Posts from 2014 (Page 2)

The last day of this month, 31st October was the day in 1517 when the Reformer, Martin Luther, challenged the church to deal with the abuses and perversions that had crept into the church over many centuries. In three years’ time there are plans afoot already for a 500th anniversary celebration. Of course today that date is better known in our society as Halloween. When people of my generation were growing up we were vaguely aware that Halloween was something…

Bettina Arndt is not a person from whom I would have expected to hear that children are better off living with both parents. Maybe it’s my preconceived ideas. Arndt became “famous” (or should that read “notorious”?) for her editorship of Forum, a sex education magazine in the 1970s. Arndt trained as a clinical psychologist specialising in sexual therapy. As I recall she was quite a controversial figure who didn’t have too much credibility among conservative Christians. But time does move…

It is fifty years ago this year that in Victoria I made a special trip from Dandenong to Geelong. The reason for the trip was that the Geelong Reformed Church was presenting to the other Reformed Churches in Victoria a new program for children and young people. A minister and his wife (George and Harriet Van Groningen), who had come to us from the Christian Reformed Churches of North America, had introduced the Geelong congregation to the American Cadet and…

The death of Robin Williams this past week caused much commentary in the news and a flurry of responses in the social-media. But the commentary was not just about the death of an iconic actor and comedian. It appears that the actor, who was just 63, took his own life – apparently as the culmination of a long struggle with depression. That has led to much soul-searching and (understandably) an increase in calls to charity help-lines. As someone commented on…

Has it ever happened to you that a certain word comes into your mind and you keep repeating that word to yourself? The word rolls off your tongue – at least mentally it does – and you relish the sound of it. You then begin to wonder how that word came to be. Why did that particular combination of vowels and consonants come to represent that particular thing? I had that happen to me the other day with the word…

It’s one of the earliest words that very young children learn to say: Mine! A three-year-old will say it defiantly when he snatches his toy from his younger sister. The sad thing is that some fifty-three-year-olds can still say it just as defiantly. It’s one thing to endorse the right to ownership and private property, it’s quite another thing to cling so tenaciously to what is ours that we lose sight of the fact that under God we are merely…

Questions about God’s existence and questions about my own salvation have rarely bothered me. I’m blessed that on both counts the Lord has gifted me with confident assurance. But there is one question that has periodically troubled me over the years. Why do some people seem to get much more than their fair share of pain and suffering in life? I must have been barely out of my teenage years when that question hit with particular force. The friend of…

One thing about these cold winter mornings is that the spider-webs in the garden look very pretty. The droplets of dew make them seem like tiny strands of sparkly diamonds glistening in the early morning sun. When the weather is warmer you don’t notice the spider webs until you walk into them but the droplets of winter dew make them highly visible. Examining one of them last week made me do a little thinking about what we call “fellowship” among…

It’s with reluctance that I write this week’s bulletin blurb. That reluctance was motivated by some serious questions. Why drag up unpleasant things that have caused lots of people much pain? And why focus on someone else’s sin when we’ve all got our own faults and foibles? And yet… there are some important lessons to be learnt. I’m talking about the iconic Aussie entertainer, Rolf Harris. Like many of you I watched the unfolding saga of the famous and now…

Sometimes when I listen to news and current affairs programs I get the feeling that our Western culture is moving, at a great rate of knots, away from its Judaeo-Christian roots. The list of concerns is endless: from gratuitous violence in movies to the sexualising of children and from same-sex marriage to corporal punishment. Already forty years ago, when I was at our theological college we talked about the coming of a post-Christian era. Well, I don’t want to be…