Couldn't Help Noticing

Like Jesus says…

A U.S. comedy writer has made this comment in the Sydney Morning Herald today (click here for the article in full) about how smutty the rooms get when all the comedy writers are in a meeting to come up with ideas for the scripts of shows like Friends, Frasier and Sabrina:

“Both rooms could get incredibly filthy,” he says. “Out of context it sounds horrifying and awful and makes no sense. But to do this job well, you have to open your head up—and sometimes what comes spilling out isn't exactly pretty.”

Sounds remarkably like what Jesus said once:

“The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45)

Kinsey

Not-for-the-faint-of-heart kinda reading. This New York Times article reports on an upcoming biopic of scientist Alfred Kinsey, whose work, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, is widely credited as giving the gay movement momentum and credibility. It gives information about his life, as well as the movie that will open in the States in November, starring Liam Neeson.

As one would expect, the article does its best to portray Kinsey in a positive light. In the first paragraph, he writes that “His studies helped bring sex—all kinds of sex ... out of the closet and into the bright light of day.”

The problem is, that since then, Kinsey himself has been widely outed as a sexual deviant, whose scientific methods were often suspect and certainly would have biased the results that he collected.

The article does its best to make Kinsey a hero of liberation, but keeps unavoidably running into the facts of Kinsey's life. Funnily enough, a similar thing happens to a biographer, James H. Jones, and Kinsey film director, Bill Condon:

(Jones) speculated that Kinsey's personal preferences might have affected his findings, especially about the pervasiveness of homosexual activity. But today he says that though Kinsey's reformist impulse probably did have an effect, any distortion was “unconscious and heartfelt.”

...At a recent screening in New York, Mr. Condon admitted that his first draft left him terrified. “At the center was someone who was socially maladroit, a bully, a scientist who spent most of his time looking at bugs,” he said. Then there's the hero's bisexuality, self-circumcision and encouragement of wife-swapping. “I think if you're unsympathetic to Kinsey,” he later added, “there's plenty, lots in the movie that would support that point of view.”

And, finally:

“It's like having a jigsaw puzzle on the table,” says Mr. Jones. “You have all these pieces that speak to his warmth, and then you've got all these other pieces of people telling you how badly they were hurt by him.” He adds, “What do you do with them? Do you brush them aside, or do you try to put them in the portrait?”

Exactly.

(For further reading, Pure Sex covers Kinsey in the context of covering the history of the sexual revolution.)

Letters from my dog

Okay, okay. I admit they published this one, in The Australian on October 8. But come on! The letter was co-signed by my dog Tilly, and this important fact was simply airbrushed out of the final product. So to set the record straight...

Dear editor,

How about we ordain everybody as bishops? Women, children, synod reporters, my dog Tilly? that will end debate and the churches will be able to get on with talking about the Lord Jesus, who was put to death for our sins and raised to life for our justification.

Yours sincerely,

The Rev. Gordon Cheng and the Rev. Tilly the Dog

PS At least they didn't edit out the gospel like they usually do...

Charistatistics

In the course of writing a Briefing article about the charismatic movement (coming up in the November issue), I was trying to work out roughly how many ‘charismatics’ or ‘pentecostals’ there were in Australia. I went to the website of the ‘Australian Christian Churches’ (ACC), a denominational alliance that includes just about all the main pentecostal churches and groupings in the country (the Assemblies of God, the Apostolic Churches, Bethesda Ministries, the Christian Life Churches, and so on).

According to the ACC's publicity, more than 190,000 people attend ACC churches each week, making it second only to Roman Catholicism in size as a denomination—an impressive claim, and a meteoric rise for pentecostalism. It made me a little suspicious, however, and so I dug around to find the source of the figure. Eventually I discovered that it came from the 2001 Census, where 194,592 people wrote ‘Pentecostal’ or ‘Australian Christian Churches’ at question 19 on the form.

This changes things quite a bit. For one thing it assumes that everybody who wrote ‘pentecostal’ is now part of a church affiliated with ACC, which is almost certainly not the case. The second thing that the figure assumes is that the number from the Census is equivalent to how many people actually go to church. If we were to use this methodology on the other denominations, then according to the Census the ACC is way back in 7th place, dwarfed by Catholicism (5 million), Anglicanism (3.9 million), the Uniting Church (1.25 million) and so on.

What the ACC doesn't mention, or doesn't realise, is that vastly more people indicate affiliation to denominations on Census forms than actually attend church each week. In the case of Anglicanism, less than 5% of those who say they are ‘C of E’ actually go to church on a weekly basis!

So how many people do go to pentecostal churches? The best estimate is that provided by the most recent National Church Life Survey in 2001. When all the groups that could reasonably be called ‘pentecostal’ or ‘charismatic’ are combined, the NCLS estimates the weekly attendance figure at around 141,000, which is just over 70% of those who say they are ‘pentecostal’ in the Census. This is not a bad figure, or a bad percentage (especially compared to the Anglicans!). It makes the ACC the third largest denominational grouping behind the Catholics and the Anglicans, who have 760,000 and 177,000 weekly attendees respectively.

The only problem is: it's around 50,000 (or 35%) short of what the ACC are claiming.

Now what would be truly interesting would be some accurate figures on how many of the three quarters of a million or so Protestant weekly church goers are evangelicals. My best guess is around 300,000 (or 40%). But I wouldn't want to base too much on it—it's only a statistic after all.

Bishop Jesus?

Once again the major news organisations in Australia, where debate rages about whether Anglicans should ordain women as bishops, are not taking me seriously. They wouldn't put this in their letters pages. Maybe they want to protect my friendships with bishops.

Dear editor,

I am finding it hard to get worked up about this women bishops debate. Jesus wasn't ordained as anything; his badge of honour was to be crucified, not to ponce around wearing robes and funny hats. Yet he was a far more effective minister of forgiveness than the lot of 'em.

Yours sincerely,

The Rev. Gordon Cheng