I got to sleep in this morning. It isn’t however for a fun reason. There’s this leadership talkfest that’ll run for 2 days. It will be at the Melbourne Park Function Centre.

So here I am waiting for a train at the unusual hour of 8am’ish. It has been scheduled to include dinner which means it will be a very long day.

I guess that’s why when the church organises something which features a speaker whose chief credential is he was a corporate figure of some sort, it is a quick turn off. I’m in church to hear God’s word and have fellowship with others. Listening to someone on any other basis than he is a faithful teacher of the scriptures, would not be a good use of our collective time.

Anyway here’s to a longish day…

It 6 o clock on a Monday morning and I’m on the way into the city to start the week. A little alert went off in my phone a few minutes ago and when I checked it made me look up my diary with a little dismay.

I have a lot lined up for today, and the rest of the week doesn’t look any better. I had brought the laptop home in an attempt to do something about this crazy week. Sat saw me doing housekeeping work the entire day, as well as some prep and cooking for a little dinner at home for some church people. Yesterday, by the time we got home after church and lunch with some people it was close to 3. I just needed some rest and I couldn’t drag myself to do any work other than checking some emails.

Anyway, it is still possible – just – to stick to reasonably normal hours and minimum or zero work at weekends or after hours for now and as long as that remains true the grind looks okay. I’m happy to leave my hands on the stone. Before that happens though I still have a few minutes on this train for a quick shut eye… zzz

About a year ago I came across a story about Julia Gillard’s possible downfall, through her work as a lawyer for the AWU. That story (Glenn Milne) got pulled but not before I got hold of it and put it up here on my blog. It attracted a lot of traffic to my blog that day so I password protected it later that day, but someone had in turn put it up in a bulletin board of sorts, having copied it from my blog.

 

That story went away, or so I thought. These past few days saw the story resurrect like a very lively phoenix indeed. It got front page treatments, talk show hosts went at it and blogs like Larry Pickering and Andrew Bolt worked through every sliver of every piece of information. All of these treatment underlined some things we have all known and strongly abhor about Julia Gillard. She certainly comes across as being dishonest and glosses over facts and truths and will bend anything to suit her agenda. To top it all off, she continues to play word games and make it sound like she is innocent and totally blameless on all counts. I find her utterly dishonourable. I am as ashamed of her as a PM as I was as a Malaysian, of Dr Mahathir back in the 90’s. In fact I have said many times, that Julia Gillard and her government has so many similarities with Najib Razak and his, in terms of honesty, competence and trustworthiness that it is a déjà vu for me.

 

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“Boyfriend songs” was the naughty and irreverent term I first heard used freely and often, when I was working in a Christian charity. It refers to that loose category of songs sung in church, where one sings – presumably – of the Lord Jesus as though He was one’s boyfriend. You know – words like “you were always there for me”, “when I’m down and lonely” “you are my best and most dependable friend”, “only you understand me”, “you’re my all in all”, “how did I ever live without you”… you get the drift.

All those lines aren’t offensive or anything like that; but by themselves and with no context of Jesus as God and His redemptive act on the cross all those lines are saccharine material – sweet nothings. It is disturbingly easy to find whole songs comprising lines like those and one can easily hear similar songs in a teenage girl pyjamas party I imagine. I really think they have little use in church especially for congregational singing purposes.

Actually it would be even better if we retraced our steps completely and re-examine the role of music in church. It has become such as central thing in church, that music has become synonymous with worship. It isn’t. To give music the status of worship, is to undermine – not underline – worship. To call someone who leads the singing on Sunday mornings as the “worship leader” is to undermine worship. To call music support work the “Worship Ministry” is to undermine worship.

To confuse music support work as worship ministry was the initial first step that lead to boyfriend songs forced on congregational singing.

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I was reading this article yesterday http://phillipjensen.com/articles/evangelical-worship/ and as it has often been the case, Phillip Jensen’s writing resonated with me. I decided to share it on that social media whose share tanked badly and like flies to a heap it attracted a couple of testy comments. I did however extract a small part of the article in the comments section as I shared it. I wonder if the comments were in response to the extract or the article. I suspect the former.

I wonder though, why the responses were of the “stronger” shades. It was just (to me anyway) an innocuous (because it is objective) article about how worship ought to be consistent with theology and is often a reflection of that. It touched on how worship should be an overall lifestyle response to God and His revelation through His word, as opposed to a narrower sphere within the confines of the arts.

The responses were telling I think of how pervasive the arts and things aesthetics have become in contemporary church scene. The edification aspect of worship has taken on a back seat and certainly the lifestyle (i.e. life changing) response issue has not just disappeared into the background, it has become an irrelevance. It has evolved now to a stage where when a specific song evokes an emotional response leading to behavior which conveys abnormal stirrings, that becomes the measurement of effectiveness, not of the church but of that specific part of that day’s program. A form of spirituality takes precedence over Godliness as taught in the scriptures. The experience of the moment – one that I often term a sugar fix – becomes the focus. In this regard, less is more, I think.  We should strive not for more performing arts type of contribution but less, because in reducing this input, I believe we would be minimising what I consider to be extraneous factors.

 

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We were up in Canberra over the weekend. To make the drive more manageable and to let us get to Canberra earlier on Sat without too much grief, we took off on Friday and broke our journey by staying in Albury overnight. It was cold and wet and though we got in relatively early, the conditions were such that we cleaned up and went to bed pretty much straight away.

The little black jedi was a bit restless through the night so we didn’t sleep very well and took off a little later than we expected to on Sat.

We got into Canberra just before noon, and it was great to see Kiddo again. She took us to Dobinson’s which has a very good coffee and their burger on sour dough buns were also very good – as were their model-good-looking counter staff. I had mine (burger) with the lot and I was a stuffed pig for the rest of the day.

Which isn’t a smart thing to do because that night we went to a really nice restaurant at the corner of Mort and Bunda in the city, called Dieci e Mezzo. Thankfully that afternoon we went to the National Gallery and we walked around a little bit. My chargrilled swordfish was very nice (washed down with over-priced glass of Pinot Grigio) and kiddo swore her dessert of a lemon torta with a whole range of other stuff (masala infused raisins in caramel -?- sorbet, caramelised something, etc) was worth every morsel-full of calorie – even after a main of falling off the bone-soft veal cheeks. Tress’ pork cutlet as usual, got shared with everyone. Even after watching the very dumb movie Armageddon on tv for the umpteenth time and it was past midnight, we were still feeling stuffed.

Sunday morning we went to the Old Bus Depot in Kingston and got some of Kiddo’s favourite pick me up’s. Later that arvo Kiddo wanted to take us to Brodburger in Kingston, which apparently has the best burgers in town. The very long queue confirmed its status but thankfully the wait was an hour, otherwise I would have burgers for lunch 2 days in a row which would have represented a bit of a risk factor…

We ended up going to Gus’ in town instead, and Tress and I shared a relatively innocuous chicken sanger. We left close to 3pm, and although the goodbyes remain difficult, the knowledge that we’d catch up again in a few weeks over the mid-semester break helped a great deal.

The drive home was a big push – we left Dickson in Canberra after refuelling and didn’t stop till just outside Seymour – some 550km later – and even then it was a mere 5+ minutes’ stopover for more fuel and toilet. We got home just after 9pm, knackered. All that food and driving weren’t what made the weekend really nice. It was just being together as a family again. Including that poor little black jedi. I am very grateful.

 

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