Before journeying with the audience through this presentation I offered some background comments which are helpful to include here.

I suggested that this was neither an academic treatise nor a fully worked through history of the concept of Holy Trinity. It used, I said, one interpretation of history about the role the Cappadocian philosophers played in the development of the doctrine. This interpretation suggested a very different form of understanding of Trinity - not a rigid, doctrinal certainty about the hierarchical nature of God but a much more fluid - indeed "progressive" - concept.

I went on to say that because this was not an academic presentation it "had been freed to be rich with my experience." There is much in here about what "feels right" to me at this point in time. This offered the wonderful opportunity for the audience to take it or leave it - in whole or in part. Does it accord with your experience? - wonderful. Does it "rub against'" your experience in ways which create helpful questions? - marvellous. Does it grate unnervingly? - you are free to let it grate or let it go as you wish. I might say, having made the presentation, that there are already phrases I would adjust or expressions I would tweak - but I would not change my fundamental sense of meaning at this point.

During the presentation there were many very fine questions and observations. But there are two that I want to briefly mention here as they do usefully shape the reading of the presentation materials.

The first related to the notion of wholeness and the second related to where "evil" or "bad stuff" fits into the ideas I presented. These are big topics on which I have reflected deeply in the past but let me offer a comment that (only just) begins to respond to the questions.

For some, the mere mention of the word "wholeness" creates tension because it suggests some future point where all flaws are eliminated and a perfect world created. It was not my intention to suggest this in my use of the term. As I said to another group recently, wholeness is not the elimination of flaws; it is the loving integration of flaws. As individual humans or groups we cannot really ever see the complete picture (or, in other words, the whole system).

So our human actions within the system create flaws because we take short-sighted action. I don't see this reality ending or being fully resolved to create "a perfect world." So for me wholeness has the sense of current reality and future potential. The current reality is the ability - as individuals and most particularly as community - to recognise a flaw and to change our interaction with the system so as to correct it. The potential is the possibility to "shorten our feedback times." All that means is that we create forms of communication and community where life denying action is recognised, conversed about and acted on in shorter and shorter response times. Therefore all manner of "bad stuff" (of the type that comes from human frailty) actually belongs within the notion of wholeness. It creates the feedback with which to change the system. The purpose of "the dance of creation" which is discussed in this

presentation is to make us more and more aware of how we are imbedded in creation. And through that awareness comes the potential to transform and be transformed.

Adrian Pyle, April 2009

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Some might remember my post last year under the title Jesus the Ordinary. On the Uniting Church's Trapeza site, the post led to a strong rebuttal which you can read here. I offered the following response to it....

Thanks Sharon. Yours may very well be the true perspective. That's the beauty of our Uniting Church. I'm biased of course but there is so much about us - even without realising it perhaps - that I think embodies healthy religion.

Here, my understanding of religion (literally "to rebind") has been influenced deeply by the philosopher James Carse. Carse argues (and this is a gross simplification of his argument) that religion is "communitas" - the gathering of a people around a central story and the generation of "positive argument" around that story. This means an argument which can never be resolved, but which, by its very unresolvable nature keeps the story alive and widening nets of people engaged with each other. For us, our "central story" is the Christ story and our "rebinding" role is to keep the positive argument about the Christ underway.

This Christ story is the truth for us about how the cosmos works. It tells us that the wholeness of God is revealed in the "suffering" or "humble" or "non-blaming" servant (we'd use different words depending on our understanding of the Christ but I am going to be so bold as to suggest there is at least some commonality of understanding in the words I have chosen).

Most of us in the Uniting Church have moved some considerable way past debates on biblical literalism. So there's now space to engage the "positive argument" about Jesus and his part in the Christ story. On one hand our understanding might be of a theistic entity acting decisively in Jesus - God becomes human, God dies, God demonstrates the Godly place. God "enters" Jesus to create the Christ.

On the other hand, when earthly vessels are deeply "present" to the hints about God in the world - hints about the mysterious source of life - perhaps they all embody the Christ. In this understanding, Jesus worked out how to continuously get little Jesus out of the way and let the Christ through.

Based on my life experience, mine is now more of the latter understanding.

It's beautiful to be able to have the conversation. It's even more beautiful to admit that I might be wrong.

How humbling....... And in that humility a realisation ...that all I can do is continue the conversation ...the relationship .....the re-binding.

Now that's religion!

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progressive Christianity, progressive Christian

I was asked by The Transit Lounge to write about spiritual health. The result is at http://www.thetransitlounge.com.au/reflections/368-spiritualwaltz.html and I have copied it below.......
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A troubled village called on a wise, old woman - a crone - from another village to help it solve its significant problems. The crone arrived the next day and the villagers gathered to hear her wisdom.

She said, "In seeking, you will only ever find what you really already know".

She then asked the villagers to put up their hands up if they knew what she was going to tell them. No hands were raised.

"Well then, as you only ever find what you really already know, I can't help you. Goodbye!"

This pattern continued several more times as various combinations of villagers put up their hands or did not do so. Each time the crone frustrated the crowd telling them that because some knew and some didn't know, they could just help each other. Each visit ended with "goodbye". It seemed to the villagers that nothing helpful was ever revealed.

Finally, after several such visits, the crone's real message began to surface. One of the villagers had a dream and shared it with the rest. She told them that the village had the resources within and amongst its members to respond to its problems. All that was needed was for the resources to be considered afresh and for the villagers to humbly realise their own place in the village's problems in order to make possible a deeper sense of ‘being together'.

This is a story about a journey into spiritual health - of transformation into a realm of wholeness. The healthy spirituality inherent in the story comes about because we are confronted with three questions as we read:

1. What are the ‘ways of being' and the gifts that:

• I don't yet know of within myself?
• I don't yet know of within my neighbour?
• My neighbour doesn't yet know about in me?
• None of us have yet uncovered in all creation?

2. What is my contribution to the very things that concern me?

3. How do I join the life-giving movements in all creation to bring about wholeness?

For some of us these may not sound like spiritual questions. Yet I'm suggesting that they reflect the essence of divine mystery, as it is expressed in several spiritual traditions.

For example, these three questions express the Christian possibility that the mystery of God is Trinitarian.

The first question, using traditional Trinitarian language, is the ‘Father' question. Just as ‘Father' was the language of the day for ‘source of life', this question focuses us on the diversity of life that the source creates. It does this by having us uncover that diversity and also having us make it known to each other!

The second question is the ‘Son' question. Again, in the language of the day, sons shone the light of the family story into each new generation. In the Christian story, the divine light is said to shine through humanity, but only when humanity assumes a mantle of vulnerability as Jesus did. In other words we have to recognise our connectedness to the whole creation. The second question confronts us with that vulnerability and our place in all that happens around us.

The third question is a question that encourages us to join into God's spirit of wholeness. Whether we see it as a mighty wind or a gentle breeze, the Spirit is continually placing the remnants of the old together to create something new. If we ask the first and second questions, we'll find we can't help but ask the third question too. And we'll start pulling those remnants together ourselves and becoming more and more a part of the Spirit's creative process.

Does a healthy spirituality mean that we have to start with question one and ask our way through two and three? Well yes, but it's not just a linear process and it's not a hierarchy of questions. Many conversion efforts try to transform the world without understanding gifts and vulnerabilities. I suggest such changes or conversions lead to dead ends.

But if we hold our understanding of gifts, our understanding of vulnerability, and the ways we can move with the Spirit together, we'll be presented with new parts of creation to get to know. So we'll find ourselves - very positively - back at question one again as we transform.

A healthy spirituality becomes circular and each question becomes interdependent with the other as more of creation joins the circle. This was a fact recognised by the Cappadocian philosophers, early Christians whose term for Holy Trinity was ‘Perichoresis'. Literally that term means ‘dance' or ‘interpenetration' - definitions dripping with inter-relationship and positive circularity.

So we might say that a healthy spirituality is a dance in three - a waltz. And, if it is not pushing the dance metaphor too far, I'd suggest that Jesus practised his waltz pattern using the steps of a foxtrot (four beat) - four distinct but inter-related ministry practices. Trust Jesus to do that! But I mention that just to whet your appetite for further exploration.

For now, let's just think about those three questions as we begin to waltz together.

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I am energised by the story this annual report tells. It is the story of magnificent commitment from a passionate Chief Executive Officer, passionate staff and passionate volunteers - passionate about creating connections that bring about belonging!

At the conclusion of every Connections UnitingCare board meeting I offer a short piece of prose for the board to consider. These pieces are an attempt to offer a profound base against which the board can reflect on the work just completed.

One such piece of prose that deeply moved board members is the following parable. It concerns a banquet where a king is yet to take his place at the table. A dishevelled man walks into the banquet hall and takes a place in the king's seat. The prime minister, incensed, asks who the dishevelled man thinks he is. To questions of whether he is a cabinet minister or king the man says "No. Higher."

Are you then God?" asks the prime minister.

"No. Higher" says the man.

"That is impossible" says the prime minister, "nothing is higher than God."

"That no-thing" says the man, "is me."

This parable is from the Sufi tradition but resonates readily with Christian value of radical inclusion. I think it so moved the board because it resonates with the individual's desire (longing) to be valued as we are (to be). In other words it captures the importance of be-longing.

Belonging is both about

1) expanding the circle so that those beyond it can be within it and

2) creating a flow to the centre of the circle at regular intervals, for those on the outer extremities (and vice-versa).

Whatever else we say about ourselves, Connections UnitingCare primarily exists to expand the circle and create the flow. And the board exists to review our life as an agency against that primary aim and to imagine how we might go deeper in living towards that aim.

As we have discerned and deliberated on matters of the agency this year, I believe the board have effectively given that aim its deserved significance. So while we provide a range of programs on behalf of various levels of government, we equally voice concerns and take action when government funding decisions or policy initiatives seemingly undermine our primary aim. While we are an agency of the Uniting Church in Australia, we speak with commitment into that church, when its institutional agendas overshadow the creation of belonging. The institutional church is not immune to asking things of its agency that distract it from the work of inclusion.

But neither are Connections UnitingCare - and the board - immune from the possibility of losing focus. The world demands accountability as "plans adhered to", "targets met" and "risks mitigated." But governance is only about these things to the extent that they service our higher aim - building belonging. Just now, the world seems awash with exciting innovations for integration, conversation and connection. Our most important role as a board is to keep our eyes on those possibilities, as much as on the details of current reality.

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One of the functions of my role is to address the annual meeting of a group called the Uniting Church Adult Fellowship. Because of its history, the group now largely consists of long-time Uniting Church members, by and large women, of age sixty and above. These are women of great compassion and energy, but given their age, their numbers are diminishing and their organisation is becoming fragile. In such circumstances it is human nature to experience grief and to express lament. And so in light of this, I offered the following address:

There are not really any ordinary moments. God's life-giving spirit moves in every time and place and it loves diversity. So there is always the potential of multiple, diverse, seemingly unrelated possibilities merging to create something new.

And so this is not an ordinary moment. It is extraordinary. I was reminded of that last night as I thought about two extraordinary happenings, one very local to me and the other more universal.

The first is that last night I signed a contract to arrange for about half of our household energy supply to be generated at our house by means of the sun. The fact that

• I can arrange to produce my own energy very easily and
• at a cost that's affordable (for a fairly ordinary household in a fairly ordinary neighbourhood)

..... is extraordinary.

The second is that in about a week - if polls are to be believed and barring any unforeseen catastrophes - the president-elect of the world's major economic power will be a man of other than fully European descent. That outcome is extraordinary.

God's spirit moves in extraordinary ways like this.

I don't mean God "makes" me do a good deed for my planet.

I don't mean God sides with a Democrat or a Republican.

What I do mean is:

• that alternative energy sources enable me to better share non-renewable resources with the rest of the planet. That this sharing becomes both possible for me and important to me seems to point to a life-affirming movement present in the cosmos. I choose to call that movement the spirit of God.

• that a highly capable part-African man is now able to be chosen for president. This creates a clearer representation to the world, of the gift inherent in diversity. That such a thing becomes possible seems to point to a life-affirming movement present in the cosmos. I choose to call that movement the spirit of God.

How do we discern what are life-affirming movements?

That question reminds me of a story I heard recently. In it a holy man is having a dream. He dreams he is present with the mystery of God. Because he is confused about the nature of heaven and hell, he calls into the mystery and asks to be shown the true nature of heaven and hell. At that point, two doors form before him and one of the doors opens. Inside that first door he sees a group of people gathered around a table. In the centre of the table is a pot of stew and it is the most delicious stew the holy man has ever smelled. His mouth waters both in the dream and in reality, but each of the people around the table is gaunt, frustrated and deeply troubled. He then notices that the people each have a very long spoon and are unable to manoeuvre the spoon so as to get the stew from a plate in front of them into their mouth. The holy man is deeply troubled by what he sees. The mystery of God whispers "This is hell."

The holy man is ushered from this space and the second door opens. The physical setting is almost entirely the same - people around a table; a pot of amazing stew; long spoons. Here though the picture in the people's disposition is one of complete joy; people nourished physically and spiritually; people appreciating others and being appreciated. The mystery of God whispers "This is heaven."

The holy man is confused. He asks the mystery of God to help him understand. "The difference" whispers the mystery of God, "is simple and it is but one very small difference."

"Tell me the difference" says the holy man.

"The difference is that in heaven the people have learnt to feed each other!"

In a small way we are learning to feed each other when we make alternative energy sources more readily available and create the possibility for a greater sharing of the world's non-renewable resources. This is a life giving movement.

In a small way we are leading to feed each other when we see the possibility and potential of a person without reference to their ethnic background. This is a life giving movement.

And there are so many other life giving movements to discern and to participate in.

Notice that these life giving movements are not necessarily occurring because of the presence or absence of the church. My point is that the church has no proprietary rights over the spirit of God. Instead what we do have is a wealth of wisdom and practice to help people participate in the movement of that spirit. The question is how we can make that wisdom and practice more accessible to the world.

In answering this question there is a need to differentiate between vehicles and values[1]. Before you dismiss these terms as corporate "mumbo-jumbo" let me explain that the values I am talking about here are the eternal life forces that are sustained by the Spirit of God. They are the feelings of love, peace, encouragement of diversity, nourishment and community that exist when the spirit of God is allowed to present itself to us.

The vehicles, on the other hand, are the earthly vessels by which we try to transmit those values. For the church the vehicles include groups like yours, the work team of which I am part and of course the Uniting Church as a whole. They also include a whole range of institutions and structures around such groups and entities.

Grief is a natural part of being human. But sustained grief will exist only where the values and the vehicle cannot be differentiated. In other words what someone values about a past experience (the value) only comes about, in their mind, when delivered through that past experience (the vehicle). The secret (and it's a secret that is whispered a lot, heard less frequently and understood even less frequently) is that vehicles are always temporary in nature. They are earthly vessels which cannot retain their form forever. The trick, as our faith teaches, is to be able to let go of the vehicle before the vehicle lets go of us; to die before we die; to elevate the value beyond the vehicle.

So I'm going to be blunt about this now, but if we are in a continual pattern of grief about the "passing of what was" in our church we are not being faithful. Our faith rests in the understanding that God's life-giving spirit continues to move in the world. Our hope comes from the understanding -that as long as humanity is one of the vessels of life present in the world - we will be able to uphold the values of the spirit in the world, even if we have to change vehicles to do it. Our role is to discern the spirit's movement and respond to it, using an appropriate vehicle. And that vehicle, whilst it will be informed by the ways of the past, will probably not replicate those past ways completely!

So what have you noticed that's full of extraordinary God-laden values lately? And how can your Christian practice change, so that you can more fully participate - and encourage the participation of others - in what you have noticed?

[1] For this terminology I am grateful to Robert J. Voyle and Kim M. Voyle:  http://www.clergyleadership.org/

Of Hospitality and Humility: Adrian Pyle - January 15, 2006

A reflection on 1 Corinthians 6; 12-20 and John 1:43-51

It's hot. It is very, very hot! It's late afternoon but still it's thirty-seven degrees in the shade - and the last shade was back at Culgoa when you stopped for a drink. There's no shade now but the tyre on the Mercedes is shredded and it needs to be changed. You sweat and strain on the dusty roadside, battling flies and traffic that passes by too-close-for-comfort until you get the temporary spare fitted. And flies and speeding semis haven't been the only menace here. The tyre didn't want to cooperate at first and though you did ingenious things with a shifting spanner, it's getting late now.

You finally pull the car back on to the road and check the map as you accelerate. "Sea Lake is only thirteen kilometres up the road. I'll stop there for the night," you think to yourself, "Can't drive too far on this spare. I'll re-evaluate my options in the morning." The dusk lights of Sea Lake are more welcoming than you'd ever expected them to be. But initial jubilation at reaching a town soon turns to panic. A sign on the only motel clearly proclaims "no vacancy." Stifling a yell of frustration you turn for the town pub. "Perhaps they'll have some rooms."

The publican's greeting is laconic but there is a cheerfulness in it that lifts your spirits some. You tell him your story of woe. Then comes the news you don't want to hear.

"We've got a few rooms but all of the main ones are taken. There's a wedding in town." But before absolute despair can set in he goes on. "But we've got a small room in the main residence. The furniture is old and it's small but it's clean and comfortable. If you're prepared to wait a while we can make up the bed and get it ready."

"Yes." you say in jubilation.

"Well look," says the publican, "have a beer - on the house, you need it - and I'll see what I can arrange. Oh, by the way. If you get that wheel out of your boot and put it on the back of my ute, I'll run it up to the servo in the morning. The garage is shut tomorrow but I know the owner and under the circumstances he'll see what he can do. It won't be as cheap as in the city, but it will get you mobile."

Under other circumstances you would never have stayed in a place like this. But that night you eat hearty meal, share some of your life story and hear a few others' life stories too and you make some new friends. And anywhere you go in the future you tell the story about that great little pub in Sea Lake.

We don't need a story from 2000 years ago to sense the scriptural significance of hospitality. The jewel that is hospitality can exist today anywhere we go. Sometimes it turns up in the most surprising places. It does not seem bound by time or place but I call it a jewel because real hospitality seems to be rare. And it seems it was rare too, 2000 years ago in Corinth.

In the Epistle reading this morning, Paul's conversation with the Corinthians turns to sex - a subject guaranteed to generate interest. But is Paul just delivering a moralizing message to the masses? He might be. But it might be more subtle than that. It might be about hospitality. Perhaps Paul has used sex as a hook to address a bigger issue. In fact, Paul seems to be addressing the question of divided loyalties, putting the service of ourselves ahead of the generation of love by uplifting others. Perhaps the most telling statement in this regard is the last one we read this morning; "For you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body."  So Paul is not necessarily offering a rote prohibition of sex - of any kind - so much as he is willing the Corinthians to use their bodies to glorify God, to be a vessel of love, to be a means of spiritual growth for others.

The divided loyalties come when we take self-serving action - whether it be in sex or learning or play or business - and consequently put ourselves ahead of love, ahead of God. Hospitality is the antithesis of this. Perhaps a test of true hospitality then is in the actions we take to serve others without fully understanding what we will get back. We take these actions without any certainty of a payoff. And so every act of true hospitality is radical, counter-cultural, even irrational. In a world of beans counted and quid-pro-quo, true hospitality is a place where we risk receiving nothing in return. Yet, mysteriously, something always does seem to come back to us - if we're prepared to see it.

It's interesting that we've adopted the term hospitality as a blanket term for the tourism and food services industries and parts of the entertainment industry. This tends to limit the term to a set of ‘fee for service' transactions. But despite this narrowing of the definition, people, it seems, still look for more - like there is yearning for the broader, deeper meaning of true hospitality. Kerry Packer's recent death has led to the recounting of the numerous stories about the man. Some focus on his gruffness in the use of power. Some no doubt are apocryphal. But some shine a light on acts of selfless service towards Packer, typically with a surprising payoff. Again, we'll never know for sure if they are true but they make great parables - stories to exemplify the mystery of this thing called hospitality. Stories such as the time when a polo game ended in the English countryside and Packer asked the team to follow him for some refreshments. It was closing time at the first pub they came to and the innkeeper told them the kitchen was closed and there was nothing he could do. Similarly the second pub was closing but the innkeeper offered his own services to whip us some sandwiches and a few rounds of drinks, if the party could wait a while. At the end of the evening the innkeeper totalled the bill at 150 pounds and gave it to the media magnate. The media magnate though wrote out a cheque for the 100,150 pounds. It was all for the innkeeper to keep, said Packer, as long he went back to the first pub and showed the first innkeeper what he had missed out on. Interestingly on our recent trip to New Zealand Heather and I noticed the phenomenon of real hospitality making a positive contrast to regular service. Many establishments just operated ‘by the rule of quid pro-quo' swapping service for money. A very few participated in the mystery of hospitality, going a few extra steps in serving us without the guarantee of extra return. Each is on our list to suggest to others as ‘must visit' places.

But true hospitality is of course not just about meals and drinks and beds. It should occupy a place in all of our endeavours. Certainly at St David's it must occupy an important place in our church life. After all, our congregation's purpose holds as a starting point to Offer a Supportive Community, an affirming presence and what we have in mind, when we say that, is true hospitality. For in order to go on and help people to learn, to grow spiritually and to participate in outreach themselves (as the other parts of our purpose suggest) those who come here must feel a strong sense of welcome, a strong sense of acceptance, a strong sense that whoever they are, we want to extend something to them for which we are not seeking any return.

In many ways we do this well. But there are many ways we can do it better. And doing it really well, I suggest, will take a new sense of humility. Humility in this sense is not an act of blind submission. It is a willingness to empty ourselves of definitive pre-conceptions and dogmatic mindsets. It is the opening love stanza in the dance of hospitality. It says "I respect that my way may not be the only way. I will listen to your way too and we will learn from each other." Consequently it is the first step of welcome and of the chance to be of service to another.

Our Gospel reading for today demonstrates the difficulty of letting go of an entrenched mindset. Jesus is gathering his disciples into community. The new disciple Nathanael - a man in whom there is a sense of rectitude, of rule book stiffness - assesses Jesus importance on the basis of a purported minor miracle that Jesus does. Seeing the miracle he calls Jesus "the Son of God, ...the King of Israel!" Yet is Jesus ministry really about miracles and grand titles and prophecy fulfilled in this sense? Is it about "who Jesus is?" OR is it about "what Jesus did," and what through his example he keeps doing? This is only one of numerous scriptural occasions where pre-conceived notions prevent a broader awareness, amongst disciples and others. Yet as New Zealand theologian John Bluck puts it,

God's truth has a habit of being packaged in dislocating and disconcerting ways. Someone we think is blind sees things we can't; someone we thought was dumb hears things we ought to hear, something we treated as ugly turns out to be beautiful.[1]   

What Jesus did, in his humility, was risk seeing and risk hearing and risk sensing the beauty. In humility, in letting go of the things that bind us into a dogmatic mindset, we can do the same.

Our path to real hospitality, radical hospitality, counter-cultural hospitality in this place requires us to risk humility. For when a new person peers into our midst and says "I've got a new idea." "I've got a creative thought." or "I'd like to try this."  we can then say "With love as our guide, you're welcome to explore that with us here."  As Canadian Jesus researcher David Galston puts it,

...We simply have to learn to admit and understand that we are all human. No one knows the answer. There is no correct way to follow the teaching of ... Jesus and no correct way to do church with ... Jesus. ....The philosopher James Carse once said that there are no rules to make us obey the rules. What he was trying to do in that statement was get us behind the surface of our habits and norms to see that there really is no foundation to life at all. Once we see the empty space, if we can, we also see radical freedom. With freedom, and I mean not....freedom as ideology but human freedom as emptiness, comes awakening..... Jesus, taken seriously is the permission to break the habit of Christianity. So go forward and be habit breaking.[2]

Each week, in this place, are activities that encourage us to seek the empty space, find the freedom, break the habit. Then, rather than being anxious about losing our old dogmas, we can be at peace in our diversity of thought and know that we are closer than we have ever been, to living like Jesus....to living with real hospitality.

[1] Bluck, J. The Giveaway God (2001) WCC Publications, Geneva, p32

[2] Galston, D. Postmodernism, the Historical Jesus, and the Church in The Fourth R, September/October 2005.

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One of the activities of my life is being convener of the Anti-Poverty Awards for Young Victorians. The awards for 2008 will soon be launched and when they are the details of the awards will be at the site http://www.antipovertyawards.org.au/ . In preparation for this year's awards I was looking back over my address to a previous year's award presentation. It not only related the spirit of the awards but also the spirit of attempting to live a faith-filled life. Here's what I wrote:  

John Lennon has a lot to answer for. At pivotal dates throughout the year his "So this is Christmas" plays on endless loop inside my head. It is a musical conscience... conscience because the next line asks "So this is Christmas ...and what have you done?"

John, what do you mean?..... Is there accusation in the question "What-HAVE-you-done!" or am I guilty of inaction "What have YOU done?" International Anti-Poverty Sunday is one of those pivotal dates. The song plays in my head. What have you done? What have you done? And in the midst of Make Poverty History campaigns and Millennium Development Goals what has our little faith community - stuck smack bang in the middle of a mass of self-sufficiency of Canterbury - done?

The fundamental difficulty with self-sufficiency is not so much that people don't give of themselves, (although that might be a consequence of it). The fundamental difficulty is that that people don't "take" .... or more specifically they see themselves as on a mission to ‘rise above' vulnerability. If we reach the magic goal of self-sufficiency, we don't have to immerse ourselves in the issues and dilemmas of our community. We don't  have to share our problems with the world. We don't have to seek solutions in society. And as a consequence of all that we certainly don't have to have society bringing its problems to us. We lose the capacity to share.

By accident of birth my faith tradition is Christianity. Its stories have moved from oral to written, been translated across languages, been interpreted and reinterpreted, been used selectively and opportunistically. Yet, for all of this, the stories of a young bloke named Yeshua still flicker with an inextinguishable flame, a heavy bias towards life! And one of the ways this Yeshua fanned the flame, it seems to me, is to invite people into connection, collaboration, community. Rich or poor, beggar or tax collector we need "the other," we need to take and give. We need to share.

If this little faith community values that message, then it needs to share it, humbly and carefully with the World. And over three years of Anti-Poverty Awards I think our emphasis on this message has grown markedly. That is, we are looking to recognise and support young people who say "This is not about me giving the World ‘an answer' to poverty. This is about me being willing to dedicate my life to walking humbly with fellow humanity, to taking on board its wisdom and being able to share my wisdom when it is suitably ripe and I know it is ready for sharing."

Practice Makes Whole

I recently experienced the funeral of my longest lived friend. We shared many things including a Christian faith and the day of our birth - even though our birth years were at opposite ends of the twentieth century. But equally at "different ends" were some of our core understandings of the Christian faith as well. If labels were appropriate I might have called her faith "rigid." Her rejoinder might have been that mine was "loose." But for all of the perceived truth in such labels it was impossible to have an argument about faith-understanding with my friend. I don't mean that "she was a dear, sweet old lady and you didn't want to argue with her." I mean that something in her told you - right at the point of engagement - that she understood that surface understandings and human arguments weren't, ultimately, what faith was all about. It was an amazing paradox to see someone so deeply convinced about their surface level understandings and yet equally convinced that there was something deeper - something more important.

According to one of her eulogists, my friend thought she was not much good at "spreading her faith." Now the faith sharing she wasn't good at was the sharing of strictures, prescriptions, checklists and definitives of the surface level. Yet she was expert at sharing how her radical (that is, deep rooted) trust in God led her beyond her own agenda - led her to be an agent of hospitality to families on post-war farms across the Mallee; led her to engage faithfully in prayer as a connection to God, led her to use the Bible as a guidebook to personal humility - and - led her put aside a comfortable eastern Melbourne lifestyle to practice midwifery in Papua New Guinea.
 

There is a Sufi parable about a banquet where the king is yet to take his place at the table. A dishevelled man walks in to the banquet hall and takes a place in the king's seat. The prime minister, incensed, asks who the dishevelled man thinks he is. To questions of whether he is a cabinet minister or king the man says "No. Higher."

Are you then God?" asks the prime minister.

"No. Higher" says the man.

"That is impossible" says the prime minister, "nobody is higher than God."

"That nobody" says the man, "is me."

My friend seemed also to take the role of "that nobody." She was so fundamentally humble that she seemed always to be getting herself out of the way so that you saw her "through God's lens" or "on the other side of God" or "transparent to the light of God" or as "God acting through." To experience her was to experience Christian Good News - to experience pure evangelism. This article is about our opportunity to "experience evangelism" within the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA).

Brad Harris's article explores the concept of evangelism and some of the difficulties we (the UCA) appear to have with the concept. As always it is an insightful and provocative piece of writing by Brad. However in the call to action on evangelism I notice that there is typically a frenetic sense evident. "It needs action." "What do we do?" "Five years to respond." I want to relieve myself of such a frenetic burden, so this article is less about avoiding a perceived institutional melt-down and more about being authentic transmitters of God's light.

To further my argument (and because we know evangelism and "Good News" are etymologically the same) it will help to offer a definition of "Good News." There is neither scope nor space to develop this definition or the support for it, so I offer it with some frustration that may be shared by the reader. Nevertheless I see "Good News" as the realisation (made known to Christians in the event of  Jesus of Nazareth's life and death and carried on from that point through the body of Christ) that the human urging towards separateness and selfhood (which is necessary, in part for evolution but ultimately leads to spiritual and physical death) can be moderated through participation in a divine dance towards wholeness. Simple, more psychological language might be that it is possible, by moderating the ego, to enter a spiritual realm.

Like all concepts that are difficult to master however, such moderation requires practice - just as my friend practiced individually and in community. Whilst the subject of Christian practices is a large one, here I only want to start the conversation with a few basic points about Christian practices. And I want to suggest that to be authentic ego moderators (or evangelists) we need some "fluid re-traditioning" of the practices.  What fluid re-traditioning realises is that tradition is a "why' word and not a "how" word. This means that tradition is about a practical effect (why we do it) rather than a particular way of producing that effect (how we do it). Knowing this opens great scope for creativity that can be applied to our practiced traditions. Reshaping our approach to evangelism - being an experience of "Good News" - will require such creativity in our practices. Here are some simple suggestions for where to start:

Knowing ourselves and one another more deeply: If you are currently a member of a Christian faith community, what is the depth of post-worship-service conversation? From the conversations I've heard I suspect we need to re-teach the art of conversation. Think of it as a starting point for learning the practise of spiritual friendship. If I can't create the place to ask "but how are you really" I can't begin to create the type of community where we help each other with ego moderation -  a community of evangelists.

Making space: Soren Kierkegaard[1] famously noted that the true person of prayer "simply attends." Like or loathe such a provocation it is true that ninety percent of corporate prayer I see offered in UCA settings "speaks to God." If there are forty different prayer instances at a yearly Synod meeting might they offer forty different ways of being transparent to God? Might not different people appreciate different ways of placing themselves in the humility of the divine dance?

Connecting the Christian story to our lives: Our primary practice vehicle in this area is the offering of a sermon. I am not anti-sermon. Front-and centre delivery has its uses. Yet I estimate that about 1000 person hours a week is expended on sermon preparation within the Uniting Church in Victoria and Tasmania alone at a cost of approximately $38 000 per week. At the same time educators tell us that extended verbal presentation is one of the least successful engagement techniques. What are the new ways of merging scholarly reflection with input of personal experience from greater numbers of people, for the ebb (ego advancement) and flow (ego moderation) that is evident in scripture is our story too!

Acting justly in the world: The Uniting Church's substantive work in social justice is essential and the people of the Uniting Church are held up as "generous" and "concerned." If I offer a comment in this area I am most often confronted with "what more can we do?" Yet I am not looking for more - "more concern" or "more charity". What I want us to do is rediscover the practice of stewardship. Our UCA squabbles about "holding on" to material possessions suggest we need to relearn this practice. True custodianship is the goal - the sense of "take what you really need and pass on the rest" as is so evident in the (ego moderating) reflections of the early Jesus movement.

What I have written in this article may not seem like the usual reflections on the subject of evangelism. After all isn't evangelism something you "do" to spread the message? Shouldn't we get cracking with it? But if we are going to attempt to spread the Good News, then I first want to see us authentically "being an experience of Good News." It's time to re-learn the tradition.

[1] Prayer: Whatever Comes to Thee; Papirer X, A, 229

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