Dr Paul Allen

We saw her sitting there on her wheelchair sobbing. Why? Because she was unable to walk up the Holy Steps to have her sins forgiven. She so desperately wanted to be able to spend less time in purgatory and she couldn’t bear the thought of being so close to the steps where Jesus had walked and unable to go up them like everybody else. She had been duped into believing that this ritual of walking up the steps, and saying a few hundred hail Mary’s would save her from her sin. Her tears were yet another example of the evil that is the Roman Catholic Church . Of course, a sign not too far from her stated that those who could not crawl up the steps could stay right where they were and still receive pardon for their sin, but she wasn’t buying it.  She knew that she was missing out on something, and it was all because of her inability to perform works. There were dozens of people partaking in this practice of walking up these “holy steps”. According to Roman Catholic tradit...

Imagine a door. A door that only opens once or maybe twice in a lifetime. The door has incredible powers. It has the ability to cleanse you. It has the ability to pardon and cast your sin as far as the east is from the west. In fact, there isn’t just one of them, there are four, and they are opened only once every 25 years in the city of Rome . Since you were a kid you were told that these doors had the ability to cleanse you from every sin you have ever committed, as long as you walked through them. I wish this were a fairytale. Millions of Roman Catholic around the world will be heading to Rome this year, thinking that there they will be able to be absolved of all their sins. That by getting on a plane, and by saying a few prayers that their actions will assuage the wrath of God. Have you ever seen a desperate person lost in false religion? Desperately trying to earn their way to heaven? I can still picture the crying lady, crawling on her knees as it was yesterday. Tears filled...

Haberfield, St_Davids_Uniting_Church (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Two Australian denominations have been given reports that reveal decay and a need for change that questions the viability of their current structures. The Anglican Church is painfully aware that its network of dioceses (regions) is not viable following its General Synod (national church parliament) last week, while a recent Uniting Church census also underscores decline. “With 90 per cent of Australia’s population now living within 100km of the coastline and that trend continuing to strengthen, it presents enormous challenges for Australia’s inland dioceses,” says the Viability and Structures Task Force report paper for the Anglican General Synod. For example, the Murray Diocese in South Australia has 1300 people in church attendance; Bunbury in Western Australia has 1600; and the Northern Territory and North West Australia , which did not report their figures, probably have considerably fewer. To support a Bish...

English: Uniting church at Hamilton, Victoria (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Catholics   5,439,268 No religion 4,796,787 Anglican 3,679,907 Uniting Church   1,065,795 Presbyterian and Reformed  599,515 Hindu  275,535 People professing to have no religion have moved past Anglicans to become the second-largest grouping after Catholics in the 2011 Census. Almost 4.8 million people said they had no religion, up 29 per cent from 2006, but the number of people not answering the question dropped by 2 per cent. This suggested that more people were claiming a religious identity (including no religion), said Monash University sociology professor Gary Bouma. Advertisement: Story continues below The total Christian population is 13.2 million, or 61 per cent, down three percentage points. Catholics have dropped half a percentage point to 25.3 or 5.4 million, Anglicans are down 1.6 percentage points to 3.7 million, while the Uniting Church is down to 5 per cen...

Image via Wikipedia When a church forfeits its doctrinal convictions and then embraces ambiguity and tolerates heresy, it undermines its own credibility and embraces its own destruction. Adrian Hamilton is concerned that the Church of England “will not survive my children’s lifetime and quite possibly not even my own.” Writing in  The Independent [ London ], Hamilton writes of a Church of England that remains established as the national church , but is no longer established in the hearts of the nation. Interestingly, Hamilton argues that the very fact that the Church of England  is  an established state church is among the chief causes of its predicament. For most Britons, he argues, the role of the nation’s state church means very little — “some exotic clothes and ritual prayers on state occasions.” And yet, what Hamilton notes most of all is this: “What is really worrying for the future of the Church, however, is that its leaders themselves seem to have ceased to bel...

Image via Wikipedia If God is sovereign, how do we determine the significant from the insignificant? I often hear people testify how God's hand saved them from the flood, or cyclone, and their house was not damaged. But the problem is another Christian loses her home and or child from the cyclone. Others can only took about "luck"  as if luck had some independent power. People seem somewhat selective in their testimonies.  If something good happens, God is often referenced.  When something bad happens there is also the desire to find God in the matter.  But what about the seemingly insignificant things?  What about the rolling stone? Are we to see God's hand in absolutely everything, if His hand is in fact in absolutely everything?  Of course the first thing we have to address is those two little letters at the beginning. There is no “if” about God’s sovereignty . He is absolutely sovereign over all things. He ordains whatsoever comes to pass, fr...

Image by de la Ronde via Flickr In the early centuries of the church’s existence, Christian apologists would sometimes appeal to the distinctively holy lives of Christians as evidence for the truth of Christianity . Would such an appeal be of any use today?  According to numerous surveys, the behavior of professing Christians is not discernibly different from the behavior of those who profess other religions or no religion at all. The phrase one often hears on the lips of pagans who observe contemporary Christian behavior is: “The church is full of hypocrites.” This should not be. We worship a holy God who calls His people to be holy and who has provided the means by which they may be holy. The problem of lax and hypocritical Christianity is not a new one, and one of the best treatments of the entire subject is a classic written by  J.C.  Ryle (1816–1900), who served as the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool for twenty years. Ryle was a deeply committed and non-comp...