Respectfully, I must decline

My beautiful wife Ally has nominated me for a Beautiful Blogger Award.

I am of course honoured to be nominated for anything, and especially by Ally.

Ally, I love you, but beautiful is not on my TO BE list.

Therefore, respectfully, I must decline

Three things… Australian Christians can learn from American Christians

1. How to be generous

2. How to listen and learn

3. How to run things

‘Church’

Inspired by Stuart’s excellent post on church, here are some more thoughts.

There seem to be four morally relevant ways you could use the word ‘church’

1. A specific Christian meeting of at least some Christian people.
2. An identifiable and coherent group of people with shared Geography.
3. All the Christians alive in the world today.
4. All the Christians who have ever, and will ever, live.

In Sydney, we seem to only consider 1) and 4).

High Anglicans 3)

And most American independent churches 2)

What do you think?

Writer v Reader (The Writer Won)

My 9 year old daughter, Remi, has just lost a contest with author Chris Morphew.

In July last year Chris ran a two-day writing workshop for children at Shearers on Norton (Leichhardt, Sydney). For the first time Remi got excited by reading and she quickly finished Chris’s first novel The Phoenix Files: Arrival before then embarking on the Harry Potter series. Her goal – read the Harry Potter books before Chris’s next novel was released.

Things were looking good as she read the first six in about 4 months, but yesterday was release day for The Phoenix Files: Contact and Harry Potter Number 7 remains only half read. Chris you win. Well done, and thank you for getting my daughter excited about reading.

We’ll be buying a copy of Contact in the next few days.

Chris will be celebrating the release of Contact on February 25 after school at Shearers. If you live in the Inner West you should come along.

In the meantime you can follow Chris on Twitter.

Three things… about Australia I wish were different

1. There really is a shortage of freshwater lakes

2. There are no cities of 500,000

3. It is just so damn far from everywhere else

Three things… I love about Australia

1. It’s my home

2. Sydney

3. Universal Healthcare

Which name is best? And why?

There is a mood around to have the small group structures in our churches move from being only Bible Study groups to being small communities who do mission together. There are a lot of names for such groups:

• Community Groups
• Missional Communities
• Gospel Communities
• Small Church
• Home Church
• City Groups
• Growth Groups
• etc

Which one do you think is best? And why?

Settlers of Catan

I was recently given a copy of Settlers of Catan. I love this game but haven’t played for a couple of years. It’s great for lots of reasons, but one of them is it is able to capture the attention of adults yet be played by those quite young (our 9 & 11yr old loved it).

This year we are hoping to have some regular games nights – featuring ‘Settlers’ and other games. I’ll let you know how they go.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in the history and business side of the game, here is an excellent article from a recent wired magazine: ‘Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre’

Three things … that worked about our holiday

1. Having a free, big house near the water (Thanks Mum and Dad)

2. Taking the whole family kayaking at Avoca

3. Playing board games with Ally

Oversight (Eternity #2)

I wrote this for the the second issue of Eternity. The third issue is out now. If your church isn’t getting it delivered yet they can order here.

Oversight

‘One of my employees cost me $11,000 this morning’. We were catching up for an 8am social coffee, and Mike was experiencing the privilege of being the half owner of a business. It has been a simple error, and fortunately he had done something similar for a greater sum for a previous employer just a few years earlier. And he was keen to honour Christ in the way he treated his staff. So yes he was going to be gracious, yes he was going to treat it as a ‘training’ experience, sure he was still going to make good money, but yes it still hurt.

It is the side of owning a business we don’t often acknowledge. Most of us are very pro work, we would like to use the gifts God has given us to make a difference to the world – and we would like to be well paid for doing so. Strangely, though, we can be quite against the people who create the opportunity for other people to work – the boss. We are generally very keen to be rewarded for our effort, but sometimes resentful when they are rewarded for theirs. Perhaps we forget that in world where the ground is cursed by God, where everything tends to disorder and decay, that it is quite an achievement to get something done that someone else finds valuable enough to pay money for, let alone enough to cover costs and make a profit.

If you create and manage opportunities for others to work you do a good thing. Maybe the product or service you offer is also a good thing, maybe the way you use the money you make is a good thing, but the work you create is certainly one. You give people the means to provide and raise families and you give people the opportunity to bless others with the gifts God has given them – and perhaps you even create a mission field.

No, not all employers are good, but this shouldn’t prevent us from noticing it when they are. They are a few good men and women and we could simply say thank you.