This article comes from the Intercessors for New Zealand – Pray for the Nation, September 2013 newsletter. IFNZ is headed up by Brian Caughley, who offered closing prayer at the NZCN Unsung Heroes Awards recently held in Wellington.
A return to the Word of God
It would appear that a huge majority of Christians do not read the Bible each day, let alone read a reasonable portion of Scripture daily or study God’s Word regularly. If you watch an hour of TV at night, during that hour you will probably watch 15-20 minutes of advertisements. In 15-20 minutes you can easily read about 4 chapters of the Bible!
So how come many Christians are “too busy” to read the Bible, study it and apply it, while they have time to watch TV and TV ads? If we don’t read God’s Word and listen to His voice speaking to us, how can we call ourselves Christians – His followers or disciples? It is no wonder that there is such confusion in the church about so many issues (e.g., moral issues) and that the church often appears as worldly as the unbelieving world around us.
Please pray that all true Christians will return to reading and studying God’s Word, listening to His voice and obeying Him. Pray that churches which are not preaching and teaching God’s Word, and those which openly contradict what God has said in His Word, will repent and turn back to Him and His ways!
This is urgent and serious! If the world sees no difference between us and them, why should they become Christians? Untold harm is done by parts of the “church” which are apostate (or almost so – if that is possible!) “The time has come for judgement to begin with the Household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the end for those who do not obey the Gospel of God?” (1 Peter 4:17).
We need to see God’s judgement as a positive thing – God’s desire to bring us back to righteousness and blessing, instead of going down the path of evil and, ultimately, destruction. Pray for the Church! Pray for all Christians! Pray for our society and the nation!
May God have mercy on us, and restore us through our repentance and our turning back to Him and His ways!
Intercessors for New Zealand was started by Brian Caughley in January 1972, after receiving a word from God to call Christians to “Pray for the Nation”.
IFNZ specifically aims to encourage prayer, and present Bible teaching, which exhorts Christians to pray regularly and specifically for their nation – for revival and evangelism, the Church, the Government and the Nation.
Wow, what a statement. I didn’t know what to think when I saw the title of the video clip that one of NZCN’s Secularism discussion panel members circulated, but I’m glad I watched it.
What Role Can Churches Play in Community Renewal?
On 9 August, 2013, The NY Times shared the story of Kip Jacob’s church in Portland, Oregon and the amazing partnership they’ve had with Roosevelt High School. “Help from Evangelicals (Without Evangelizing)“ The Times called it. The initial paragraph reads:
PORTLAND, Ore. — Four summers ago, on her first day as an administrator at Roosevelt High School here, Charlene Williams heard that the Christians were coming. Some members of an evangelical church were supposed to be painting hallways, repairing bleachers, that sort of thing. The prospect of such help, in the fervently liberal and secular microclimate of Portland, did not exactly fill her with joy.
Following is a 6:31 minute sizzle reel of the documentary made about the project.
Qideas.com filmed an interview with Kip Jacobs, pastor at SouthLake Church, about this project. Click here to watch the story of what happens when a mostly white, affluent suburban church shows up at the doorsteps of an urban high school with a desire to work together. Through his experience, Jacob challenges churches to get involved with their neighbourhood schools and invest in their renewal.
After watching these videos, I followed the link on Qideas.org to a follow-up story. In this clip, The presenter interviews two friends, Tom Krattenmaker, who is a regular contributor to USA Today, and Kevin Palau, president of the Luis Palau Association, as they discuss how God is moving in Portland, what dynamics are at play that movements in other cities might resemble and urge us to prepare for future cultural shifts.
Other videos about this particular project in Portland can be found on the BeUndivided YouTube channel. Their website, which is full of resources and ideas, can be accessed here.
What do you think? Is it better than prayer in schools? What can we take from this and apply to our culture, here in Aotearoa?
Please leave your thoughts and comments below and share this link with others. Challenge your Christian friends to think about what role they can take while living in a secular society. We look forward to the discussions!
Blessings,
Gayann
Gayann and her husband, Stephen, have provided web design and email communication support to NZCN since 2006. She has home schooled their two children for the past nine years, but was ‘made redundant’ at the start of 2013. Since then, she has taken a more active role with NZCN.
Last week, we posted an essay by EAUK’s Danny Webster titled One Way Christians Can Respond to Secularism. In his essay, Danny described how the churches of Southampton partnered with local government when the council asked for their help. Fantastic.
Have you ever asked a young atheist why he or she doesn’t believe? Well, one researcher did. And the answers may surprise you.
It’s something most Christian parents worry about: You send your kids off to college and when they come back, you find they’ve lost their faith. The prospect of this happening is why many parents nudge their kids towards Christian colleges, or at least schools with a strong Christian presence on campus.
But in many ways, the damage has been done long before our children set foot on campus. That’s the message from a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly.
My friend Larry Taunton of the Fixed Point Foundation set out to find out why so many young Christians lose their faith in college. He did this by employing a method I don’t recall being used before: He asked them.
The Fixed Point Foundation asked members of the Secular Students Associations on campuses around the nation to tell them about their “journey to unbelief.” Taunton was not only surprised by the level of response but, more importantly, about the stories he and his colleagues heard.
Instead of would-be Richard Dawkins’, the typical respondent was more like Phil, a student Taunton interviewed.. Phil had grown up in church; he had even been the president of his youth group. What drove Phil away wasn’t the lure of secular materialism or even Christian moral teaching. And he was specifically upset when his church changed youth pastors.
Whereas his old youth pastor “knew the Bible” and made Phil “feel smart” about his faith even when he didn’t have all the answers, the new youth pastor taught less and played more.
Phil’s loss of faith coincided with his church’s attempt to ingratiate itself to him instead of challenging him. According to Taunton, Phil’s story “was on the whole typical of the stories we would hear from students across the country.”
These kids had attended church but “the mission and message of their churches was vague,” and manifested itself in offering “superficial answers to life’s difficult questions.” The ministers they respected were those “who took the Bible seriously,” not those who sought to entertain them or be their “buddy.”
Taunton also learned that, for many kids, their journey to unbelief was an emotional, not just an intellectual one.
Taunton’s findings are counter-intuitive. Much of what passes for youth ministry these days is driven by a morbid fear of boring our young charges. As a result, a lot of time is spent trying to devise ways to entertain them.
The rest of the time is spent worrying about whether the Christian message will turn kids off. But as Taunton found, young people, like the not-so-young, respect people with conviction—provided they know what they’re talking about.
Taunton talks about his experiences with the late Christopher Hitchens, who, in their debates, refrained from attacking him. When asked why, Hitchens replied, “Because you believe it.”
I don’t know what that says about Hitchens’ other Christian debate partners, but it is a potent reminder that playing down the truth claims of the Christian faith doesn’t work. People don’t believe those they don’t respect.
Here’s something that one of the students told Larry Taunton; he said,
“Christianity is something that if you really believed it, it would change your life and you would want to change [the lives] of others. I haven’t seen too much of that.”
Folks, that’s pretty sobering. This puts the ball in our court. Are we living lives that show our children that we actually believe what we say we believe? And here’s another question—do we actually believe it? I have to say, as a parent I’m taking this very seriously. If possible, join me in reading Taunton’s excellent article here…
I wrote an article in one of the national newspapers a couple of weeks ago in praise of Lucinda Creighton and afterwards received an email that gave me pause for reflection. It was short and not so sweet. My correspondent didn’t like my views, and indeed seemed to like Lucinda’s even less. But what intrigued me was the graphic image at the core of the communication – of a teenage Down Syndrome girl who has been raped. People like Lucinda Creighton and myself, he declared, were standing in the way of her receiving an abortion.
The email didn’t change my mind about abortion, but it put me thinking about the way liberals have managed to win this debate, and will go on to win many more. I was briefly tempted to write back to this man (my correspondent was male) and ask him for the name of the teenage girl he referred to. In the end I decided against this course, feeling that it might give him a perverse kind of encouragement.
But of course there was no teenager with Down Syndrome. The girl had no name because she did not exist. It stuck me then that at least half of the argumentation put forward by the ‘pro-choice’ lobby is similarly lacking in any reality, being purely hypothetical. I can think of no other issue in respect of which the debate could take place in such abstract, dissociated terms. Imagine a debate about motor transport, for example, being conducted in this way: it would take just one or two instances of people being killed by motor vehicles to ensure that mechanically-propelled vehicles were banned for all time.
In the past 30 years, there has been a handful of real-life public controversies in which the issue of abortion was critical in the life of an actual woman – the X and C cases, for example, and more recently the Savita Halappanavar case. And yet, the pro-choice, building on this handful of cases, and augmenting its arguments with a series of creative hypotheses has, in effect, changed Ireland from being a nation inflexibly opposed to abortion to a society on the cusp of giving the nod to one of the most liberal abortion regimes in the world.
The debate of the past nine months confirms that this is going to happen, and there is no point in sticking our heads in the sand. Given the conditions in which these ‘debates’ occur, this is inevitable and cannot be prevented. For one thing, the ‘debates’ are almost invariably hosted by ‘liberal’ journalists, and, for another, the skewed dynamics of the ‘debates’ ensure that these are really dramas in which traditionalist forces are pitted against liberals in a manner than ensures only the liberal argument can win. Hence, it is not so much a question as testing both sides of an argument as dramatising the victory of ‘truth’ over ‘error’. If the present media culture is permitted to continue, abortion will eventually be introduced into Ireland. It is only a matter of time.
But those taking up the other side of the argument must take some responsibility also. Because of its outlook, ideology and tactics, the pro-life side has done much to deliver victory into the hands of its opponents, most notoriously in its promotion of the 1983 constitutional amendment, which had the effect of overriding a perfectly adequate anti-abortion law with a measure that in effect placed the rights of mother and child in diametric opposition, leaving the decision in complex cases to be decided by the courts. Once you redefine the relationship of mother and child outside its natural symbiosis, identifying the two parties as competing entities, the child has a diminishing chance of survival. Hence, that amendment unwittingly delivered the unborn child into a new dispensation of individualised rights, in which the balance of advantage – by virtue of ideology and the media’s capacity to manipulate public sympathies – would most likely be overwhelmingly on the side of the mother. Each successive case has resulted in a further erosion of the legal situation, which has now been formalised in the Protection of Life in Pregnancy Bill.
At the heart of this debate has been the recurring theme that pregnancy is always by definition an imposition on a woman, unless she chooses to define things otherwise.
Once this idea is accepted, abortion on demand becomes merely a matter of time, because the very bedrock of the culture becomes contaminated with a quite different understanding of human nature and purpose than was understood hitherto. Rarely is it pointed out that it is not in the nature of mothers to be opposed to their children, unborn of otherwise. On the contrary, the very idea of motherhood, and indeed fatherhood, is centred on providing for the needs of the child even at the expense of the parent’s personal well-being or even ‘rights’. Most parents, for example, would think nothing of risking their lives to rescue one of their children from a burning motor vehicle. And yet liberals use as a central bulwark of their debating tactics the idea that no woman should ever be expected to incur any risk by virtue of being pregnant.
Life is risk, and most people accept this. The number of people who are unwilling to run such risks for their children are miniscule, and yet the outlook of this tiny notional minority is used to effect the most fundamental changes in our understandings about the very nature and structure of human beings.
Another major failing on the pro-life side has been its attitude to the position of fathers in relation to unborn children. Irish Catholicism is by its nature mother-centred, and has therefore, unbeknownst to itself, been supplying a harmony to the feminist rhetoric emanating from the ‘pro-choice’ side. There is no point banging on, in different contexts, about ‘family values’, if you neglect to emphasis this aspect where it is most vital. The only person I heard alluding to fathers during the recent discussion was the (now former) Fine Gael TD Peter Mathews.
And there is an even more fundamental difficulty in as far as the Catholic contribution to these discussion is concerned. In recent times, Irish Catholicism has been asserting itself in the public domain almost exclusively in the context of battles to prevent the social drift of Irish society from taking a different direction to Catholic moral teaching. The word ‘abortion’ has become almost a synonym for ‘Catholic’, provoking public demonstrations characterised by extremist statements and intense rage. Meanwhile, the insistent and growing pressure in our culture to remove Christian thinking from the mainstream of education and culture attracts virtually no opposition from within the Catholic Church – apart from an occasional and timid resistance which might easily be construed as the straightforward protection of territory.
It is a problem that Catholic contributions to these debates rarely penetrate to the heart of the Christian teaching involved. Thus, the ‘traditional’ argument is easily dismissed as arising from simplistic positions, usually expressed in the form of unadorned and unsubtle rules – for example, that ‘all human life is sacred’, or that ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’. Such is the construction of the debate-drama that the reiteration of such reductionist rules serves merely to confirm that the interest of Christianity in this context is to oppose the impetus of modern society, rather than, for example, to make clear why Christians have come to think as they do. In the kind of public discourse we have arrived at, the telegrammatic expression of such values acquires precisely the texture and context which those on the other side of the argument rejoice in.
The Christian message is in trouble. From a public relations point of view, our brand is hurting. Non-Christians find us to be hypocritical, judgmental, arrogant, and constantly telling other people how to live. Our own young people are leaving the church in surprising numbers. Christian influence in American culture is probably at an all-time low.
For Christians who believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the solution to the poverty, pain, and brokenness in our world, this is very bad news. The question is, what can we do about it?
During my career as a CEO, I have led companies that were on the rise as well as on the decline. There was a time in the early ‘80s when the electronic gaming industry hit a rough patch. Sales were down, and my shareholders wanted to see a turnaround. Times were tough.
In this situation, a leader has two basic options. You can retreat to your “core competencies.” That is, you focus on what you do best, and stick to it while riding out the storm. You batten down the hatches. This is what a bank might do during a market crash, focus on the core business of collecting deposits and making loans and avoid the fancy market speculation that can produce big payoffs as well as losses.
The other strategy is to take some risks, get aggressive, and step into what might be unfamiliar territory. You use the difficult situation to find an edge when the market changes. This is what a technology giant might do when new, nimble startups fundamentally change the nature of the industry.
I believe this is what the church needs to do today.
For the last century, Christians have largely focused on the first strategy. We have sought to clarify our doctrines and purify our congregations. We stuck to the basics of the faith: believe and be baptized, and you’ll go to heaven.
That strategy had its moment and saw its share of successes. When the basic truths of Christianity were being questioned—but Christianity was still widely accepted and followed—it was important to stick to our core beliefs. However, there are times when that strategy is no longer effective.
Today, Christianity is not only questioned but even disliked. The situation is fundamentally changing, and we need to look outward, not inward. It isn’t good enough to ride out the storm if the wind and waves are likely to break the ship to pieces.
Having travelled to dozens of countries, I have seen the church succeed wildly when it takes the gospel message boldly into new arenas, but it requires us to be willing to break out of our ghetto. It means we will have to engage in the messy reality of our world.
I’ve seen Christians earn a fresh hearing for the gospel as they worked alongside Muslims and Buddhists providing a day care for the children of prostitutes. In Africa I’ve seen Christians and Muslims learn to respect each other’s faith as they work to stop the AIDS crisis. I have seen Christians working on behalf of the poor but doing so alongside governments accused of human rights abuses. What I get to see in the arena of international development, the church must also do in the arenas of culture, politics, business, art, science and entertainment.
In each situation, Christians must earn the right to offer the whole gospel—one that moves from belief to action—as the solution to the brokenness and pain in our world.
The fact is, we have to get into the messiness of the world—and get messy ourselves—if we’re going to impact it. Instead of judging those outside the church, we must engage them. We have to risk offending other Christians who want to stick to our “core competencies” and avoid the grey areas in the world.
In 1 Corinthians 5, the Apostle Paul advises the church not to associate with immoral people, but he offers this clarification. “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.” I think Paul is saying that while we are to be holy ourselves, we must also live with and love all the swindlers and misfits in our world.
We can no longer bar our doors and close our windows seeking a refuge from the turmoil outside. We can’t expect people to come to us looking for salvation. We have to find new ways, outside the walls of the church, to demonstrate to a hurting world the good news of the gospel. We need to show people a different and authentic faith. And we have to be willing to make mistakes, get dirty, and take risks. The times are changing, and we need a new strategy.
For fully hyperlinked article, view the original post on stuff.co.nz
OPINION: When UK journalist and co-founder of The Women’s Room Caroline Criado-Perez spearheaded a campaign to replace Charles Darwin’s image with Jane Austen’s on a British banknote, her efforts were rewarded by a sustained Twitter attack from some of the more repugnant turds excreted by society’s sulphurous bottom.
She received about 50 abusive threats an hour over a twelve hour period on the bite-sized messaging service, some threatening rape or murder, and all just because she had successfully campaigned to get a woman’s face on a bank note. She complained, and a 21-year-old has now been arrested.
“It’s sadly not unusual to get this kind of abuse but I’ve never seen it get as intense or aggressive as this,” said Criado-Perez.
“It’s infuriating that the price you pay for standing up for women is 24 hours of rape threats. We are showing that by standing together we can make a real difference.”
Criado-Perez’ experience reinforced what female users of Twitter have known since its launch – that the social media site woefully fails to quickly and proactively support the vast network of women who are subjected to abuse (often graphic and violent) simply for daring to have claim space in the ‘conversation’ that Twitter positions itself as being the locus of. She had to take it to the police.
She is now leading a campaign similar to the #fbrape one conducted a few months ago, with the intention of having Twitter become more accountable for the way their platform is used.
Twitter has been threatened with a mass boycott on August 4 from prominent celebrities, MPs and writers should they continue to sidestep responsibility over the issue. (So far, Twitter UK general manager Tony Wang has responded by stating that they are looking at simplifying the process of reporting offensive tweets.)
The question of what can be done to counter gendered online abuse is routinely painted as a woman’s problem to solve with the most frequently offered directive being to “just ignore it”. Having experienced such unwelcome intrusions on repeated occasions, I am familiar with those responses aimed at discrediting the justifiable anger of being told, for example, that even though you’re too ugly to rape, you probably still deserve it. “Don’t pay attention to them”, such advice dictates. “You’re only giving them the attention they want.” Or, “You have X number of followers, and this person only has a handful. Why are you abusing your power like this?”
“For those who say, ‘why complain – just block?’ on a big troll day, it can be 50 violent/rape messages an hour. Exhausting and upsetting,” tweeted comedian and writer Caitlin Moran.
Occasionally, I have been lectured on my attempts to “shut down free speech” – as if it is my objection to sexual assault being used as a warning that threatens the fabric of society, and not the fact that some people still find it a useful tool of debate.
Criado-Perez quite rightly calls bull on this tactic, advocating instead a commitment to “shout back”. Ignoring abuse doesn’t make it go away. Believe me, I know. What it does is make you feel invaded, powerless and (if the troll in question seems to have a greater than usual insight into your online activities) vaguely paranoid.
Too often, trolls are left untended simply because they are invisible. They are the Peeping Toms of the online world – they can peer through your windows, but you can’t see their faces. So to stop them from salivating over your distress, you become weathered against their hatred.
The result is twofold. Firstly, women become superficially immune to the pain of being told in minute detail what it is we deserve to have done to us as punishment for the crime of speaking. It still surprises me when I hear gasps from groups as I reveal some of the things that have been said to me in the past, and urges me to remind myself that this experience of dehumanisation is not the rent a woman must pay for being given a spot at the table.
But there is deeper damage being done, an erosion of the sense of self. One can only be exposed to this sheer hatred so many times before it begins to seep into your core.
You read it and hear it and see it without flinching, and then suddenly without warning find yourself standing in the shower one evening feeling broken yet unable to cry because you’ve been steeling yourself against vulnerability for so long that you don’t seem to know how to do it anymore. It is a theft of emotion, and it is unforgiveable.
These misogynists ejaculate their rage all over the internet, using their threat of both a rutting penis and the denial of it to try and keep women in their place. It happened to Lindy West when she criticised the abundance of jokes about rape. It happened to Marion Bartoli when she won Wimbledon, and viewers decided she was too ugly to deserve this honour.
And when the trolls are found out, what do they do? They scurry away and hide, delete their accounts, protect their tweets, complain about how women can’t take a joke and whinge that feminists are trying to censor them.
Mostly, they bank on the fact that no one will find them out – that their real life personas, complete with jobs, partners, children and friends will remain separate from the online one where they use handles like RapeCr3w and talk about how “consent” is irrelevant.
To them, degrading women on a routine basis is both an enjoyable game and a silencing tool. As Tanya Gold wrote recently in The Guardian, “Rape, and the threat of rape, is a favoured weapon for men who hate women. It is an effective mode of decapitation, speaking (or rather shouting) only to the vagina, pretending the brain doesn’t exist.”
But occasionally we can fight back. At the time of writing this, a 21-year-old man from Manchester had been arrested in relation to the threats made against Criado-Perez, with the possibility of more to follow.
Despite what some might say about the sanctity of free speech and the lawlessness of the internet, this is not an overreaction. These trolls bank on women’s silence while ironically defending their fundamental right to say whatever they like without consequence.
Well, women aren’t going to roll over and ignore it. We’re not going to enable their entitlement by keeping our mouths shut. Like Criado-Perez says, we’re shouting back – and if these misogynist troglodytes don’t like the sound of one banshee standing up for herself, they’re going to really hate it what it sounds like when millions of us do it together.
By Clementine Ford
