Courtesy: Tim Challies, challies.com

Mightn’t it be true that sometimes God lowers our standard of living to raise the standard of our giving!?

This meme is one where I feel very ambivalent (see original at end of this post). I normally like Tim Challies‘ illustrated quotes. And I understand Alcorn is a solid evangelical. And I know nothing of the context of this thought Challies has featured from Alcorn’s works. [* see below for update.] No doubt he says much that’s good. 

And no doubt the Bible talks about prosperity and plenty at times. And if we prosper, we should be generous.

But still I get nervous about prosperity talk. And I want to push back on this quote.

I am thinking of the widow’s mite, of course, in Mark 12:41-44. 

I am thinking of the Macedonians’ generosity, in 2 Corinthians 8:2, and following.

Just pause a moment and actually look the references up! Their generosity welled up in the context of a severe trial that God willed for them.

I am also thinking of an architect I knew, whose income fluctuated widely depending on business, who always insisted on putting something in the offertory bag even when there was no income (or negative income through continuing business expenses), and was (I believe) still generous when a big job paid off.

We learn dependence on God when our income goes down. We learn to live simply. We are tested to discover whether we can still keep being generous to others.

And conversely I am thinking that sometimes greater riches are a great danger (1 Timothy 6:9)!

Proverbs 30:8-9

…give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’…

+++

* UPDATE: A friend supplied this photo from Alcorn’s book for context, under a heading called “When God prospers us, why?” which occurswithin a chapter refuting prosperity theology.

I also appreciate Tim Challies taking the time to comment below graciously and pointing me to the context of the quote. Totally fair enough.

It’s accompanied by the claim that Facebook is banning Christians from sharing pictures like this and so we should all protest by sharing the image.

Firstly, please pause to note the irony that you read the information and saw the picture via the medium which is supposed to have banned it!

But secondly, I wonder that more Christians don’t check their outrage longer in order to fact-check the reliability of the info.

As it happens this meme has been circulating the internet since 2012 – i.e. for at least two Christmases prior to this one! A quick check of the Snopes or Hoax Slayer websites would have de-bunked it.

Given Facebook permits all sorts of rot from both extreme and silly viewpoints, is this allegation of censorship of Christians really plausible? Or does it just make us seems unduly sensitive and gullible?

Proverbs 23:23 says:

Buy the truth and do not sell it; get wisdom, discipline and understanding.

Lets save our energies for genuine and serious cases of censorship and persecution. Once again the advice to ignore it seems worth considering.

[P.S. To all my dear friends I have already ‘chipped’ for passing this meme on, I am not mad at you. I’m not trying to embarrass you personally. The fact so many committed and thoughtful Christians have passed it on shows that it’s an easy mis-step to make in the social media space. (I’ve made a few of my own!) I’d just like to help us avoid similar mistakes more often in the future.]

Photo: istockphoto.com

I’m not marketer, but I’ve heard more than once there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I guess there’s exceptions to the rule, but not too often when you are trying to get your product onto people’s radar.

In recent times, my digital friends, mostly Christian but also others with a moral compass, have protested against:

• a computer game which apparently involves running women over with cars;
• the screening on TV of an American football variant which involves women wearing skimpy underwear as the competition uniform;
• the visit of some sort of dating coach to Australia with offensive views about women.

In each case, the suggested protest involves sharing the link to a blog critique or petition site. And this almost always involves Facebook picking up as its preview the picture of the very person or practice you are protesting against!

In each case, until then I had been barely aware of the product, if not completely unaware, so I’m sorry if I got a detail wrong.

But as the protest spread in that viral digital way, I kept getting the image shoved in my face through my Facebook feed. Ironically it was by my friends, who don’t want this sort of thing being promoted!

Counter-productively, this can lead your friends into temptations we might not otherwise have faced. (“I might just click on that link to find out how bad it is…”) At the very least, it can become an unwelcome distraction.

Here’s a couple of alternatives.

1. Ignore it. Don’t give it any air. Don’t give it any extra publicity. Being ignored is a promoter’s nightmare, so help make it a flop and ignore the offensive product.

I wonder if the wisdom of Proverbs 26:20 could sometimes be applicable here.

Without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down.

2. Keep the image out of it. If you must share a protest, then encourage the protest in a way that does not keep bringing the offensive image to everyone’s attention. Risk that you won’t get the visual hook. Or use a different image that does not serve to highlight the product or person you are protesting.

Trust that the merits of the case you outline without a sensational image will persuade people to join you.

Naïve, I know.

I guess I am struggling with how to apply Ephesians 5:11-12 –

Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.

Some of these things need to be exposed. But the Apostle says that sometimes the details should not be mentioned, let alone inadvertently promoted.

And context suggests that most of all, it’s the gospel light of Jesus that should do the exposing.

~

Tony Payne: Phillip, The Briefing was really your idea. You drew together the resources to get it started, and you tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to drive it. What were you hoping to achieve?

Phillip Jensen: Well, partly it was because there was an obvious need. The publishing of Christian material in Australia was in a slump. The Australian Church Record had just closed. Southern Cross was not really addressing the issues. And most of the book publishing that was happening was controlled by the Brits and Americans, neither of whom were very interested in Australia or Australian authors—except as some cream on the cake for their bottom line.

So there was a dearth of opportunity for getting Australian material in printed form into people’s hands. And the arrival of desktop publishing made it possible for little people to start new publishing ventures in a way that hadn’t previously been possible.

And so we started (as the Church Missionary Society likes to say) in a small way, not with books but with The Briefing.

TP: Which in the beginning was just 11 pieces of paper, printed on one side only, with big margins.

PJ: But it was very good quality paper if I remember rightly, with a very nice font.

TP: Palatino I think—the height of 80s elegance.

PJ: The goal was really to seed and grow ideas, to explore evangelical theology and its implications for ministry—and to do that with our friends. We were building a community of like-minded evangelicals who wanted to see evangelical theology play out in their ministry practice. It was very personal and relational. In the early years, we would have known almost every subscriber personally.

TP: What were the key issues we dealt with, do you think— in terms of the theology and the ministry practice that flowed from it?

PJ: That’s a hard question to answer without understanding the background. One way of grasping the background is to say that in 1959 we had a united evangelistic effort, whereby all the denominations brought everyone they knew into the Sydney Showground and Cricket Ground to hear Billy Graham, and saw thousands converted. Five years later, a similar-sized crowd went to hear The Beatles preach the antithesis of the Christian gospel.

There was an incredible swing. 1968 is the year that people often point to as the year of great cultural revolution across the world, but it didn’t occur in a vacuum; and it didn’t stop there. In 1972, Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister and transformed our political landscape, for good and for ill. No-fault divorce came in, and changed the meaning and culture of marriage.

Nominalism in church life basically disappeared. It had begun to wane in the 60s with the rise of television, but by the 70s it had all but evaporated. At first we rejoiced in it, because the mixed or compromised nature of church life (with a large number of nominal members) was always a difficulty in ministry. But in due time we sorrowed in it, because our evangelistic opportunities diminished. Previously, we evangelized the nominals who were with us every Sunday in church. We evangelized their children in Sunday School. You never had to go outside church life to evangelize.

But all that changed. It seemed that, almost overnight, Christianity had become a marginal presence in our society.

In the midst of this rapid change, we had to rethink Christianity. The Uniting Church, which came into existence around this time, expressing the liberal wing of Christianity, basically accommodated itself to these massive cultural shifts, and went out of business very quickly. They used to have big youth groups—the Methodist and Presbyterian youth groups—but they started to run dances and all kinds of things to keep up with how the culture was changing. And in their accommodation to the culture they saw major decline quite quickly. They just lost the plot.

Accommodation was one strategy. The other was to retreat into a Christianized ghetto, to head back into the pre-war culture of British Empire Anglicanism, with its robes and dog collars and prayer books. In many ways, this was very attractive for evangelical Anglicans, because we loved the Book of Common Prayer and the 39 Articles because they expressed the Reformed character of Anglicanism.

But this was not attractive to the outsider at all. It was no longer reaching the culture or understanding the culture. It was just culturally weird.

So we had to change and modernize—radically and quickly—without changing our theology. And that is very difficult for Anglicans to do—because our theology is connected with our Prayer Book and how we do church. Our theology is practised, not just taught.

This was the challenge of the 70s and early 80s: how do you change your practice without changing your theology? People tried all manner of things. Many were ineffective; many were wrong because they shifted the theology; many of them were just daft.

I was very keen not to shift our theology. Mind you, I certainly did things that were ineffective and daft—because we didn’t know what to do or how to do it.

By the late 80s when The Briefing was launched, I think we had found our voice—the voice of what I would call ‘Reformation Anglicanism’ (that is, from the 16th century) and ‘Evangelical Anglicanism’ (that is, from the 18th century), expressed in a language and a practice that reached out to contemporary Sydney and Australia. And that’s what we were giving voice to in The Briefing. It was arguing for the changes we needed to make, and against the changes that were wrong to make.

TP: What were the key changes that needed to be made?

PJ: Well, it affected everything we were doing.

Take one example: it came down to little things like how you took up the offertory in church. We stopped taking up the offertory. We left the box at the back, because we didn’t want to communicate to non-Christian visitors that we were after their money; instead, we wanted to encourage the Christians to give out of generosity and their commitment to the vision of the gospel.

Now, passing the plate was a very old and venerable tradition. In the Reformation it was passed for the poor, not for the sake of the clergy or the running of the church. In some ways, putting money in a plate is a lovely expression of fellowship.

But for a range of reasons—particularly to do with the Wells Scheme of the 60s, where we had gone around to every nominal Anglican in the suburb and badgered them for money to support the church—there was a palpable negativity about money. Even in the 70s and 80s, when many of those nominals were no longer in church, the latent hostility and suspicion about the church being after your money was still very strong.

So with all this in mind, we looked carefully at 2 Corinthians 7-9, and asked: what would this mean for the practicalities of how we collect money at church? We then approached the congregation about taking their financial responsibilities seriously and generously from the heart—and it was extraordinary. The amount of money we were given vastly increased, even though we stopped passing the plate. It was amazing how much people gave when they gave from the heart, as the Scripture taught, rather than out of convention, as our history taught.

Now that kind of thing we did in every area of church life. As we read and studied the Scriptures, we looked at what we were doing and said, “Let’s work out from first principles what we can or can’t do, what we should or shouldn’t do, in this place and time”.

It affected the language we used—for example, expressing the biblical concept of ‘sin’ by talking about it being ‘rebellion against God’, because for most Australians ‘sin’ was a confused and confusing word, mostly to do with sex.

Or it meant training our people to take the gospel to their homes and neighbourhoods and workplaces, rather than thinking that evangelism would take place primarily in church (as it once had). It meant taking off the robes and dog collars of a former age and dressing in a way that didn’t put up a cultural barrier.

It affected everything.

TP: Would you call that ‘contextualization’?

PJ: I wouldn’t, no.

TP: Why not?

PJ: Because it’s a trendy word that takes us in the wrong direction. It puts the emphasis on the relativism of different contexts instead of the importance of taking God’s word with obedient seriousness, regardless of the context. It makes the context sovereign rather than seeking to change the context by the message of the gospel. Contextualization usually degenerates into accommodation, and fails to call the context to repent.

We were seeking not to modernize the gospel message but to recapture the gospel message, because (if you like) ‘the context’ no longer allowed our previous theological and evangelistic sloppiness to continue.

We were just seeking to be obedient to what the Scriptures were saying and applying them to our situation—which we should have been doing a long time before the 60s revolution. If we had, we wouldn’t have suffered as much from that revolution.

TP: So the Bible and its theology should continually drive what we’re doing in practice, and critique and reform what we’re doing in practice—not just at the moment of crisis.

PJ: Nor just because we’re in a new context. It should always be what we’re doing. If we’re going to retain our theology but change our practice, the Scriptures must keep driving what our theology is. So teaching the Scriptures was fundamental.

Now the centrality of Scripture wasn’t a new idea. John Stott had come in the 60s and encouraged us to be expositors, and modelled it for us; Broughton Knox had been teaching for years about the centrality of the Bible and exposition; John Chapman (‘Chappo’) and Dudley Foord taught us to do it, and set up the School of Preachers, and so on. So the idea of expository preaching of the Scriptures was already there and active. And I’m an heir of that.

Likewise, biblical theology had been developed by Donald Robinson and then Graeme Goldsworthy. So teaching the Scriptures as a whole, with a Christ-centredness of understanding, was part of our inheritance. And that was distinctively important.

Where we moved was: if that’s what the Bible says, and we are preaching and expounding that, let’s change what we’re doing to be in accordance with it. It was the practical outworking of that movement of expository Bible teaching and biblical theology.

We weren’t alone in it by any means. Lots of others were trying to do the same. And they were pushing all kinds of different things that needed changing. There was a group of brothers who were captured by the idea of lay eldership and were trying to create lay eldership within the structures of their parish. They were grappling with whether the parish council could be the lay elders, or whether there needed to be a different structure, and how should they be appointed, and what’s their job, and so on.

I never particularly focused on that discussion, but I’m just saying I wasn’t the only one trying to reform our practice in light of the Scriptures.

However, some of the ‘reformers’ were taking us off beam. The charismatic movement was trying to do it. The feminist movement came a little later, but also were trying to influence us. I guess in my period of history, they were two of the groups and movements we had to struggle most with.

The charismatic movement was a reformation from within. But theirs was a movement of spiritual experience rather than expositional Bible teaching. The aim was always twofold: evangelize the unbeliever and spiritualize the believer. But the second aim changed the theology of the gospel very significantly, and the resultant splitting of the evangelical cause in the late 60s and 70s was quite dramatic. It was called in those days the ‘neo-pentecostal’ movement—it was not outside but within the mainstream churches, and the aim was the spiritualization of the churches. It was a movement that sought to change not just the practice but also the theology, and so had to be resisted.

TP: From the early 80s and onwards, many of the neo-pentecostals left the mainstream denominations to join the new charismatic churches that were starting and growing—the Christian Life Centres, the Christian City Churches, and so on (the precursors of Hillsong and similar churches today). They were a challenge to Reformed evangelicals more from without than within. And this came out in The Briefing in the early 90s when John Wimber came to town. It was a call to evangelicals to join a new movement.

PJ: The ‘third wave’ as it was called. And it was very seductive to begin with. You see, up to that point the charismatic movement was nearly universally Arminian and taught a two-stage Christian experience—to accept Jesus as Saviour in stage one, and then to be baptized in the Spirit and yield to him totally as Lord in the second stage (to put it kind of crudely).

John Wimber accepted John Stott’s critique of all that, and agreed that there wasn’t a two-stage process. He was also taught by some former Dallas Seminary people not to be so blatantly Arminian.

And so there was this new movement that was accepting and promoting all the spiritual power experiences of pentecostalism, but not going along with the Arminian two-stage theology of pentecostalism. At first, it really rattled us—because the normal arguments or defences didn’t apply, and didn’t work.

It took time to listen carefully to what Mr Wimber was actually saying, rather than lumping him in with people he disagreed with. But once several people put their minds to it, and read his books and so on, it became apparent that this was a proposed reformation of the church that was theologically wrong. It was seriously misleading in a number of ways, and caused all manner of trouble to a lot of people. And so we had to resist it—which was difficult and painful.

TP: Yes, it was painful. Many people were very grateful for our critique of Wimber’s teaching, but we received plenty of complaints as well.

PJ: I remember we did get some flak for opposing it and resisting it. But when it tipped into the Toronto Blessing, as it did only a few years later, all kinds of people said, “You were right; it was mad”. But it was mad before the Toronto Blessing. It’s just that Christians tend to be generous people (as we should be) and so we’re gracious—but in our generosity we mustn’t be naive. There’s that lovely verse in 1 Corinthians: in understanding be mature; in sin, be babes. We tend to get that muddled.

TP: The problem is that experientialist religion, if we can call it that, keeps emerging in new guises all the time, even though the particular theological issues and practices will be different.

PJ: And if we don’t keep teaching about the dangers and errors of experientialist religion, some new version will come along with slightly different features, and again we will be confused and drawn away.

People don’t like us to be negative—and who can blame them? Who wants to be negative, or to be thought of as negative? But if you don’t keep explaining both what is right and what is wrong, you are not teaching clearly and people are just not prepared when something comes along. The Bible is full of negative as well as positive teaching—Jesus himself was not short of negating error.

TP: Looking back over The Briefing, we’ve published something like over 6 million words in the past 26 years, and only a very small proportion of those words could be described as polemical or critical or ‘negative’. So it’s interesting that we gained a reputation as the polemical magazine and for being negative—even though the vast bulk of what we published was very warm and positive.

PJ: I think there are three reasons for that. Firstly, the logical force of negating is more powerful than affirming. It tends to be more memorable. Secondly, when we negate, we step on somebody’s toes and they complain—not about the truth or falsehood of the argument but about their toes hurting. And thirdly, it’s a bit like newspapers: they’re full of bad news stories, because that’s what people want to read and talk about. And so with The Briefing. People don’t remember the good news stories, but the bad ones: “Did you see that issue?!”

TP: Over the past 26 years in The Briefing, we’ve played some role in gathering the evangelical community and speaking into that community about theology and ministry. What’s your view about where that community is heading now?

PJ: In any movement—and there’s a whole sociology to this—there is a central drive or theme that gives it momentum. As you push forward that central theme, so you attract more people to it. Over time, as it grows and becomes popular or effective, outsiders want to gain access to it and claim some membership or ownership of it. And a new generation of leaders emerge who want to establish themselves as leaders and take it into new directions.

Eventually as it moves into a phase of organization and institutionalism, it loses its central drive and growth. People start trying to attract fellow travellers so as to expand their organization, rather than letting the movement increase the organization by attracting people to its core beliefs. It seeks to accommodate people on the edges who are not really part of it, and so it loses its focus and momentum.

Our central focus is biblical Christianity; it’s the gospel. As long as we are pushing in that direction, the changes we make—the new songs we sing, the different ways we conduct meetings, the new ways we reach out in evangelism, and so on—can be good and productive. They can shift and be improved and develop.

But evangelicalism keeps going through surges in size and influence, where it becomes organizational and institutional and substantial. And then it becomes worth being an evangelical because it’s the only game in town. No-one at the moment is out there hawking liberal theology. There’s just no mileage in it. If you want to gather a crowd, you can’t stand up and say, “I’m a liberal”. No-one is going to join you in your phone box.

But if you say you’re an evangelical, then all kinds of people will be willing to get behind that—but what is ‘that’? If it’s just an institution or a sociological grouping or a particular personality, then it’s not the real thing. It’s got to be genuine evangelicalism. 

TP: How should we define genuine evangelicalism?

PJ: Well, you can describe evangelicalism sociologically: this group of people have certain characteristics and features. You can describe it historically: this is what the ‘evangelicals’ did, or were, and so on.

But an evangelical will describe evangelicalism from the gospel. Evangelicalism seeks to preach the gospel by being faithful in exposition of the Scriptures and being obedient to what we read there. That’s the heart of it. The aim all the time is not to become new lawmakers, but to apply the Scriptures such that people will understand the gospel better.

TP: I also hear people asking questions like, “Is it possible or valid to believe X or Y, and still be an evangelical?” I don’t think that’s a question that an evangelical would be particularly interested in.

PJ: No, the evangelical question is always: “In response to the gospel, and in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ as he speaks to us in the Scriptures, what should we believe and do?” And pursuing godliness and holiness in this way will almost always lead you to be out of step at significant points with the world and its culture.

It’s sad to see people who want to wear the label ‘evangelical’, but only up to the point where they might be disliked for it. And so they constantly accommodate.

They want to be more accommodating to our pagan culture, so they are constantly finding what is good in our culture to affirm in the hope of building bridges so as to share the gospel; or finding something in Christianity that our culture might still regard as good, and using that to build a bridge. But when we keep affirming the pagan culture in what it regards as good, in order for people to like us and cross over a bridge into Christianity, we have to remember that traffic on a bridge goes two ways. What we embrace or affirm or accommodate today ends up changing us and our churches tomorrow.

It’s the same battle we’ve always had. We don’t want to be disliked for critiquing experientialist religion and so we move to accommodate the charismatic end of the spectrum, and leave our people open to all the serious spiritual problems that result. Or we want to be more institutionally accepted and so we take up robes and collars, and bow and curtsey to bishops, and get onto committees, and so on. Or we don’t like to be put down by the intelligentsia or the chattering classes and so we reframe the gospel message into politically correct pap.

TP: Speaking of ‘political correctness’, do you think our relationship with society as a whole, and with the government in particular, has changed since The Briefing started?

PJ: Oh I think it has, and this will be a huge issue for the future of our evangelical community. In the 20th century and earlier, the British sense of being a ‘Christian nation’ undergirded what we did. That is now gone.

And just as the 60s and 70s meant that we had to rethink church, so now I think we’re going to have to rethink citizenship—because we are in dire peril now of all manner of restriction of religious freedoms. It’s going to be a hard time for Christians in the next generation.

And again, you’ll have the accommodators, and you’ll have those that withdraw into the ghetto. What we’re going to need are people who will get their Bibles out, and work out afresh how Christians are going to be Christians in society.

TP: In many ways, that’s been the agenda of The Briefing over all these years—to encourage and give examples of bringing the Bible and its theology to bear on the issues that face us. But over the next 25 years, it won’t be The Briefing providing that lead, because a paper-based magazine is no longer the best way, or even a viable way, of pursuing that goal. Desktop publishing has been overtaken by digital publishing.

We’re not going to stop encouraging, promoting and stimulating that process of biblical reflection. But the vehicle or the medium will be different.

PJ: That’s actually completely consistent with what The Briefing has been arguing since day one. The important thing is not the medium or the institution but the movement and the message. We’ve got to keep changing how we do things as times and circumstances change, but without changing the theology of what we do.

TP: Which is kind of where you are up to personally as well, isn’t it? It’s a time of change for you as well—you’ve announced that you’re finishing up as Dean of St Andrew’s Cathedral at the end of this year. What does the next phase look like for you?

PJ: I’ve reached the stage where I can choose to spend time on the core aspects of pastoring a church, and can leave aside the associated work of committees and building maintenance. I think it’s now time for me to use the energy God has given me to concentrate on preaching and teaching the gospel, and recruiting and training the next generation—but without the burden of being responsible for a church.

So I’m not retiring—just resigning from the Cathedral.

Next year, I will be moving into a little organization called ‘Two Ways Ministries’ which is aiming to train evangelistic Bible teachers. It sounds so obvious to ‘preach the gospel by teaching the Bible’, but we tend to evangelize without the Bible, and teach the Bible without evangelizing. ‘Two Ways Ministries’ is about holding the two things together and showing people why and how we must combine them. So being free from the Cathedral and diocesan responsibilities, I am returning to itinerant preaching, spending more time modelling, recruiting and mentoring evangelists in evangelistic Bible teaching, and continuing to write and create training materials to help all Christians preach the gospel by teaching the Bible.

‘Two Ways Ministries’ is an old thing and a new thing. I’m back to where I started with Chappo in the early 70s, preaching the gospel through Bible teaching and trying to train others to do it. And yet it is a new thing starting up in the Church Missionary Society principle of a small way and seeing how it grows.

For lots of people work is also at the heart of our relationships. A decade or so ago, shows like Friends, Seinfeld, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer told us that our friends were our family. A generation before that they told us that family was family—think of shows like The Cosby Show, The Brady Bunch, or Hey Dad…! But today, isn’t the message from shows like The Newsroom, Grey’s Anatomy, or any of the crime shows like NCIS and CSI, that work is now our family?

Work is, therefore, not just an important part of how we see ourselves and how we explain ourselves to others. It’s also a big part of our culture’s view of life.

But it’s also an area that we sometimes struggle with when we’re trying to think Christianly. We’re okay when we’re talking about the gospel, or about our life together as Christians, or growing in love for one another, or sin and holiness, or trying to make disciples. But for lots of Christians, we’re nowhere near as good at speaking about work, except perhaps as something you should give up in order to do full-time paid Christian ministry. This means that for some of us a big disconnect can develop between our Christian faith and our lives at work, and we’re not quite sure what one has to do with the other.

So how should we think about the value of work in a world that God has made, but which is also going to pass away?

Work in the beginning

The important starting point in our Christian thinking about work is Genesis 1-2. The first thing to say is that work is good. It’s good because God does it. It’s good because creation needs it. And it’s good because mankind was made for it.

The idea that God works is taught to us very clearly:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from his work that he had done in creation. (Genesis 2:1-3)

It’s the very first explicit reference to ‘work’ in the Bible, and it’s all about God’s work of creation.

But God didn’t do his initial work of creation and then just leave things to go on their merry way. He continues to work in the creation, by sovereignly ruling all things. Psalm 104 is just one place that speaks of this work of God (e.g. vv.24-29). This work that God does is delightful, and God delights in it (v. 31).

But work is also good because creation needs it. Thus Genesis 2:5 tell us:

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground…

In other words, right back at the very beginning, there was a time when not much was happening in creation. And the reason was there was no man to work the ground. The creation is good, and very good. But without a man to work the ground, it is somehow incomplete and unfulfilled.

Finally, work in creation is good because it’s what mankind was created for. Not just later on in Genesis 2 when the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it; or even later than that when God brings all the animals to the man to see what he would name them; but even back in Genesis 1:27-28, when:

God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

It’s box 1 of Two Ways to Live, for anyone who has ever been trained in that way of explaining the gospel. God has made us in his image. And he has put us in charge of the world: to rule it, to care for it, to be responsible for it. This is the work we were made for.

One of the immediate implications for our thinking about work is that we often use the word in a much narrower sense than Scripture does. Typically we use the word ‘work’ to refer to our employment, which is why we can so easily get ourselves in knots when we’re speaking about activities that are clearly hard work but which are not employment in the usual sense, such as the work of parenting. Biblically, though, human work includes a whole range of human activities—whether paid or unpaid—that reflect our ruling of creation and which are necessary for the well-being of human communities. Work in the sense of our employment is simply one expression of the much bigger category of work that God has given us to do as his image-bearers in this world. (This is reflected in the rest of this article, by the way: many of the examples apply particularly to our primary ‘workplace’, but are also applicable to broader examples of work, whether it’s part-time employment, raising a family, volunteering as a coach on your children’s sporting team, or any other work that you’re engaged in.)

Peter Orr has helpfully argued elsewhere in this issue that “the work of the Lord” is a specific response to the resurrection of Jesus with specific, Christ-centred, gospel-advancing content, and not the regular work we are engaged in with faithfulness to Jesus. This article is therefore a complement to that position: while not thinking that our regular work is “the work of the Lord” that in itself is the work of God’s kingdom, there’s still a place for talking about how we ought to be faithful and productive in that endeavour. We can and ought to examine how the gospel shapes our lives and our work in the midst of committing ourselves to the work of the Lord.

So here is the starting point for a Christian view of work. Work is good, and we ought to keep affirming its goodness. It’s not a necessary evil that has to be endured so that we can get to the really good stuff of life, which is doing nothing. It hasn’t come into the world because of sin. It’s been there from the beginning. God does it. Creation needs it. We were made for it. It’s good.

Work after the Fall

Of course, the world of Genesis 1-2 is not quite the world we live in now, because the work that God gave mankind to do—the work of ruling the creation under him as his image bearers—is precisely what mankind fails to do. And so the image of God in us is now distorted by our sinful rebellion against God. All of our relationships are affected by this—our relationship with God, our relationships with each other, and our relationship to creation.

As a consequence of sin, and because of God’s judgement against sin, a significant element of difficulty and frustration is now introduced to the work that humanity does. So God announces to Adam:

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it’, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:17-19)

There’s just no getting around it. In a world marked by human sin and rebellion, work is one of the biggest areas of human life that is affected. And any of us who work know what this is like. Work can be frustrating. Work can be tiring. Work can be unfulfilling. Work can be disappointing. Work can be repetitive and boring. Work can be difficult because of the relationships that are there. Work can be difficult because it doesn’t produce the fruit that we want it to, or in the time that we want it to. I think of how many years we did speech therapy with one of our sons; we worked hard, but the progress was so slow! Work can be frustrating because we don’t have the skills we need to do a particular job that is before us. Work can embitter us if we are working hard and it is not recognized.

It just goes on and on. There are so many ways that work is toilsome and frustrating for us. But all of it stems from our rebellion and sin against God, our failure as humanity to do the work that he created us to do—the work of ruling the world under him as his image bearers.

The writer of Ecclesiastes knew about all these things, and he devoted significant time to considering these truths. As a man of considerable means he says of himself:

I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees… I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:4-6, 10-11)

Here is a man for whom literally, in terms of his work, the sky was the limit. Yet when he pauses to take stock of what he has done, he is forced to admit to himself that work ‘under the sun’ done without reference to God our creator and judge is a completely meaningless pursuit. It is meaningless as a means of amassing wealth and possessions, because in the end when you die, whatever you have gained from your work will be left in the hands of another. And it’s also meaningless as a means of securing a reputation, because in the end when you die, within one or two generations you will be completely forgotten.

Admittedly, none of this is particularly positive. Yet it’s such a great help to us to speak about things truthfully, for it is just one case of how the Bible interprets life for us. It teaches us about the world we live in, and explains that the problem of pain and frustration in work is caused by us sinning and falling short of the glory of God, and, rather than ruling the world under him, trying to rule the world without him.

One of the things these truths can help us with, however, is evangelism in the workplace. It’s probably something that many of us find difficult. But recognizing the frustration and pain of work in this world that is so affected by human sin and rebellion can actually give us a doorway to walk through as we try to speak about Jesus.

I heard recently that Billy Graham used to say that in every culture he spoke to, people had these five things in common:

• emptiness and a quest for meaning
• loneliness
• guilt
• a fear of death
• insecurity¹

Are these things true of the people we work with? Of course they are. Because these are the cries-of-the-heart of God’s image-bearers, whose ability to live out their lives as God’s image-bearers is now broken and distorted by sin and rebellion. And what this means is that even if people don’t go about considering life in the systematic way that the writer of Ecclesiastes went about considering life, if we can help them to stop and consider their lives they will be forced to recognize the same sense of vanity and meaninglessness that he was forced to see.

Therefore, one of the things we can do is to help people understand their own experience of life. When they find work to be toilsome and frustrating, we have an opportunity to come alongside them and say, “Yes, work is painful. It is frustrating and toilsome. And can I try and tell you why?” If we can get to this point with people, we really are very close to the gospel.

Work and the gospel

The gospel, of course, is about God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the one by whom and for whom the entire creation has been made. He is the perfect image of God. He is the perfect man. In contrast to the first man, Adam, he came and perfectly ruled the creation under God—in his sinless life, in his sacrificial death, in his resurrection to glory, now at God’s right hand in heaven. If we want to see a man perfectly ruling the world under God, Jesus is the one to whom we must look.

Significantly, there are a few places where Jesus describes his life and ministry using the category of work. In John 4:34, for example, he says:

My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.

In John 17:4, he prays to God his Father:

I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.

This is not a new idea in the Bible. In the Old Testament, God’s work in the world is not just limited to his initial work of creation, or even his ongoing work of sustaining the creation. It includes his special work of salvation (e.g. Josh 24:31; Isa 10:12).

But the Lord Jesus comes along and draws together both threads. His work is the perfect fulfilment of the work God had given to mankind as God’s image-bearers, to rule the world under him. And his work is also the perfect fulfilment of the work that God has done in salvation history. As a result, any thinking that we want to do about our work must now take place in and through him.

In terms of our big work as humanity—the work of ruling the world under God—that only happens now as we accept in faith and obedience that Jesus Christ is Lord. If our ability to rule the world in the way God intended was broken by us stepping out from under God’s authority in sin and rebellion, it follows that the only way for it to be restored is to come back under God’s authority. This is exactly what the gospel calls us to do, as we acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the one who rules all things. Therefore our rule of the world now is carried out as we submit to his rule of the world, and as we seek to please him in all things and serve him in all things.

This means our whole approach to work is now completely transformed. One passage that shows this very clearly is Colossians 3, where Paul gives instructions to wives and husbands (vv. 18-19), to children and fathers (vv. 20-21), and then to slaves and masters (3: 22-4:1).

Admittedly the category of household slaves is not prominent in modern society (though there are similar roles in other cultures) and there are important differences between this role and the situation of work that most of us are familiar with. Yet Paul’s instructions to slaves are clear:

Bondservants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality. (Colossians 3:22-25)

An important question worth probing with these instructions from Paul is what place they have in Colossians. This was a group of Christians in danger of beginning to follow all sorts of human traditions and rules about how they live (2:8-23), in part because of a belief that Christ was not sufficient. Part of Paul’s solution is to show that Christ is totally sufficient (2:9-15, 17). In fact he is more than sufficient: he is absolutely supreme in all things:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:15-19)

In other words, here is a letter that blows our mind with this incredible teaching about Christ—about how exalted he is, and how supreme he is, and how his rule and authority over the church, and indeed over all things, is utterly without contest.

But then we come to the back end of the book and we find all these instructions about the minutiae of daily life, and about my duties as a wife or a husband, or as a child or a father, or as a slave or a master. But how are the details of my daily life, in whichever of these roles that I have, connected to the supreme Lordship of Jesus Christ?

Paul’s answer is that when we get these roles right they will be the very expression of our submission to the supreme Lordship of Jesus Christ. So the slave is taught to work hard, and to obey their earthly masters. They are to do this not only when they are being watched, as people-pleasers. But since Jesus Christ is Lord, and since he is always watching us, they are to work hard, with sincerity of heart, working as to the Lord.

The gospel doesn’t mean that work is now to be despised. It means that our approach to work is transformed. In fact for most of us work will be one of the main areas of life in which our submission to the supreme Lordship of Jesus Christ is to be expressed most consistently. When a Christian goes to the office on Monday morning, they do so as someone who fears the Lord, who loves the Lord, who serves the Lord, and obeys the Lord. That means their motivation at work is not to please men but to please the Lord. And so they will work hard all the time. And they will work sincerely, and with honesty and integrity and godliness and humility and gentleness and patience. For work is an expression of their Christian faith.

This understanding of work under the rule of the Lord Jesus makes sense of some other things. In Ephesians 4:28, for example, Paul gives this instruction:

Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labour, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

For some, who used to steal, their new commitment to honest hard work is the very expression of their repentance and their submission to the Lordship of Jesus. The gospel does not overturn our commitment to work. It re-shapes it and transforms it, and makes our work an expression of our submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Yet the gospel also teaches us that this world is set to pass away, which is why Jesus calls us to seek first the kingdom of heaven, and to store up for ourselves treasures in heaven rather than treasures on earth. This in itself ought to be a constant rebuke to the worldliness by which we can so easily idolize our jobs or our professional lives, or the way that we can let ourselves be defined more by the work that we do than by Christ Jesus our Lord. It ought to rebuke any tendencies in us to let our jobs feed our greed and materialism. All of these things are a particular danger for those of us who are university trained and professionally employed, and who put the work that we do so close to the centre of how we see ourselves.

The gospel confronts all of these worldly tendencies, and it teaches us to keep living in this world, but for the world to come. As a result, for all of us, high on our list of priorities, is a new commitment to seeing the gospel go out into whatever pockets of community we find ourselves in, including our workplace.

This actually liberates us to think in what may be a fresh way about one of the questions that often gets asked concerning Christians and work. The way the question often gets asked is whether I should keep doing my job as a physiotherapist, accountant, teacher, engineer, or whether I should quit my job and go into full-time financially-supported gospel ministry. The problem with asking the question that way is it can hide the real issue. The real issue is whether we are seeking first the kingdom of God; whether we are storing up for ourselves treasures in heaven; whether we have let the Lordship of Jesus Christ completely transform our priorities and values in life, and our sense of identity.

You can do these things as a physiotherapist, accountant, teacher or engineer, and you can do these things in full-time financially-supported gospel ministry. And you can not do these things as a physiotherapist, accountant, teacher or engineer, and you can not do these things in full-time financially-supported gospel ministry. It’s terrible that we must admit such things, but it’s true.

For all of us, the gospel should completely transform our priorities in life, including our priorities at work, so that now in everything that we do, life is to be lived to the glory of God (which means for the salvation of many: 1 Cor 10:31-11:1) and as an expression of our submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. For all of us, that ought to produce a commitment to sharing the gospel that is willing to forsake our friendships, our reputations, our status, our popularity, our being considered as wise in the eyes of the world, or being considered for this or that promotion. For some of us, the gospel will cause such a significant disruption to our priorities in life that we leave the secular workforce and go into full-time financially-supported gospel ministry.

But that final choice, in and of itself, is actually the small question. The big question is about us and the Lord Jesus Christ, and whether we are seeking his kingdom first in all things, including our work.

Work at the end

Understandably, whatever the Bible teaches about work is only fully understood when we consider it alongside what the Bible teaches about rest. In fact, if we look back at Genesis 2:1-3, we find that the Bible has been teaching about rest for as long as it’s been teaching about work, for God worked in creation and then he rested from his work.

In the Ten Commandments, the pattern of God’s work and rest was to become the pattern for Israel, working six days and resting on the seventh (Exod 20:8-11), as she modelled to the surrounding nations what it meant to be the people of God who were enjoying God’s work of salvation. It would not do for Israel to exhibit the same kinds of workaholism that is so prevalent in cities like Sydney today. Later on Israel was meant to enjoy rest in the Promised Land (e.g. Deut 12:10). For a time she did (e.g. 2 Sam 7:1), although it was taken away from her in the judgement of the exile.

Then the Lord Jesus comes along, calling people:

Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)

Ultimately, of course, we will not rest until we take hold of that for which Christ Jesus has taken hold of us: the salvation that will be revealed in the last day, and which will take place in the New Jerusalem, where our songs of praise and thanksgiving will never end. The Bible does not describe this future using the category of work, yet it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to consider it as a joyful work of God’s heavenly people, much as a greater fulfilment of the joyful work the first man and woman were to do. Strictly, though, work will stop, but rest will continue.

I said a stupid thing the other day. I was talking to a neighbour who commented about how busy I was. To which I responded, “Better to burn out than to rust”. What stupid male bravado is encapsulated in those words!

Perhaps as a choice between the two, one is better than the other. But what a foolish response for someone who knows that God doesn’t want me to do either of them. Work hard? Absolutely. Because work is good, and it’s a necessary part of life as God’s image-bearers in this world that God has made. More than that, because we know that Jesus is Lord, and because he is always watching us, therefore we will work as to the Lord. But rest as well? Definitely. Not for the sake of rusting, but rather for the sake of enjoying God’s good provision for our needs, and as an expression of our certain hope that through Christ we will enjoy God and his good work of salvation to the end of the ages.

Recently a friend suggested that Australian churches should consider an Anti-Gambling Sunday like in the United States (September 21). As the Americans said, “Gambling, at any level, is an investment in trouble.”

My friend may possibly have noticed I have a bee-in-my-bonnet on this issue, and so expected a warm endorsement!

Economist.com/graphicdetail, 3 February 2014

In fact, I absolutely despise poker-machines and the damage they do, especially to problem gamblers and their helpless families. And the National Council of Church in Australia has suggested this coming ‘Social Justice Sunday’ (September 28), should be dedicated to raising awareness of the dreadful impact of gambling in Australia. Statistics they cite from The Economist, shows that Australians are the world’s biggest gamblers losing over $1000 per adult per annum, which is more than twice the rate in the USA. Only Singaporeans come close to us.

But for all that, I doubt it’s a good idea to populate our Sunday services and sermons with special themes.

As a pastor with a real interest in social issues, here are few reasons for resisting the push towards more and more special theme days.

1. Christians – because we care – will want to keep adding to the list of special Sundays: gambling, indigenous reconciliation, domestic abuse, abortion, racism, refugees, marriage, poverty, pornography and … each one is important and you could keep the list going. But making each one a set feature every year can inadvertently reinforce the message of moralism – that we are mainly on about a series of moral and social issues.

And that’s not the gospel of Jesus, but the gospel’s fruit. And we must never forget it.

2. If one then shapes the preaching to the theme for the special Sunday, more than very occasionally, you undermine the systematic expository preaching pattern that I think is generally preferable as the bread and butter method of a church’s public teaching life.

3. It can lead to tokenism; we all do a number of these special Sundays to ‘tick the box’ of our moral and social conscience. But we don’t really take the time to engage our people deeply on each issue. It’s generally just not possible in the space of a single Sunday to do more much more than awareness raising.

4. I suspect that real progress in terms of ‘campaigning’ on issues like these happens by individual opinion leaders – whether keen church members or pastors – keeping the pressure on, writing, blogging, lobbying, politicking, with occasional big public efforts seeking to draw the masses in.

As a pastor with responsibility for preaching programs, I know how hard it is to get a good expository series going, organising series break up, making it fit the school term pattern, and so on. If the series then gets interrupted a couple of times with special issue Sundays, so much momentum can be lost.

I think I’d prefer to schedule occasional topical or doctrinal series to deal with social and moral issues. For example, we’ve had a good return with a very occasional 4-5 week break from the sequential expository stuff for “issues facing Christians today”, or “the ethics of life, death and the bits in between”.

Or if I am to have a one-off on gambling or abortion or racism or refugees or the definition of marriage, I’d often prefer the freedom to fit it into natural breaks in the preaching program, rather than the inflexibility of being tied to fixed special purpose Sundays annually on the 3^rd weekend in September or whenever! One should also be alert to seize the opportunity when the passage next in your sequence of expositions gives a natural chance to apply God’s Word to the contemporary social issue.

Of course, if for particular historical reasons, it fits your church to go with a few of these special purpose Sundays important to your culture, then by all means. But do remember, there are other ways of managing it, than just turning over the sermon. It could be by more extended attention to the subject in prayer, by a Minister’s letter in the church bulletin, or perhaps by a well-prepared interview with a member.

And definitely, in my opinion, resist the temptation for the multiplication of special issue Sundays. What do you think?

In a month or two I will be giving my first conference talk.¹

I feel a bit like Paul, if you will allow me to rip a verse out of context: “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling” (1 Cor 2:3 NIV).

Except in my case the fear and trembling come from less godly motivations. I want to succeed. I want this event to succeed. I want to impress people. I want them to like, respect, admire me. I could go on – I’m a type A person! My ambitions are boundless! – but I’d embarrass myself (like I haven’t already) and you, too.

My gut clenches; my mind hazes over. People say, “You’ll be great!” – my mother, who’s not at all biased, plus a few faithful friends who have far more respect for me than I deserve – and all I can think is, “Now there’s further to fall!”. I remind myself that it’s a small conference among friends;² but it doesn’t really help.

There’s just one thing that helps. It’s one of my favourite Bible passages, Philippians 2:1-11. It keeps coming into my head, driven by the Spirit. When I feel the fear welling up, I repeat to myself (and yes, this is pretty much the 1984 version of the NIV, because my brain is stuck there):

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit …

Selfish ambition. Vain conceit. Sums up the worst of my motivations quite nicely.

And the alternative:

…but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

Putting others’ interests above my own. Valuing them more than myself. Doing this for their sake, not mine.

And then the model, Jesus Christ:

Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name …

This isn’t about me. It never was. It’s about me laying down my life for the sake of others. And if, in the process, I get cold toes and a wriggly tummy, well, that’s a small price to pay.

I just pray I can forget myself and serve others for the sake of Christ. Not for my own glory, but for his:

… that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

For his glory.

How does a pastor handle such things?

To be honest I am a little conflicted.

Those who know me personally will know I am all in favour of prayer for the persecuted saints in Iraq and elsewhere.

I just organised and hosted an interdenominational prayer meeting for Iraq last Saturday. Inspired by Open Doors Australia, and in fellowship with about 45 other venues across Australia, about 100 Christians from Anglican, Baptist, independent Evangelical, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, and Reformed Churches united at St Michael’s Cathedral, Wollongong, to Pray for Iraq.  

However I am also a little anxious that we check our sources carefully, and be cautious about passing on some of the most dramatic reports.

Even back on July 14, when I passed on reports of church buildings being burned in Mosul, it turned out that the pictures supplied in web stories of the ISIS invasion of Mosul, were not of burnt churches in Mosul at all, but of churches in Syria and Egypt that had been burned months and even years earlier, albeit, it appears by Islamic extremists in those places.

Still terrible, but it’s not honest reporting to use pictures from other events and to claim they showed churches were burning in Mosul.

This brings me to the “URGENT PRAYER REQUEST” forwarded to me, by my prayerful and well-meaning parishioners…

Date: 24 August 2014 
Subject: Urgent Prayers needed: Latest ISIS atrocities against Christians 

Urgent Prayer Request / Please Pray  and FAST   –  Such evil needs Fasting as well as Prayers

URGENT PRAYER REQUEST!!!!

Please Pray. ..Fast

BREAKING URGENT NEWS! The email below was sent to Benny Mostert from Jericho Walls:

Dear Friends,

Just a few minutes ago I received the following text message on my phone from Sean Malone who leads Crisis Relief International (CRI). We then spoke briefly on the phone and I assured him that we would share this urgent prayer need with all of our contacts.

“We lost the city of Queragosh (Qaraqosh). It fell to ISIS and they are beheading children systematically. This is the city we have been smuggling food to. ISIS has pushed back Peshmerga (Kurdish forces) and is within 10 minutes of where our CRI team is working. Thousands more fled into the city of Erbil last night. The UN evacuated it’s staff in Erbil. Our team is unmoved and will stay. Prayer cover needed!”

What made me wonder about this email was talk of Qaraqosh falling, and that children are being systematically beheaded.

You see, I’d heard these claims at least a fortnight earlier.

In fact, I know that the fall of Iraq’s largest Christian town, Qaraqosh – terrible and sad event – was reported in mainline media almost three weeks ago, (for example, in The Independent (UK) on 7th August). It’s not something that is just happening now.

And when I googled “Benny Mostert Sean Malone Qaraqosh” I discovered this “urgent prayer request” has been circulating on the internet since at least August 9th. I saw other examples on 12th and 19th August. Some (not all) people even passed it on on those later dates, seeming to imply it was as if they had perhaps just received the text message personally and directly a few minutes earlier. Not good.

In addition, I shared a “Fact Checker” article published on August 12 from Joe Carter at the Gospel Coalition, urging caution on the claims of “systematic beheading of children”.

Carter does not deny atrocities have occurred, even impacting children. But he notes that most of the information is second hand, and that evidence supplied has been very patchy, largely from a single source located in America (but re-quoted numerous times). In some cases, there are demonstrable inaccuracies.

Even the very disturbing report circulating from Canon Andrew White (which I have viewed on Youtube) mentions just one specific atrocity against a child, which it appears Canon White did not witness, but was told about. He says other terrible things are happening, which he does not specify (at least in the video I watched).

Again, take the email above, from others, quoting Mostert, quoting Sean Malone. You’ll note, Malone is reported as saying ISIS troops have come “within 10 minutes of where our CRI team is working”. In other words, it seems logical that his reports of systematic beheadings of children cannot come directly from his Crisis Relief International colleagues, since they are not in the territory controlled by ISIS. The reports must be at least third hand.

Again, as Joe Carter says, there have been terrible atrocities occurring. No doubt there may even be worse ones than we have accurate, first hand and substantiated information about.

You might want to nuance Carter on this or that detail himself. However I find Carter’s conclusion important…

As Christians, we have a duty to champion the truth. We should avoid spreading unsubstantiated claims and inflaming dread and panic by playing on people’s natural disgust of harm to children. ISIS is an organization that has committed heinous acts of violence and violated the human rights of many of our fellow believers. But we must not partake in the spreading of lies, even if it is against our enemies.

Again, read the whole article, and note the C.S. Lewis quote at the end in his last update.

We ought to be often in prayer for persecuted Christians, and also for all down-trodden and abused people, whether or not we know the details.

But we should also be cautious about passing on highly dramatic reports unless we have taken some care to see if they can be verified or corroborated independently.

We should not need extra drama to persuade us to pray!

+++

I have read the Exposure draft of the ‘Dying with Dignity’ Bill.

I would oppose its passing into law in Australia.

I write as a Christian minister, to reinforce my opposition, and that of many other Christians, to euthanasia and to physician-assisted suicide.

It is important to remember that with euthanasia, we are not talking about refusing burdensome and futile treatment, nor the administration of appropriate drugs for pain management, such as morphine. Both of those steps are legal and ethical.

Euthanasia refers to the deliberate administration of a drug, intending to cause the death of someone who is suffering. The stark reality is that it is a doctor killing a patient! (Or enabling that patient to kill him or herself).

I note carefully the safeguards in the exposure draft. Specifically, I am still concerned that the ‘second medical practitioner’ and the ‘third medical practitioner’ [§12 (d) & (e), respectively] have quite limited roles in the process. In addition, the description of the second medical practitioner as one who “holds qualifications or experience in the treatment of the terminal illness” [my emphasis] is far too vague.

Notwithstanding safeguards, the permission of any physician-assisted suicide will

• fundamentally change the doctor-patient relationship;
• begin to normalise euthanasia as an acceptable option; and
• inevitably lead to demands to widen its availability.

The potential for abuse is horrific. The evidence from places like the Netherlands is of a ‘slippery-slope’, with categories widening beyond the terminally ill, even to those who do not consent, to the mentally ill, to minors, and to disabled infants.

Legalizing euthanasia also introduces the potential for subtle but inappropriate pressures to be brought to bear on vulnerable persons, by relatives or an overburdened and underfunded hospital system.

By contrast, the medical evidence is that advances in palliative care have improved the symptom control of patients at the end of life, and where expertly used, suffering is minimal. I urge legislators to put their efforts into funding the improved provision of palliative care.

What follows is a selection of writing from a variety of angles expressing the concern.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in The Times on the UK ‘Assisted Dying Bill’:

[…] It would be very naive to think that many of the elderly people who are abused and neglected each year, as well as many severely disabled individuals, would not be put under pressure to end their lives if assisted suicide were permitted by law.

It would be equally naive to believe, as the Assisted Dying Bill suggests, that such pressure could be recognised in every instance by doctors given the task of assessing requests for assisted suicide. Abuse, coercion and intimidation can be slow instruments in the hands of the unscrupulous, creating pressure on vulnerable people who are encouraged to “do the decent thing”. Even where such pressure is not overt, the very presence of a law that permits assisted suicide on the terms proposed by Lord Falconer of Thoroton is bound to lead to sensitive individuals feeling that they ought to stop “being a burden to others”. What sort of society would we be creating if we were to allow this sword of Damocles to hang over the head of every vulnerable, terminally ill person in the country? […] 

Dr Theo Boer, Professor of Ethics, Protestant Theological University, Groningen, and member 9 years of a Regional Review Committee assessing euthanasia cases for the Dutch Government, supported their euthanasia law, but now thinks he was wrong:

[…] In 2007 I wrote that ‘there doesn’t need to be a slippery slope when it comes to euthanasia. A good euthanasia law, in combination with the euthanasia review procedure, provides the warrants for a stable and relatively low number of euthanasia.’ Most of my colleagues drew the same conclusion.

But we were wrong – terribly wrong, in fact. In hindsight, the stabilization in the numbers was just a temporary pause. Beginning in 2008, the numbers of these deaths show an increase of 15% annually, year after year. […]

Other developments include a shift in the type of patients who receive these treatments. Whereas in the first years after 2002 hardly any patients with psychiatric illnesses or dementia appear in reports, these numbers are now sharply on the rise. Cases have been reported in which a large part of the suffering of those given euthanasia or assisted suicide consisted in being aged, lonely or bereaved. Some of these patients could have lived for years or decades.

Dr Peter Saul, Senior Specialist in Intensive Care and Head of Clinical Unit in Ethics and Health Law at University of Newcastle, asks “Do people really have the right to a rational suicide?”, pointing out that the ‘right to die’ is not listed in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

[…] Nowadays, the law prohibits suicide in more specific settings, guided by a US case that suggested, among other things, that “protection of the interests of innocent third parties” and “maintaining the integrity of the medical profession” could weigh against self-determination.

Philosophers vigorously disagree, but most continue to see contemporary reasons to question rational suicide, some arguing that the idea is nonsensical, while others argue that intervention to prevent suicide is warranted in any case, as an assessment of rationality is difficult to make.

[…] Rational suicide may exist, but is as sad as that driven by mental illness. It deserves our attention and our compassion, but not our complicity.

Dr Giles Fraser, former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral London, a liberal theologian, writes that he has “no absolute religious objection to assisted dying”:

[…] But I do have a serious anxiety that we hugely underestimate the emotional complexity of giving patients this choice. For what it says to many people who are dying (and because of that, often exhausted and confused) is that it is now within their power to relieve the emotional distress of those who surround them. It presents the dying with the option of giving their loved ones the gift of their simple swift end. And thus it opens up an emotional minefield of second-guessing and lonely choices.

[…] When the moral history of the 21st century comes to be written, I predict we will look back with horror at how the word choice became a sort of cuckoo in the nest, driving out all other values. This week, in an editorial, the BMJ decided that patient choice now trumps the Hippocratic oath. The moral language of the supermarket has become the only moral currency that is accepted. Which is why, for me, assisted dying is the final triumph of market capitalism: we have become consumers in everything, even when it comes to life and death. And as history demonstrates, the losers in this equation are always going to be the most vulnerable.

Conclusion

Legalising euthanasia or assisted suicide privileges individual choice in a way that threatens protection of the rights of the weak and often defenceless. As Christians, we believe God who has a special concern for the vulnerable and so we want our society to protect them. I oppose this draft legislation.

Canon A. R. (Sandy) Grant
Senior Minister
St Michael’s Anglican Cathedral, Wollongong
21 August 2014