Sarah Greeks writes for Humane Pursuits: Half-time Huddle: Why I Lack Enthusiasm for the Church. She has 22 reasons.
Frank Brennan (an Australian Jesuit) writes for Eureka Street that It’s time to recognise secular same sex marriage.
Jonathan Clatworthy of Modern Church asks What is Christianity for anyway?
Nelson Jones asks in the New Statesman Does it matter that young people in Britain aren’t religious?
Michael Jensen presents an insider’s view for ABC Religion and Ethics: The church and the world: The politics of Sydney Anglicanism.
Lack enthusiasm for the church? Since Sarah writes that “59 minutes later we are all out of the door” it’s hardly surprising. I am tempted to suggest she should find herself a different church – but a marketplace where each of us chooses “what suits me” can be a rather un-catholic concept.
Sarah’s church is mostly attended by older people even though it uses modern worship choruses and projector screens. Notably, it fails to excite her. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what was fresh and revolutionary in the 1970s is now staid and boring and formulaic.
I think she needs to pop along to a local Episcoplian conventicle with a reasonably traditional liturgy. A spot of George Herbert or John Mason Neale let her know that, yes, signing praise to God doesn’t need to be as banal as that.
I disagree with Jonathan Clatworthy only in so far as institutions make for change, so that the Reformation was an opportunity for princes to define autonomy by their own institutions, and from these generate more diverse ideas. One religion one Church became one religion many Churches and as that diversity worked so was it easier to gain many religions and none and many institutions. The rise of the secular was long coming, and benefits from that institutional diversity, and it came about because of a new collective working class that wasn’t part of middle and upper class religion. So it… Read more »
In South Africa we called it Apartheid,separate development , self determination,or plural democracy!
I would have been more impressed by Jonathan Clatworthy’s piece if it had ended with some concrete proposals rather than fizzling out into its ‘somebody ought to do something’ conclusion.
This is a very interesting article on the history of Sydney Anglicanism from Michael Jensen. They’re even worse than I thought and supported Apartheid in South Africa and the racial separatist “Church of England in South Africa”. Ironic that they are now in solidarity with so many African Primates! Broughton Knox was Principal of Moore College from 1958-1982. Jensen writes: “For Broughton Knox, “social justice” was itself a questionable category. In an article entitled “Social Justice or Compassion,” he argued that “the teaching and actions of Jesus nowhere show a concern for ‘social justice'”: “The reason is that the call… Read more »
There’s a church in a posh part of a city that my godmother, a former member, once called “St [ ] the Comfortable”.
You can just imagine Mr Principal Broughton Knox preaching from such a pulpit. “How revolting that the lower classes have become so envious! In God’s Design, as we have ‘compassion’ upon them, dropping them a coin in their begging bowls now&then, so also should they have ‘compassion’ upon the fiduciary-burdened trust-fund set!”
From my godmother again: “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” It is unto the comfortable, that Our Lord wielded a whipping cord…
Michael Jensen’s article need to be understood in its conservative evangeloical context – of the Sydney Anglican Diocese. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not charity, then am i nothing worth” – Saint Paul – Even Saint Paul recognises that the words of men – be they evangelical preachers or others who rely on the power of the pulpit rather than the power of Jesus present in the Eucharist – for the purpose of evanglism, are selling the gospel short! What Evangelical Sydney seems to have lost sight of, is the FACT that… Read more »