New Ways of Being Church

A Conversation on the Need for New Ways of being Church

For the benefit of any who come in at this point the story so far is ….

Simon posted an article on this topic on facebook…

I replied that it was like moving deck chairs on a sinking ship – churches first needed to return to lively faith in Jesus.

Simon replied that we should get off the ship.

Touche! When I thought about it I had got off the ship … or rather they had cast me adrift on a longboat - glad to be rid of a tiresome priest!

My thoughts:

OK I stopped going to the local Anglican churches because I always came home so angry that they were preaching UNbelief! Then I started going to my younger daughter Jenny's church, which is a local congregation of a micro-denomination. They have members of the congregation preach – and they do preach the true gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ and obedience to His commands. But I have to admit that I do miss the liturgy, and I do miss the old hymns (well the better ones anyway)

So yes I did get off the ship, and that is is one solution that works, but is it the only solution, or indeed one that works for everyone?

Now my great grand parents on one side were converted through the Methodist preachers who were the human agents of a revival that swept the country in the late 1800's. Then my grandparents were converted by Seventh Day Adventist evangelists. We were all brought up in that church but all ended up Anglicans.

My point is that every generation needs to be converted afresh. And although the SDA's may be doing fine as a church for all I know, the Methodist church has gone from being on the forefront of the work of the Gospel to being a rotting spiritual corpse in just three generations!

So taking to the lifeboats may be a practical solution – but one still has to watch that they in turn don't spring a leak.

My own thoughts about the Anglican church are that it is spiritually like Israel in the time of Ahab and Jezebel. There are still faithful ministers and people – just as God told Elijah that there were “seven thousand in Israel that have not bowed the knee to Baal”. But when the revival we pray for comes, by and large the new believers need to be nurtured away from it – and away from most mainline denominations – likely in house-churches, or internet link-ups, or other means of utilising modern technology. (So I guess I am now agreeing with the writer of that article about the usefulness of technology and of new ways of being church !!!)

But the ancient foundations of the Anglican church are sound. It may be better to get rid of the rubbish and repair it rather than build a new “institution” - and institutions are just a sociological necessity for maintaining important activities among humans. Because as the Methodists illustrate one can put a lot of energy into a new institutional church for it to all turn to dust in just a few generations!

My expectation is that once the new believers in the revival have grown strong in the Faith, they can flood back to (in this instance) the Anglican churches and join the faithful few who have hunkered down there in clearing out the rubbish – maybe converting the apostates – and making it into a faithful church … at least for their generation!

I'd be interested in any thoughts on this.

Love Muslims but Fight Islam

Note: I wrote this and submitted it to my own (Melbourne) Anglican diocese's monthly newspaper, and then to Sydney Diocese. Both politely declined to use it. I understand their fear, but this fear is part of the problem! Without a strong defense of Christianity and attack on false doctrine, Christianity will be obliterated as has happened historically in other places.

Love Muslims : Fight Islam

Rev. David Greentree, August 2019

No, that is not a paradox. Muslims are people. We share a common humanity, a common citizenship in this country, and as Christians we believe that all humanity is created in the image of God, and each person someone we should love as we love ourselves, and treat as we ourselves would like to be treated. Islam, on the other hand, is a political ideology fused to a religion. There is nothing wrong with fighting a dangerous ideology or a misleading religious dogma.

Some years ago when I was building houses, I employed two Muslim carpenters. They were both very decent fellows, and good workers. One was quite devout. He attended and gave financially to his mosque, and he had a wife and baby that he was devoted to. He was a good person, and a good citizen. The other was perhaps more nominal in his religious observances, and a more typical Aussie young man, again he was a good person and a good citizen. One time when we were short handed, he asked if he could bring his best friend along. As we sat around at lunch that Saturday, I noticed that his friend was wearing a cross, so I said “How come your best friend is wearing a cross when you're a Muslim?” He replied that they were both born in Cyprus, he was Turkish and his friend Greek. They had met on their first day at kindergarten and been best friends ever since.

So whatever the “theory”, Christians and Muslims can in practice get along.

Many years before that, I had, as an 18 year old, travelled by train in Malaysia to Kuala Lumpur. On the journey I got into conversation with a Malay lad of my own age. When we got to KL, he invited me to spend the day with his family who were having a celebration for his father's departure on the Hajj to Mecca.

One thing that struck me looking around that family gathered for prayers was that I could mentally pair many of them with members of my own extended family. On the religious level, I could see likenesses from the earnest young man leading the prayers through to those with a much more relaxed attitude to it all.

In everyone, Muslim and Christian alike, our human nature modifies how the teachings of our religion work out in our daily lives. We don't have to go to far to think of examples of professed Christians who have done very evil things. Conversely, the vast bulk of Muslims are, and act as decent people despite some of the teachings of their religion.

I used to think, and perhaps you do too, that Islam and Christianity worshipped the same God; that Islam merely had a deficient understanding of God. That is not the case. To demonstrate this just ask any knowledgeable Muslim the following questions about Allah:

1) Could Allah have sat down and eaten a meal with Abraham and discussed his plans with Abraham? (Genesis 18)

2) Could Allah have descended, made his glory pass by Moses, and pronounced his divine name as YHWH? (Genesis 34.5 ff)

3) Could Allah have spoken to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend”? (Exodus 33.11)

4) Could Allah come to earth, take human nature in addition to his divine nature, be the God-Man Jesus Christ, die for the sin of the world, and rise again?

5) Could Allah live on earth now inside all believers? (John 14.23, Colossians 1.27)

6) Could the rewards of paradise primarily be, not sexual gratification for men and food and wine for women, but rather, for men and women equally, the joy of of a close personal relationship with the living God? (John 14, Revelation 21)

7) Could Allah be triune rather than singular.

If I have been correctly informed, then anyone familiar with the sacred texts of Islam will respond to the effect, “No! Absolutely not!” To each and every question.

On the basis of this, Allah, and YHWH - Father, Son and Holy spirit - cannot be the same entity. So either Allah is false and YHWH is the one and only God, or the other way round. There is no middle course.

In this spiritual battle there can be no compromise. As Elijah might say today: “If YHWH Father-Son-Holy Spirit is God follow him; but if Allah, then follow him.” As the Church we have confused accepting Muslim people with having a detente with Islam. The first we should do, the second is an oxymoron.

Detente with Islam is an oxymoron for two reasons. First, as Christians we worship and serve the only true God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We can give no quarter to a false god. Also we must repudiate a teaching that wrongfully tries to appropriate the true servants of YHWH to this false god. Abraham and the Prophets worshipped and spoke in the name of YHWH. Islam appropriates them and calls them “prophets of Islam”, it even has the brazen audacity to claim Jesus Christ our Saviour, who is true God and true Human, as a mere “prophet of Islam”. This is something we should be willing to die for rather than concede!

Second, it is an oxymoron because Islam has been waging an aggressive war on Christianity for fourteen hundred years. Further according to its sacred texts, all Christians must be put to “Allah, slavery, or the sword”, and all idolaters beheaded, until the whole world acclaims “there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”. There is no quarter offered by Islam, and so no detente is possible. Indeed holding out the prospect of detente is only a trick of psychological warfare. If you doubt this, google the constitution of Iran. You can read for yourself in the preamble under the heading “An Ideological Army”, the stated aim of using their armed forces to bring the whole world under Islamic law. You may recall ISIS voiced a similar desire.

Saudi Arabia is spending huge sums exporting worldwide the Wahhabi doctrine that the Salafi, the first three generations of leaders, were the true face of Islam.

What did Islam do under those first generations of leaders? They launched unprovoked war against their Christian neighbours. They slaughtered, raped and pillaged their way until they had conquered half the then Christian lands. They brutally subdued virtually every Christian country South of the Mediterranean, plus Spain. They forced entire populations to convert to Islam or be reduced to serf status, they took the most beautiful women for sale as sex slaves, and the boys to turn into soldiers.

Islam's armies got to within 250Km of Paris before they were stopped by the Frankish king Charles Martel at the battle of Tours in 721.

Later generations of Caliphs also attacked Christianity. In 1453 Islamic armies sacked Constantinople itself, and went on to the Balkans region. They got to the very gates of Vienna. The second siege of Vienna was broken by a Christian confederation in 1688.

Islamic navies controlled the Mediterranean, and sent raiding parties to the coastal areas of England. The “Barbary Pirates” were actually an aggressive Islamic empire which extorted tribute from countries as far away as America. Battles to free the Mediterranean for international trade were fought by the U.S., and Sweden 1801 to 1805, and by the U.S., Finland, and Britain in 1815, and finally by France in 1830.

The First World War saw the end of the Caliphate, but during that period, Islamic forces killed some 1.5 Million Christians in the Armenian Genocide, then turned on Greek and Assyrian Christians killing another one million civilians.

It is noteworthy that the Christian victors in WWI did not try to entice let alone force Muslim populations in the former Ottoman Empire to convert to Christianity.

We are enjoying a relative peace from attack, only because of the deterrent effect of Western military might, and the vigilance of our police and security forces. But even today, lands that lack such powerful armed protection, are being harried by armed and violent Islamic rebels. Boko Haram, North Sudanese insurgents, Islamic State West Africa Province, and other armed bands are killing, enslaving and displacing many thousands of peaceful Christians each year.

So do not believe “Islam is a religion of peace”. That is a barefaced lie. Islam is a dogma of war. War on unbelievers until all the world is under the rule of Islam. We are only spared a war of bombs and bullets in the West because of our military might. For now we are just facing a war of words. Wake up Christians, fight back with argument and persuasion while it is still only a war of words!

Jesus is the Truth. We must fight Islam with this truth and with prayer.

Remember that in Islam, truth telling is only required among fellow believers. To tell lies to unbelievers in the furtherance of Islam, to speak peace when you mean war, is all counted as doing a service for Allah. (An example is the doctrine of Taqiyya). So do not believe Islam's smiling apologists. Do not be deceived by an invitation to “interfaith dialogue”. These are ruses to turn you and other well meaning Christians into what the Communists used to call “useful idiots”, now those unwittingly furthering the cause of Islam.

Muslims we love, but Islam is the enemy of God and all that is good. We must fight it to the death.

Genesis is Theology not Science

How to understand the Genesis account of Creation and Fall

I've been at both ends of the Christian spectrum on this. I was brought up as a convinced “6-day creationist” and remained one until I had studied enough science at high school to see that it could not be right. In my earl 20's I was seduced by liberal theology and the mantra that genesis was just a “myth”. 45 years later I can see that both those extremes are wrong, quite wrong.

Genesis has profound teaching about God, humans, gender relations, and the entry of evil into this world and the effects of this which we see today. Its teaching is fundamental to our understanding of these things and of the rest of the Bible. To treat it dismissively, as liberals do, is more than silly, it is wicked.

To lump Genesis in with the ancient creation myths we know about is absurd. The Babylonian “Enuma Elish” for instance is a lurid tale of gods fighting and humans eventually being created as a bit of an afterthought to serve the gods. It has the sky and earth made out of the split-in-half body of one of the gods. It also has a political purpose with the Babylonian city deity Marduk portrayed as the champion of the lesser gods, so legitimising Babylon's claim to hegemony. The Egyptian cosmologies are varied, but have the common themes of gods killing each other, and the sky, earth. Sun and many other elements being themselves gods. Even the famous philosopher Plato's 4^th century BC creation myth has a complicated series of divine beings and is incredibly sexist. Plato said that all souls were created male, but ones who lived bad lives were reincarnated as the animals, while ones that were a little bit bad were reincarnated as women. Ladies, how does that make you feel?

As cosmologies go Genesis is sane plain sensible and sober. Don't try to write it off as “myth”.

“six-day creationism” which claims the universe is only some 6,000 years old is also wrong, but as it has a much larger following it is the more dangerous heresy.

Creationism has arisen because sincere people who claim to take the Bible seriously have failed to carefully read what the Bible actually says – even in English translations. Further they have back projected modern culture into a text written for Bronze Age people. To put it simply they have miss-interpreted the Bible. I'll explain why very briefly.

You can't understand what the Bible says by interpreting it “literally”. I know that sounds a harsh criticism, but it is true. God had the Bible written in real human languages that real people spoke. Hebrew (a tiny bit in Aramaic) for the Old Testament and ancient marketplace Greek for the New. Like modern English these languages were enriched with figures of speech, idiom and metaphor. These all have a definite meaning, but it is not the literal meaning of the words. For instance “out of sight out of mind” does not mean “invisible idiot”. If one believes, as I do, that the Bible is “God breathed” then it is vitally necessary to work out exactly what God intended it to mean.

The next important thing is that whilst the Bible was written for us, it was not written to us.

The Bible was written for the instruction of every generation from the time of the original manuscript to the time Jesus comes again. But the original manuscript was written for the original intended audience. Exceptions of course would be things like the prophesies pointing to Jesus, which had both a partial fulfilment for the original recipients and a second complete fulfilment in Jesus' time. But in all cases the Bible was intended to be intelligible to the first audience. It was written to them. It was written in their language, and it spoke to their culture and world view.

The Bible was also written for us: it has relevance in every age and culture. But we moderns have some work to do to understand it. For a start most of us are not fluent in Hebrew or ancient Greek. We have to rely on some scholars translating it into English. But as someone said, “reading the Bible in a translation is like kissing a bride through a veil”, so we further need the help of scholars writing commentaries to bring out the finer points. But we have to do more. We have to put aside our modern frame of reference. We have to put ourselves back into the thought world of the first recipients.

Take one of Jesus' parables, say “the sower and the seed”. We all know what it means because from childhood we have learned it in its original cultural context. But consider a Sunday School teacher in a rural town telling it to kids who hadn't heard it before.

“Hey Miss, that makes no sense,” cries out one little boy, “when my dad takes the seed drill out to plant a thousand acres of wheat what you said never happens. The GPS and on-board computer shut off the feed when he's on a road, same if there's shallow soil because the computer knows that area didn't produce much last year. And as for weeds, well not on our farm! Hadn’t they heard of 'round-up'.”

You laugh, but we are so used to putting ourselves back into the culture of Jesus' time for his parables that we forget we're even doing it. So much so that in the even more distant time of Moses, we may forget to do it all.

So how do we read the Genesis creation and fall account through the eyes of its first recipients, the Israelites God had just rescued from hundreds of years as slaves in Egypt? That was about 1350 BC. They were technologically primitive: they didn't know how to sharpen, let alone make, iron tools. They were “Bronze Age” people. They were scientifically illiterate compared to us. Religiously they had adopted the Egyptian polytheism. We would expect so after 430 years in Egypt, We know so because when they despaired of Moses' return they made an idol from popular Egyptian religion and worshipped it. We also have it from Moses that he expected that when he said he had been sent by the God of their ancestors they would say; “So what's this god's name then?”

An Ancient Egyptian Apis bull. (source: Wikipedia)

What did these Israelites believe about the universe?

1. That all was watery chaos until the gods defeated chaos, brought order, and made land appear (like the annual Nile floods receding)

2. That the sun was a god, and an important one. The moon and stars were also gods.

3. The earth was a flat disk, and also a god

4. the sky was a goddess who stretched on tip-toes and fingers over the earth, with the stars stuck to her belly (in some tales she ate them each morning).

5. The air was a god that helped hold up the sky and made space between earth and sky

6. The sun-god traversed the underside of the sky-goddess each day and was ferried back through the underworld each night.

7. humans were pretty much irrelevant, at best a sort of afterthought of the gods.

The air god Shu, assisted by other gods, holds up Nut, the sky, as Geb, the earth, lies beneath.
From Wikipedia article: Ancient Egyptian Religion

Now suppose you were God. Without completely frying their brain cells, how much can you correct all these ideas? Which are the most important wrong ideas you would want to correct?

My guess is the polytheism for a start. There is only one God who made everything, and he wants his special people to know that. Then the special place of humans, they were in no way just an afterthought. God would want them to know the love he had for them.

But would God correct their primitive scientific views? I don't think so! Most science would be irrelevant and incomprehensible to the Israelites living as God's chosen people. Imaging God trying to get them to understand this: “thirteen and a half billion years ago …” or “at ten to the minus twenty three of a second after I made the big bang ...” or even “I set the physical constants like the gravitational, electromagnetic and the weak and strong nuclear forces.” God couldn't even say that in ancient Hebrew, and no one then could have understood the concepts! But they could have understood a few tips on blacksmithing and that would have helped them greatly, and certainly God could have told Moses that - but we know God didn't even tell them this simple thing! He was

exclusively interested in spiritual matters.

So with this in mind let's look at Genesis anew.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” That would have blown the minds of the ancients! No birth of the gods, no cosmic battles between gods. Just one eternal God who creates everything.

“the earth was formless and empty and ...” or as one translator put it “the world was topsy-turvy.”

Then described is three days of God's activity changing formlessness to form and order, followed by three days of God's activity filling in the emptiness.

This arrangement of days is set out with such careful and beautiful symmetry that it is crass to interpret the “days” as referring to the material beginnings of the universe, they must be intended to be symbolic.

Fix “formless”	Fix “empty”
1. light gives day/night	4. make sun, moon & stars
2. sky-dome with water above & sea below	5. creatures that fly, and sea creatures
3. separate land from sea	6. land based creatures and humans

God's creative acts are repeatedly stated simply as, “and God said”… ending up … “and it happened just like that”. This is so absolutely different from the Egyptian, Babylonian and Canaanite ideas. It highlights God's awesome power. No effort, no battles, God just says the word and it is.

Day 1: God creates light and uses it to separate day and night. You could say he introduces measurable time.

Day 2: God creates a solid sky-dome with water above it (for rain). You might say he creates a space for weather to happen. Yes, we know now that the sky-dome does not exist – but the Israelites believed it did and likely thought it was a god. It was more important for God to teach them it was not a god, but just something he made than to try to teach them science they had no chance of understanding.

Day 3: God separated sea and land and told the land to produce vegetation. You might say he created fertile land.

Now, with time, weather and food, here is a suitable habitat for animals and humans

Day 4: God puts lights in the sky, and also stars. This was the fulfilment of the separation of day and night on Day 1. The Egyptians believed that Ra the sun god was really important, so God does not even dignify the sun and moon with names. They are just lights he put in the sky, a big one for daytime and a little one for night time. But God also gives them a purpose: firstly to shed light on the earth, which is a universal benefit, and, secondly, to mark seasons for festivals and to mark time: days, months and years. This benefits humans. So where foreign creation ideas had humans providing for the gods, here again we learn that God cares about and provides for humans.

Day 5: God makes creatures to live in the sea and creatures to fly between the earth and the firmament. You could say God fills in the sea and air space which he formed on day 2.

Day 6: God orders the land to produce land creatures – and it happens just like that. Then God creates humans in his own image and likeness so that they may rule over the earth and all its animal inhabitants as God's deputies. God creates humans by hand, not command, and breathes his life into them. He creates them male and female. This says heaps about the sanctity of human life.

Day 7: God ceases his work of creating. The Sabbath is instituted as a rest day for humans (and their work-animals) celebrating God as Creator.

Chapter 2

Here we have a beautiful scene of God being playful with Adam to teach him a lesson about equality of the sexes that we still need today. God says, “it is not good for the man to be alone, I will make an ally to stand beside him”. I know most English translations use the word “helper” but this is unfortunate because in English a helper is a subordinate. But the Hebrew word is only used other than here about God. As a verb it is used for a mighty ally, helping Israel fight off enemies.

God introduces all the animals to Adam, but for Adam no helper who is his equal can be found. Then when God introduces Eve to Adam, he says, “this last one, this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…”. She is definitely his equal.

This section rounds off with a statement which would have been mind-blowing in a society where loyalty to parents was paramount. God says, “therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

Chapter 3

In this chapter, humans disobey God. Worse, they give in to the temptation to try to usurp God's position and make the rules themselves. Evil enters the world.

Chapter 4 and following

In the next chapters human evil manifests as the worst sort of crime – murder - then evil spreads geographically all over the world.

(From the account of Cain's fear that people will kill him if he is driven away after murdering his brother Abel, that he marries, and that he founds a city, there must have been other humans around at the time who were not descendants of Adam and Eve. Perhaps Adam and Eve were the first humans with a spiritual relationship to God and to them the possibility of not dying was offered – but as we are not told we probably shouldn't speculate!)

The point of this is to see that Genesis is really important for what it teaches about humans and God, and how sin entered the world. God overlooked the fact that the ancients had wrong scientific views about the world because he was correcting their wrong religious ideas that there were lots of “gods” and teaching them that he was the one and only, the awesomely powerful, and the wonderfully benevolent, creator God.

For what God intended to teach through Genesis, it is absolutely true and reliable.

But to say Genesis was teaching science is patently wrong.

1. we've just seen that God didn't try to correct their scientific ideas.

2. if we claim Genesis is teaching science, then we make God out to be a liar because we know the earth is not flat. We know the sky is not a solid dome. We know rain does not come from a reservoir of water beyond the sun and stars. And we know that the sun does not travel across the sky and return during the night. But Genesis says all these things.

So modern people are absolutely wrong to set Genesis against science. God didn't care about the Israelites' science so it follows he doesn't care about ours! Genesis is about religion.

We simply must stop trying to “prove” science wrong.

1. We can't succeed. So we are wasting energies that could be spent spreading the Gospel.

2. It doesn't matter to God. So we are stubbornly “doing our own thing”.

3. It prevents people who understand some science from coming to Christ (and Jesus said “if anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble it would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their necks).

4. It makes those who do believe “6-day 6,000 years ago creationism” puffed up thinking they know more than the brilliant scientists who have laboured all their lives exploring how God created the universe, and we know how abhorrent pride is to God.

Surely creationism can only be a delusion spawned and maintained by the devil. I say this as one who was hooked on it, so I'm not judging anyone. But now we need to wake up and throw off this encumbrance.