Couldn't Help Noticing

Equipping women

During a lunch break at the recent EQUIP conference, where my colleague John Sammut and I were running the bookstall, we nipped into the closest coffee shop for some sustenance. John knew the owner of the coffee shop and went over to say hello.

The owner of the coffee shop, who was not a Christian, asked John why he was at Darling Harbour, and John explained that there was a big convention of Christian women just next door.

“Oh that explains it then!” says the owner.

“What do you mean?”, says John.

“I was wondering why all our customers were so nice this morning. And that explains it.”

“You can really notice a difference?”

“Sure,” says the owner, “last weekend there was a convention and the people were just horrible.”

“Who was at the other convention?”

“Real estate agents.”

Praise God that the godliness of the women saints at Darling Harbour on Saturday can bear such testimony to the grace of God in this way.

Touche

It seems that Rev. Gordon Cheng is not the only Christian apologist beavering away in the nation's letter pages. An alert reader spotted the following exchange in the pages of The Australian:

Tim Saclier (Letters, 23/5) has summed up beautifully the old cliche that religion is a triumph of superstition and blind faith over reason and logic. My own epiphany came at the age of 12, when my Sunday school teacher, in reply to my asking who created God, informed me with a straight face that God had always existed. I refused to attend further religious instruction on the grounds that I was being taught by idiots. My Sundays were then spent happily playing in the local swamp, where I observed many of the creatures from which I had actually evolved.

Peter West, The Vines, WA

To which came the following riposte:

Peter West (Letters, 24/5) reminded me of my old science teacher, to whom, at the age of 12, I posed the question, “Who caused the big bang?” He answered me, with a straight face, that nothing caused it, to which I promptly replied that something must have because it obviously happened. It was at that point that I had an epiphany: my science teacher could not give me an answer that was either reasonable or logical. My Sundays were then happily spent attending Sunday school and learning about the God who created me.

Bruce Newberry, Mansfield, Qld.

Different rules for Christians

From a UK Briefing reader:

When the pressure group Christian Action posted on its website the names and addresses of those responsible for Jerry Springer The Opera with the request that people write to them about the production, many hands were thrown up in horror. If anyone from Christian Action was interviewed on TV to explain their action, someone always followed to declare how totally irresponsible it was, because ‘extremists’ might get hold of the information and endanger these people.

I know of no armed, militant and violent Christian groups offering harassment and intimidation to those who offend them, but if that is what they feared, then they had the right to express their prejudices.

However, when animal rights extremists sent letters to shareholders in GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) threatening to publish their personal details on a website unless they sold their shares, an apologist for the animal rights movement was interviewed, who said these people were “absolutely a legitimate target” for this kind of action; but guess what? Nobody came on after that to say what a totally irresponsible action it was, despite the fact that there are known extremists who will use almost any means at their disposal—certainly violence, intimidation and even grave-robbing—to attain their ends. Even if the people doing the publishing of the names would not use those tactics, it is known that others would: so to threaten to publish names is to threaten violence and is in itself intimidation. But nobody came on to say so.

Isn't that odd?

Where are all the women priests?

When the women's ordination debate was in full swing (in the late 1980s and early 1990s) a panoply of arguments was put forward as to why we should all get on board, do the right thing and ordain women as priests/presbyters. We were told that our witness to an unbelieving world would never be effective until we removed the stumbling block of excluding women from leadership. And we were told that the ‘evangelical’ case for women's ordination had been made, and that many evangelicals were willing to get with the programme, presumably to the shame of those recalcitrants (like this author) who remained utterly unconvinced.

As the ever-perceptive John Richardson points out in a recent issue of ‘New Directions’, neither of these contentions have proved true. More than a decade after the ‘women's ordination wars’, the vast majority of women priests in the Anglican church in the UK are liberal, and none of them are running large churches:

Excluding cathedrals, there are about 160 Anglican churches with ‘Usual Sunday Attendances’ in excess of 350. The majority are growing, many of them are evangelical, and all the senior ministers of these churches are male. When pastoral push comes to shove, it seems that congregations instinctively congregate around male leadership.

If, as we have been told, most evangelicals have no problem with the ordination of women, we should expect this picture to change, so that the proportion of women running larger churches corresponds to the proportion of clergy who are women. However, whilst women are found in every ‘senior’ position from dean to archdeacon, and will soon be bishops, they have yet to be found running big churches, evangelical or otherwise.

Judging by the tiny numbers of evangelical women being ordained, it seems that evangelicals as a whole are actually not convinced at all about women's ordination. Those who are convinced congregate almost entirely in the liberal wing, and the churches that they run are hardly being overrun by grateful atheists willing at last to embrace the gospel now that a woman is in charge.

The liberal churches, in which the vast majority of women priests serve, continue to decline, while the evangelical arm of the denomination, in which there are very few women priests, continues to be the only sector showing any growth.

Not so huggable

I honestly can't decide which of these quotes from the website of Holy Huggables, a website which sells Jesus and Moses children's dolls, is more ironic. This:

Currently we offer:

• Jesus Huggables with Blue Eyes;
• Jesus Huggables with Brown Eyes (limited supply)
• Moses Huggables.

or:

We aimed to develop a cuddly doll that could provide children—as well as the rest of us—with a reminder of the 10 Commandments Moses brought down from the mountain.

Um, and what was that third commandment again?