Thoughts on Yesterday’s Bridge Tragedy

Many of you would have heard with horror yesterday’s news story of a father from a well to do suburb, allegedly murdering his four year old daughter here in Melbourne.

In the midst of a records heatwave, a father of three was returning from his beach house in order to get the kids to their first day of school. As morning rush hour traffic slowed on the Westgate bridge, horrified commuters saw the man stop his car, unbuckle his daughter from her seat and walk up to the edge of the bridge and drop her 58 metres to her death. (read full story here )

When I was younger and in my twenties, such stories affected me but I was able to hold a kind of distance from them. But now that I am a father, with a daughter of my own, such a story can only simply floor me. It is almost as if when you become a parent the castle walls are removed from around your heart and such tragedies hit with a force that they could not before.

How could such a thing happen? What causes someone to do something like this? Was he having a psychiatric episode? Was it a custody battle? What caused such a moment of evil? Our first response is to see such an offender as less than human, to deal with such a tragedy by seeing such a man as an animal. Part of me wants to see this incident through such a lens, it is much easier to deal with it in that way. But as a follower of Christ I cannot. To do so would avoid the reality that evil is much more complicated than our culture would like to admit.

The great Russian Christian and political dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after observing the worst of human behaviour during his time in a Soviet prison camp, expressed the Christian view of evil in this way,

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

If we are really honest there are people everywhere, particularly men in whom a slow cooking anger boils. I am not saying that everyone of us is capable of such an act of murder. But I know that such an anger has boiled in me sometimes. That as a male, frustration, desperation and anger can cause a reaction that frightens even yourself. When most men are honest there is a least one moment when we have felt such uncontrollable anger, and have directed it others, at objects or at themselves.

I remember speaking to a prison chaplain, he told me that prisons were filled with career criminals, people who had been raised in or fallen into the criminal class. Yet prisons were also filled with normal, decent men, who let that anger boil away unchecked, who allowed their inner world to turn toxic, and in a moment of madness let the rage explode out. That anger can combine with sleeplessness or alchohol  or drugs and end up ruining their own and their loved ones lives in a moment of inexplicable violence. Prisons are filled with men who sit and who cannot believe that for a matter of seconds they did not recognize themselves, that they became that man that they never thought that they would be and that those few seconds of madness destroyed their world and the world of their loved ones.

As a culture it is essential that we make it a priority to have excellent psychiatric care available, we need systems, counselling, education, programs, facilities and structures to help people who are suffering with such anger, depression and frustration.  Such programs are able to alleviate many problems, yet they are unable to deal with the root cause of the existential angst that causes so much desperation, anger and violence today.

As a follower of Christ I also believe that we that we are charged with an important responsibility. A responsibility to allow God to work on the project of our inner lives. We are also called to partner with him in this enterprise  to move each day towards allowing his shalom peace to transform our inner world. To many this will sound so ‘Christian cliche’, so ‘Sunday school 1986′, but I would like to humbly assert that I have come to believe, that the task of personal holiness is actually one of the most socially radical steps anyone can take. To admit that the potential for evil is not ‘out there’ amongst a certain group of people but inside of ech one of us, is an incredibly counter cultural prophetic step to take. It takes Romans 3:12 and Solzhenitsyn’s wisdom seriously, that if we are to rid the world of injustice and evil we must begin with our own hearts. 

In an age where mission has increasingly become one dimensional, we need to rediscover the radical subversive nature of evangelism. We need to ge to the task of encouraging others to encounter Christ, to allow him to transform their inner worlds. To engage in this task is to partner with God in his plan to redeem the world, to walk with him towards a future in which such horrors as we heard of yesterday are an ancient memories from our world’s past.

The Trouble With Incarnation + The HeatWave Blogging Clause

Just to let you know I am invoking the HeatWave blogging clause. That for the duration of Melbourne’s record heatwave I hold no blame for anything stupid that I write, I encourage other Victorians and South Australian’s to follow suite.

One of the words which gets used often in the missional conversation in Australia is incarnational. A lot of people now use the term missional-incarnational to differentiate the conversation that has emerged out of Australia in contrast to some misisonal discussions particularly in the United States. However upon reflection I think there has been some difficulties about how the incarnational approach has been applied.I agree with incarnational missiology. But the problems seems to be in the realm of application, or should I say misapplication.

Many Christians, particularly young adults find themselves struggling with an identity crisis when it comes to their faith. This is one of the main reasons so many young adults are leaving faith in the West. Being a Christian who is serious about faith carries no social currency in our culture, in fact it is likely to harm your social standing. To be a Christian who is open about your faith requires quite a bit of strength of character.  So when many young adults hear about the idea of incarnational mission, without realizing it they see it as a way of resolving the social isolation they feel as a follower of Christ. The incarnational approach then becomes an excuse or an escape clause in which we can limit the differences between us and those who would not classify themselves as followers of Christ in order to lessen the strain on our social standing. Sadly, often in the process the idea of holiness gets dumped and the missional purpose of the incarnational approach gets neutered.

Erika Haub in the following quote offers a wonderful yet frightening reminder for those of us who believe in the incarnational approach,

 I think if there were one thing I would want us to remember today as we consider all things missional, it would be that as we talk about incarnational living and incarnational ministries and being incarnational wherever we live, we are talking about a way of life that leads to the cross. It did for Jesus, and if I read Philippians correctly, it should for us as well. Read the full article here

Erika makes a fantastic point, we are called to live incarnationally just a Christ incarnated himself in our world, however the life of Christ reminds us that incarnation does not lead to us feeling anymore at home in the kingdom of this age, that the more we incarnate into our culture, the more we will find ourselves at odds with the elements of that culture which resist God’s redemptive actions in the world.

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So Nerdy it Hurts

Ben Wheatley has written a great post pointing out some of the flaws in my previous post Have Nerds Hijacked the Missional Church?

Ben writes

I am and always have been what others might call a nerd/geek. Unlike most of my nerd brethren however I am what I am going to term a Metanerd – in that I am not just aware of my own nerdishness but actually understand its nature and am able to cognitively apply adapted social skills to appear more “normal” and then be able to apply my nerdishness in ways accessible to others.

Ben Continues

I think Mark gets it wrong here or at least chose the wrong language.

The fact is, speaking as a Nerd, I believe that the one thing Nerds long for most is a sense of belonging and community but it is the one this consistently denied them by the nature of there Nerdishness. In a sense Mark’s post feels like we are being attacked for the one aspect of our brokenness that we have least control over. Let me stress I know that was never Mark’s intention.

Yep that was not my intention. I guess I used the wrong word. Ben continues

Returning to Mark’s post and if I might be a bit nerdy and reference Harry Potter I believe the real targets of marks post should not be Nerds but the All Talk, No Action Gilderoy Lockhart’s of the missional church.

I guess I was more trying to make the point that there are many great voices out there who we need to be listening to, people who maybe due to personality or age or general non- tech proficiency have hugely important things to say. I would hate it if this conversation became purely about those who marketed themselves the best online.

Ben has some really important things to say about fitting into church, and the expereince of being a nerd. Check out his article here and while you are there have a wander around his blog.  Also a big nod to Ben for writing to me personally and allowing me to see my flaws of logic with great grace.

Maybe I was having more of a poke at the over abundance of computer love in the missional church. Which is just a really silly sentence to allow me to leave the last word to Zapp and Roger (why did they have to end up shooting each other?). Yes i know its a big stretch but it’s my blog and I can do what the heck I want and besides talk boxes were so cool.

Have Nerds hijacked the Missional Church?

Nerds have a fascinating place in our cultural landscape, some cultural analysts claim that they are a kind of mockery of autistic people. Other cultural analysts have claimed that they are a form of anti-Semitic ‘blackface’, that is a racist caricature of Jewish people. But in the 21st century the term nerd has become shorthand for someone who has a strong interest in computers and technology.

Which leads me to a question. Have nerds hijacked the missional Church conversation? I began to wonder this over the Christmas break. I noticed how little I used computers when I was not working. I find blogging , podcasting and email helpful when it comes to communicating with people in my ministry duties, but in terms of personal interest, frankly to relax there are tons of others things I would be rather doing. I have friends that salivate as they see the Apple logo, however I don’t think I have ever taken much notice of a Mac store let alone walked into one.

Thus I began to think there must be a lot of other people like me out there. That is those who do not have an interest in spending half their lives online. But the problem is these days that the more interested you are in all things techie, the louder your voice has become, to put it in the vernacular, if you are a nerd it is much easier for you to get your opinion out there.

So the other day when I read Dan Kimball write on his blog

“Could blogging, twittering, Facebook etc. be addictive – and if so, can it actually get in the way of mission? The answer may be obvious, but when we spend time doing something, it takes away from time we could be spending doing something else. So do the hours we can spend on blogs, twitter, Facebook and even reading about missional things on blogs take away too much from the time that we could actually be on mission and spending with people in real life?”

It made me wonder if the missional church conversation has become dominated by nerds. The people who I have met and who I know who are the most naturally missional and gifted in sharing their faith, tend to be highly social, highly extroverted people, who’s idea of punishment is being shackled to a computer away from interacting and loving people, to be blunt, they are not nerds.

Now remember I am painting here in broad and general brushstrokes. But perhaps, a lot of the angst that is surfacing around the ‘fruitfullness’ of missional church is due to this phenomenon. That is the missional discussion tends to stay in the realm of the ‘abstract’ and the ‘theoretical’ because it is discussed ad nausem by nerds online, and the voice of the actual practitioners is sidelined, due the fact that they spend a lot of their lives offline, getting ‘face time’ with people. Therefore the online discussion regarding misisonal church does not include the natural feedback loop of the practitioners who test the theories in the real world.

Dunno, Just a thought….

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Help needed to make me seem awesome online. Hyperreal Status Updates

Struggling with the grind of making your mundane life seem awesome online? Finding it difficult to to put the glitz in your twittering, the hyperreality back in your facebook status updates, and the kapow in your personal blogging. Help is now at hand in developing your faux fantastic online identity, let others do it for you. Just click here 

Cheers to Ben for the link.

Why no Comments?

The fact that I do not have comments on this blog has caused great angst to some people. For the reasons why I have comments turned off, check the side bar and hit the why no comments link, which strangely is one of the most read articles on my blog. Now someone else has captured many of my feelings about the shortcomings of dialogue in comments pages. Keith Kahn-Harris & David Hayes write

But when you peruse a typical comment-thread, the problems with it become apparent. What is striking is that few of the comments really engage with the piece they are supposedly commenting on. Instead, most commentators just engage with each other, often with a viciousness that takes your breath away. There is a kind of circularity to the threads, with similar arguments repeated time and time again and rebutted as often.

Kahn-Harris and Hayes bring home the bacon,

Perhaps it is time for comment-threads on popular sites to be monitored more carefully or even jettisoned altogether. Perhaps the right to comment on something should be contingent on maintaining a respectful and constrained manner. The emergent trend towards “slow blogging” emphasises the production of considered, thoughtful online writing over immediate, often angry responses (and openDemocracy itself provides many good examples of this kind of writing). Blogs that feature dialogues rather than monologues are emerging (such as bloggingheads.tv). Social-networking sites can bring politically active people together in ways that develop meaningful relationships rather than antagonistic ones (see for example, the “peacemaking” network, mepeace.org).

The tools for a different kind of politics exist. What is needed is the will to turn away from self-obsessed and point-scoring politics to a politics that is actually about something. What is needed is a politics that reconnects individuals with each other, a politics that looks outwards as well as inwards, a politics that is not all about “ME”.

read full article here. Oh and happy Australia day!

Post bling Recession Chic

Is this post-bling recession chic? Interesting to note that there is still product placement, can you spot it?

Obama and Gen Y. When the Honeymoon ends.

A number of people have sent me messages asking for my take on the cultural event of the week, that is Obama’s inauguration. As I mentioned yesterday I have been ill for the last couple of days, and so have been here slow cooking in the 24 hour media coverage Obama’s transition to power. There are multiple different observations that I have had over the last 48 hours. But I wanted to pick up on one stream. To me there were a variety of different stories being told yesterday. Probably the strongest story that gained the most resonance with people across the world was the story of an African – American being elected president of the United States. But an interesting sub story will be how Obama now handles the expectations and aspirations of the millions of Gen Y’s that he so effectivly corralled.

Obama brilliantly spoke to Gen Y’s in a language that they understood, that is aspirationally. He used social networking media and technologies to engage them where they were at. His branding and slogan “Yes we can” captured perfectly the worldview of Gen Y. However in an age of inflated personal expectations and instant gratification, many young people may simply see the breakthrough of Obama’s rise to president a result of his drive, personal power, and his command of social networking technology. However the reality is much different, the path taken by Obama, was blazed by millions of others who fought in the civil right movement, who’s understanding of commitment and cost meant that they faced social isolation, racism, imprisonment, or even lynching. This is a very different reality than supporting the cause by wearing an Obama bandana or adding him as a facebook friend.  

I think that Obama understands this dynamic. However many young people watching across the world yesterday would not have seen the spark’s flying as Obama pulled the breaks, the ‘Yes we Can’ Obama was gone, we now had President Obama who spoke of the giant challenges that we faced, the huge task ahead, the dangers of terrorism, the threat of economic meltdown. The need for everyone to pull together and work hard. This was not Gen Y Obama, this was not even Gen X or Baby Boomer Obama, this was Builder Obama, this was the language of the the builder generation who had lived through World War two, who understood the hardships of the depression. The Yes we can message that had entranced young people was still there but there was a caveat attached the end “Yes We Can: But it is going to really cost, going to be hard work and could take a lot longer than you think at significant cost to you”. Sentiments and language that is unintelligible to Gen Y. The million dollar question is how does Obama handle the sea of expectation that he has created from a generation who will expect instant results at bargain basement prices?

Tony Blair faced a similar issue when his Britpop infused new Labour engaged British young people in the political process in a way that they had never been before. He swept the conservative party out of the way surfing to power on a youth wave. However months later the music bible the NME which had lauded Blair and his hipster brand of politics was filled with scorn for the new leader, its pages were filled with the vitriol of rock stars and celeb’s that had once praised the Prime Minister (for more on this story see John Harris’ excellent rock/political history The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock) Once you enter the world of youth culture to

The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant once noted that the real skill in leading a nation is playing the balancing act between working towards social good and administering universal justice. When you are running for office all you speak about is social good, social justice, and building a fair and civil society. But once you take office you also have to wield the stick. As one commentator on CNN said yesterday, how will the organic social networking generation handle President Obama the boss of the most top down leadership structure on earth?

It is going to be fascinating how the newest President of the United States handles the expectations of a youth culture who expects it all, yesterday.

The Fear

Was intending to come back from speaking in New Zealand and jump into the new year with aplomb, but have come down with the mother of all flu’s (not much fun having a fever while it is 39c /100f outside).

 So will return to bed and hand today’s reigns today to Lily Allen. A number of people who have read The Trouble With Paris    had told me that I need to check out her new song The Fear. Despite my skeptism, they were right, quite a bit of interesting social commentary in this little pop song. (and yes if you are working in the open plan church office you might wanna put your head phones in as Lilly drops a couple of F-bombs ) Allen seems to catch the zeitgeist quite well.

The Forgotten Victims of the Middle East

Over the Christmas holidays I read William Dalrymple’s fantastic book From the Holy Mountain. In the book Dalrymple travels around the various Christian communities of the Middle East. The book opened my eyes to the plight of various religious minorities in the Middle East. While the world’s media focus is upon the current conflict between Israel and Palestinians, other communities face incredible persecution and violence all away from the world’s attention.

Islamic sects that are considered heretical by mainstream Islam such as the Alawites and the Druze, Gnostic and monotheistic groups such as Mandaeans,the Yazdani and the Bahai, ethnic minorities such as the Kurds and the Armenians, the various ancient Christian communities all face incredible discrimination, violence and persecution. Some experts predict that these minorities will be non existent in the Middle East in 50 years. We are witnessing a silent and hidden ethnic and religous cleansing. For more on the current crisis for Christians in the Middle East check out this article

Soul Thoughts and the Trouble with Paris

Thanks to Rowland Croucher who has written an extensive and very complimentary review of my book the Trouble with Paris. Rowland writes

I believe Mark Sayers’ book, The Trouble with Paris, should be compulsory reading for all Christians living in our affluent Western culture. Taken from a comment from a friend of Mark’s who talked about moving to Paris to freshen up her life, and from another idea that Mark has formulated called ‘How Paris Hilton made me a better Christian’, this book is a landmark work in exposing the unreality of our consumer-driven culture.

Quite simply, the Church needs more people like Mark Sayers. In a Christian culture which puts more emphasis on what Jesus can do for me than seeking to find out how I can serve Jesus, Mark Sayers is a breath of fresh air. But the freshness is not because his message is anything new. Rather, it is because it is biblical. This book exposes the fallacy that our hyper-real culture can provide the happiness we seek. It then proceeds to show why the real message of dying to self, and that life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions, is what really satisfies.

Over the years I have found that when people rightly protest about what is wrong with the world, they are often found wanting in terms of having a credible solution to the problem. Mark does not succumb to this weakness. This book is both a warning of the dangers of our addiction to what society tells us is important, and a real solution to how we can escape its deadly clutches. As John Ortberg states on the cover, “Mark has something fresh to say about what can kill your soul and who can salvage it”.

This book is particularly relevant to these times of economic burden, when we are told that the way out of our financial hole is to spend even more. Its message is also particularly pertinent as I write, as we have recently had the visit of Paris Hilton herself to Melbourne to show off her, well, herself, to drooling shoppers. The title of this book suggests that Paris Hilton is symbolic of a culture that would rather idolise someone whose raison d’etre seems to be to shop, than weep as Jesus would over Israelis and Palestinians hurling missiles at each other on the other side of the planet.

Read full article here and get The Trouble With Paris here

Hyperreal Friendships for the right price

Hyperreal Fathers, Virtual relatives, paying to pat a cat, hire a husband to wash his socks. Japan continues to play the role of forerunner in the global rush towards hyperreal community.

One specialist agency is known as Hagemashi Tai, which translates as I Want To Cheer Up Limited. It rents relatives.

Actors are despatched to play the part of distant relations at weddings and funerals. For an extra fee, they will even give a speech.

But the firm’s services do not stop there. It can also provide temporary husbands to single mothers who want them.

The website says the “dad” will help the children with their homework. He will sort out problems with the neighbours.

He will take the kids to a barbeque or to a park. He could also appear at the daunting interview with a nursery school head teacher which parents are required to endure in order to persuade the principal to give their child a good start in life.

Cry for help

There is a service for women who are about to wed too. Apparently, they can practise for married life with a hired husband, although whether this involves seduction or sock washing is not exactly clear.

And if things are not working out with a real husband, a woman considering a divorce may choose to hire a “mother” in order to discuss her marital anxieties.

Read Full article here

Digital Diets

Well I am back after a Christmas break. In which I discovered how little interest I have in the internet and email whilst I am not working. So I took the digital diet which according to futurist Richard Watson is going to be uber hip in 2009. Watson writes,

UNPLUGGING: Digital technology has reduced the need for face-to-face contact. But as those who boast of having 150 “friends” realise that most of them are merely digital acquaintances, they are starting to crave the real thing. With this comes the understanding that you can be too connected, and that it’s time to unplug.

This means that people will start to edit and unwire their lives, removing unwanted friends and dropping out of social networks as they reclaim personal or family time. There is an aspirational element here, too: just as owning a mobile phone was once seen as a mark of sophistication, not owning one (or using one sparingly) is becoming a signal that a person has sorted out their priorities or has staff to take mundane calls.

Hence the new phrase “digital diets”, and an interest in analog products: fountain pens, wet-film photography and vinyl records.

read full article here