Couldn't Help Noticing

Watching Ben Pfahlert

I am currently reviewing hours and hours of material recorded by Col Marshall interviewing leaders who have been involved in training apprentices in ministry. There is some marvellous pragmatic stuff from Ben Pfahlert, current national director of the Ministry Training Strategy (MTS). He says that it is actually efficient to add two years to your training for ministry before going on to enter theological college. It may look like a waste of time to spend six years in training (instead of four) before you even hit your first long-term paid ministry role, but Ben's point is that many pastors drop out of ministry over the years, and a good number of them (in his observation) dropped out because they didn't really know what it was going to be like before they started the long process of training for it. A two-year MTS-style apprenticeship will give you a pretty solid idea of what it will be like. I also appreciated what he said was the big lesson he learned as a ministry apprentice: that it's God job to fill the ministry holes—whether Bible study leaders or others—and so the best response is not to panic but to pray.

The material on these recordings is pure gold. There's wonderful practical and theological thinking from Tara Thornley, Joshua Ng, Phillip Jensen and a heap of others (I'm in there too). Col Marshall is also one of the best interviewers I have ever heard. The mountain of material here will certainly repay the efforts of trainee and trainers in watching them.

I have the job of ensuring that this material ends up well-indexed and well-edited. We hope to make it accessible, as well as link it to the MTS training manual I'm working on with Col Marshall. But the process is going to take a while. I believe that, by the time we've finished working on this resource, we're going to have something that will be of extraordinary benefit for our generation of gospel workers.

I also hope that Col will keep interviewing and adding to what we have.

Wives and Lovers

(From Katie Stringer, one of our Briefing readers in Bellevue Hill, Australia.)

It's 5.15 pm, and I'm folding nappies and singing to my nine-and-a-half week-old baby girl as we listen to track 7 on a Burt Bacharach collection I've borrowed from the library.

Hey, little girl,
Comb your hair, fix your make-up.
Soon he will open the door.

I merrily sing along, noticing for the first time the happy coincidence of the lyrics as we await ‘Daddy's’ imminent arrival home from work. The back of the CD case tells me I'm singing with Jack Jones to ‘Wives and Lovers’ which was written in 1963 by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The tune is great, so I turn up the volume and listen to the lyrics for the first time:

Don't think because
There's a ring on your finger,
You needn't try anymore,
For wives should always be lovers too.
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I'm warning you ...

Now hang on a minute! I push stop on the CD player, somewhat affronted by the incredible political incorrectness of the song I'm singing to my little girl. I assume it's written with an ironic nod to 50s housewives, but what if it's not?

When my husband does come home, I play him the rest of the song:

Day after day
There are girls at the office
And men will always be men.
Don't send him off
With your hair still in curlers;
You may not see him again.

My husband laughs—a little too heartily, I feel.

For wives should always be lovers too ...

“That's true”, my husband says. Hmm, I guess he has a point.

After a few replays, I've come to the conclusion that this song has a lot going for it. For a start, it's anti-adultery—which is something a lot of today's music can't boast (for example, “Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” by the Pussycat Dolls). And, dare I say it, it's almost biblical in its exhortation for wives to be working hard at keeping their husbands faithful.

Of course, husbands need to work hard at staying faithful too. I'm not suggesting wives are responsible for husbands straying, but rather, as their helpers, we can help them in this area. We're supposed to. So there's nothing wrong with a wife making a little effort to keep the flames burning. Curlers have never been my thing and you can forget about a full face of make-up, but I guess I could get out of my slobby tracksuit pants.

Paul states that one of the purposes of marriage in 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 is to protect husbands and wives from sexual immorality. So a healthy marriage provides protection for husbands and wives from the girls and boys in the office. Furthermore, it is supposed to be satisfying. Proverbs 5:18-19 says,

Let your fountain be blessed,
    and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
    a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
    be intoxicated always in her love.

So play on, Mr Jones:

Hey, little girl,
Better wear something pretty—
Something you'd wear to go to the city—and
Dim all the lights,
Pour the wine, start the music.
Time to get ready for love.
Time to get ready—
Time to get ready for love.

Freudian slip of the month

In a recent blog, Albert Mohler discusses the problems with an Idaho judge's decision to strike down a state law limiting marriage to the union of a man and a woman. The ruling would open up marriage to homosexual couples. Mohler quotes from the judgement, and, very subtly, highlights one of the funniest, and yet most poignant, Freudian slips I've seen for a long time:

Couples, such as plaintiffs, who are otherwise qualified to marry one another may not be denied licenses to marry or certificates of marriage or in any other way prevented from entering into a civil marriage pursuant to Iowa Code Chapter 595 by reason of the fact that both persons compromising [sic] such a couple are of the same sex. (Judge Robert Hanson)

Hope, joy and judgement

One good reason for rediscovering at least a few of the old hymns is that they have a far more full-blooded understanding of the grace and goodness of the gospel than the spineless, anaemic contributions of many present-day choruses. Charles Wesley understood that the basis of the Christian's hope and joy is firmly grounded in the reality of God's judgement:

Rejoice in glorious hope! Jesus the Judge shall come,
And take His servants up to their eternal home.
We soon shall hear th'archangel's voice;
The trump of God shall sound, rejoice!

The great truths set out in this final verse of his hymn are resisted or misunderstood by many Christians today. Even evangelicals are constantly losing sight of them. Very rarely do we find songs that rejoice in the truth and hope and awe of final judgement. Here's one I love:

Great God, what do I see and hear?
The end of things created!
The Judge of mankind doth appear,
On clouds of glory seated.
The trumpet sounds, the graves restore,
The dead which they contained before!
Prepare, my soul, to meet Him.

The dead in Christ shall first arise
At the last trumpet's sounding.
Caught up to meet Him in the skies,
With joy their Lord surrounding.
No gloomy fears their souls dismay,
His presence sheds eternal day
On those prepared to meet Him.

But sinners, filled with guilty fears,
Behold His wrath prevailing.
In woe they rise, but all their tears
And sighs are unavailing.
The day of grace is past and gone;
Trembling they stand before His throne,
All unprepared to meet Him.

Great God, to Thee my spirit clings,
Thy boundless love declaring.
One wondrous sight my comfort brings,
The Judge my nature wearing.
Beneath His cross I view the day
When Heav'n and earth shall pass away,
And thus prepare to meet Him.

What wonderful grace and glory! All that is old and corrupt and dead and diseased and sinful will be set to rights. The old has gone; the new has come. It's completely fitting that a tune by Martin Luther is one of the best-known settings for this song (see the Cyber-hymnal).

We've lost the sense of the awe-fullness of God's grace in and through judgement. Consequently, our evangelism is wet, gutless, flaccid and prone to regular outbursts of gimmickry and postmodernist church growth techniques. It's only in, with, and under judgement that the hope of salvation is discovered.

Isaiah knew this:

“And though a tenth remain in it,
  it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak,
  whose stump remains when it is felled.”
  The holy seed is its stump.
(Isa 6:13; emphasis mine)

Surely it's significant that Jesus quotes this very chapter on Isaiah's vision at such a crucial stage of his ministry. In judgement—and only in judgement—is the hope of glory found. And the glory of God is revealed to us only under the mask of the cross, and nowhere else.

A college of the yarts

Recent calls for Sydney Anglicans to consider investing in a college of the arts have set my mind racing: Christians engaging with their culture, fostering social connections, developing creativity, resourcing churches to run more culturally engaged and excellent meetings, and to form cultural links ... it's inspiring stuff.

In fact, it's so inspiring, it's brought to the surface a long-held dream of mine. For the past two weeks now, I've been walking around in a kind of daze. Everywhere I go, I've been scribbling down the same five words on the back of service sheets, on the back of envelopes and on the back the guy in front of me on the bus:

Sydney Anglican Academy of Footy.

Doesn't that set your heart on fire? Here in our sports-mad city where four different codes compete for the attention of footy-loving fans, we could showcase and promote a Christian brand of footy that connected with the real passions of our culture.

In my view, for too long, Christians have been half-hearted about their commitment to football-based interaction with our culture. The occasional lame evangelistic night during the Rugby World Cup—a few hard-working but unsupported chaplains trying to reach out to the league community—it's not good enough.

Let's be honest: the standard of our own footy is a joke. When was the last time an Anglican team won the Protestant Churches soccer comp? And where is the Protestant Churches League comp, the AFL comp or the Rugby comp?

Our lack of passion and investment is an indictment. It's time to take the cultural blinkers off, put in the hard yards, and connect with real people and their lives! I'm not sure we can wait for our denominational and church leaders to take the lead. It's no secret that our ministry leaders are, on the whole, ageing and unfit, with their best footy years behind them.

Perhaps the most we can hope for is institutional commitment—some cold hard cash to pour into a lay-led Sydney Anglican Academy of Footy. If centralization is a concern, we could regionalize the Academy with a soccer campus in Leichhardt, a league institute in the Illawarra, a rugger centre in Gordon and an AFL academy based at the SCG.

Imagine the possibilities for evangelistic outreach when properly trained, theologically aware footy players are unleashed into the cultural heartland of our metropolis! Not to mention what this would do for the quality of our church ministries. Want men to stop hating church? Organize high-quality, professionally refereed games of touch or five-a-side soccer after the service in the rectory grounds. Want youth group games nights to enter the 21st century? Showcase the kind of ball skills, passion and excellence the discerning visitor now demands. Want men's outreaches to have some real street cred? Hold events during half-time at the big game. The possibilities and benefits are self-evident.

So let's invest in a college of the yarts. Bring it on. But if we don't match it dollar for dollar with a Sydney Anglican Academy of Footy, we're being fools to ourselves, fools to our families and fools to the footy-loving people of our great city.