Dr Paul Allen

I (Sam) ran into a long-standing church member at the store. We had one short conversation, but it was emblematic of a much broader concern. She’d been going through a bit of a crisis, and we hadn’t seen her at church for a few weeks. So when I ran into her, I told her how much we’d missed her and how lovely it would be to see her in church again. She told me she couldn’t come until she was doing better. She didn’t want people to see her while feeling life’s mess: “I’m waiting until the storm passes and I’ve got things back together enough to be able to walk back into the church building.” Those words were heartbreaking. Church should be the place we sprint to when things are at their worst, not the place we avoid until we’ve got our Instagram-worthy Christianity back. I saw right away that this church member’s perspective was unhealthy. But I sensed something else was wrong, too. There was a mismatch between the beauty of the truth my church proclaimed and the culture we’d cultivated.

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