Dr Paul Allen

Pauline Hanson is right.  Last week, in response to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in Australia, the Socceroos released a video ahead of the World Cup. In it, the players take turns sharing their ethnic stories on top of a heartening piano soundtrack. They say, “We are a reflection of modern Australia”. Commenters express their wish for Hanson and One Nation to pay attention – this is the real Australia. This followed her comment at the National Press Club that Australia should be a monoculture. Her response? “ The Socceroos, in fact, represent my vision of a monocultural Australia, people from different backgrounds and cultures and nations all wearing green and gold and representing one nation under one flag and succeeding under the same set of rules.”  In fact, Hanson has always maintained she is not racist, even while wearing a burqa for a political stunt in the Senate chamber. Her reasoning? Islam is a religion and not a race. In both accounts, she’s technically right,...

A piece of research by McCrindle asking ordinary Aussies this very question – which special day is the most important? And, to my surprise, 30% thought Anzac Day was. You may be relieved that for 37%, it was still Christmas. But not much in it. (The clear winner, for interest, with 48% of the vote, was Mother’s Day. I was entirely unaware that a huge proportion of the Aussie volunteers who sailed to fight in WWI were Christian believers and faithful churchgoers. Robert Linder’s book The Long Tragedy: Australian Evangelical Christians and the Great War, 1914-1918, examines the curious ‘airbrushing’ out of the religious beliefs of the ‘diggers’.  Linder suggests that a disproportionate rate of enlistment by evangelical protestants points to as many as 40% of Aussie soldiers being from this one Christian tradition alone. Other historians suggest that these ‘wowsers’ (as they came to be known) made up around 50% or more of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during World War I. Austral...

Stan Grant.  Like many, my best Christmas memories come from childhood. Endless hot summers, the river, food, and family. And faith. I come from a big Aboriginal family. There's no Christmas like a black Christmas. There was never much money and presents were few and modest, but they were treasured. One year I got a book of Greek myths that opened a world of wonder and ideas that have stayed with me a lifetime. We played cricket with a homemade bat carved out of an old fence post. Our ham came from a tin and chicken substituted for turkey. But we were blessed. Christmas was a time of prayer and hope. My uncles were pastors in the Aboriginal church. They looked to the black church leaders of the United States like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. These people had been forged in the furnace of the worst of Australian racism. Yet they refused to yield. Victimhood was not for them. The Aboriginal civil rights movement had grown out of the church. Men and women of profound faith who ...

English: From frontpiece of Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (1924) by David Unaipon at the State Library of New South Wales (http://image.sl.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/ebindshow.pl?doc=a1929/a1191;thumbs=1) Category:Images of Australian people (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The first adult Christian at the Point MacLeay Mission, near the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia , was James Ngunaitponi, a Ngarrindjeri man whose name was Anglicised to ‘Unaipon’ by white people who could not pronounce it. The mission, technically non-denominational, was conservatively evangelical and ruled by the stern George Taplin. James Unaipon , born about 1830, came to Christ in 1862 through the teaching of a far gentler itinerant missionary, James Reid of the Free Church of Scotland , whose name James took at baptism. He chose to accompany Reid, acting as a translator and taking his own first steps towards evangelism. He had an immense knowledge of the Bible, the King James Bible of cou...

Author: David King. And He who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also He said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” (Rev. 21:5). Surely, if this language of the risen, glorified Lord Jesus presupposes anything, in the light of John’s vision in verses 1–4, he intimates the complete renovation of all creation as the preparatory act by which God will consummate His eternal purposes for His people and bring them to their final fruition. This imagery: the new creation, the new Jerusalem , God’s communion with His Bride adorned in wedding garments, His dwelling with men, the end of sorrow, pain, and death — points to future realities awaiting the people of God in the new heavens and new earth . In a word, His work will be to make all things new. But how are we to understand these realities, and what are we to make of them as believers? Moreover, where do we as the people of God fit into the picture of this divine revelation? Whe...

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: Austin J40 toy car, interior (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) When I take my foot off the pedal, the car does not speed up. It doesn’t even maintain the same speed. Instead, from the very moment I take my foot off the accelerator, the car begins to slow. Allowing the car to coast is inviting the car to stop. It may take some time, but left on its own, it will stop eventually. It is inevitable. I’ve been thinking about this lately because I see in my own life a tendency to coast—to coast in my relationships, to coast in my pursuit of godliness , to coast in my pursuit of God himself. And here are some things I’ve observed: I do not coast toward godliness, but selfishness. I do not coast toward self-control, but rashness. I do not coast toward a love for others, but agitation. I do not coast toward patience, but irritability. I do not coast toward purity, but lust. I do not coast toward self-denial, but self-obsession. I do not coast toward the gospel, but self-sufficie...

The Oldest Christian Church - Yerevan, Armenia (Photo credit: whl.travel ) You’ve seen the statistics. If you’re in ministry, you’ve probably witnessed the problem firsthand. The Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) are leaving the church in droves, and staying away. Approximately 70 percent of those raised in the church disengage from it in their 20s. One-third of Americans under 30 now claim “no religion.” There are 80 million Millennials in the U.S.—and approximately the same number of suggestions for how to bring them back to church. But most of the proposals I’ve heard fall into two camps. The first goes something like this: The church needs to be more hip and relevant. Drop stodgy traditions. Play louder music. Hire pastors with tattoos and fauxhawks. Few come right out and advocate for this approach. But from pastoral search committees to denominational gatherings to popular conferences, a quest for relevance drives the agenda. Others demand more fundamental ch...