000 people in our city already think if themselves as members of our club, which I would think means that they have some vaguely positive feelings towards us. So: what are we doing about it? This is a huge potential missionfield.... What is the statistical information that we have on this vast population of people? Why are they still connected, but absent?

Annual Diocesan Jamboree?

Here's an idea that will never come to pass:

Why doesn't the diocese of Sydney run an annual conference in the way that Hillsong does? That is, an unmissable city-based ministry conference which fulfills the aims of:

• allowing cross-pollination of ideas
• enabling people in the diocese to meet up and communicate with one another in a forum other than Synod
• the shared process of identity building in a positive and non-adversarial context
• a chance for lay people in particular to participate in building the diocese

You could have plenary sessions and seminars on a broad spectrum of topics.

At the moment, CMS Summer School is treated like this by a certain generation of clergy, but the trouble is firstly that it is in Katoomba, and secondly that its focus is narrowly on overseas missions and thirdly it is at the wrong time of year (January). We have the annual Synod, but this is a parliamentary body which meets for politico-legal reasons, and excludes those who have not been elected to it. Already there is a very crowded calendar of events, but you just trump them by being better than all of 'em put together.

Anyhow, since I had the idea it is probably very unlikely ever to come to pass!

Transportation as punishment

On 13th May 1787 11 ships loaded to the gunwales with a human cargo set sail from Portsmouth for Botany Bay, in the land of New South Wales discovered by Captain James Cook some seventeen years previously. The 1420 souls aboard – somewhat more than that arrived at the other end – were to begin a colony in the form of a prison under the governorship of Captain Arthur Phillip – a colony built by forced labour at the barrel of the gun and at the crack of the cat o’ nine tails. Their journey must have been as terrifying in prospect as it was remarkable in completion. What could a poorly educated horse thief or pickpocket have imagined lay before him across the sea?

Transportation provides a fascinating case study in the history and methods of criminal punishment. Its need arose out of changing social conditions in England in the 18th century – the increasing urbanisation and population growth in Britain owing to the industrial revolution resulted in a terrific displacement of persons and, naturally, in an increase in crimes against property in particular. Whereas localised crimes of a relatively minor nature could have been dealt with by temporary and economic measures such as the stocks in rural districts, the rapid growth of the anonymous city meant that the means of administering punishments in this way was far less manageable. A village miscreant could have been quickly isolated, condemned and shamed by a community familiar to him or her. In the streets of London, it was easier to slip in and out of the crowd unnoticed.

Transportation was not a new punishment in 1787. But Cook’s discovery of an apparently empty and vast island at the other end of the globe made it a more attractive solution to the perennial problem of punishment. Transportation was, it was argued, more humane than the noose. The prisons of the day were notoriously overcrowded and disease-ridden; and in fact the government had resorted to putting its prisoners in prison-hulks moored on the Thames. More space was needed in the jails. What is more transportation was a means of excreting the waste matter from the body of society for its general health: the community stood only to benefit from the disposal of its more annoying and troublesome members. This was opportunity to lance the boil. It had its deterrent effect, too: New South Wales was to the eighteenth century mind surely further away than the moon is to ours – it was a terrifying prospect. And, it could also be argued, transportation was a great opportunity for the rehabilitation of the convict: if he survived the journey and the beatings and did not starve and served out his seven- or fourteen-year sentence he could find himself presented with all the opportunities of a new life in a new country.

Everard Digges La Touche

My predecessor as a lecturer at Moore College, Everard Digges La Touche, Church of Ireland clergyman and author of a brilliant work of Christology, saw WWI as a holy war against German liberal Protestantism. He joined up to fight against it...

The report of his service is here. I quote an excerpt from it:

"At the outbreak of war in 1914, he tried first to join as a chaplain, then in the ranks of the 2nd. Battalion, Australian Inf. In November 1914, he was rejected because of his severe varicose veins, so he immediately went away and had an operation. This meant that he was too late to join the 2nd. Battalion, but as soon as he was well he joined the 13th and rose to Sergeant. You might wonder why this clergyman, who was not in A1 physical condition, and with the responsibility of his wife, Eve, and two young sons, was prepared to go off and fight, but one of his men summed him up, saying "he convinced us of the righteousness of our cause and likened this present struggle for liberty to a Holy Crusade, so when we finally sang "Onward Christian Soldiers", we meant it".

He was commissioned as a 2nd. Lt. in the 2nd. Battalion when an officer was needed to take reinforcements from Alexandria to Gallipoli, for the August attack. On the morning of the 6th, August 1915, he landed his men at Anzac Cove. As a Reinforcement Officer he could then have chosen to go back to Alexandria, but the official historian says that he begged leave to join the attack at Lone Pine. At 5.30, he went over the parapet with the first rush, only to fall, mortally wounded within a few seconds. He managed to roll down the slope of the spur and crawl back into the Australian lines, dying "among his own people" as Charles Bean the Australian war historian described it.”

They don't make 'em like they used to!

Ruth Gledhill on Wycliffe

Well blow me down, Ruth Gledhill has written just about the only sensible article on the Wycliffe affair. Now, lets be clear - The Times has had a job to win me over after a frankly appalling article on the Sydney diocese a few years back (was it 20+ factual errors? I forget: it was basically copied it out of a hatchet job in Theology by a chap called Humphrey Southern). But this piece is a professional piece of journalism that doesn't make opinion into fact (Stephen Bates' stock-in-trade). Amazing!

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: the offending article was NOT written by Ruth Gledhill as I originally claimed but by her colleague Mary Ann Sieghart. It is a true shocker (a 'Barry Crocker' as we call it back home). See for yourself:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mary_ann_sieghart/article830129.ece

A picture of Sydney every day

This is a lovely site for the homesick!

Anglican Communion gets tough

The Primates of the Anglican Communion have issued as tough a statement as you are likely to see in response to TEC (the US Episcopal Church). The call for discipline means a strengthening of the hand of the Communion itself to deal with errant dioceses. Sounds great, but:

This could be Sydney diocese.

If we go ahead with lay presidency - though it seems inconceivable from our point of view that the communion would care - we will be disciplined as TEC has been.

Is it really worth it? Worth risking all our property for? Worth risking our ties with Anglicans in Africa and Asia and England?

I don't think so.