This Saturday at 6:30 we are having our Men’s Social event. We will have steak n fries in the city then head down to the new TBT offices for a game of “500”, or whatever takes your fancy.
But I challenge you all to a game of 500 (not at the same time).
Meet at the Cathedral (George St door) at 6:20 on Saturday night .
If you are running late call me on 9265 1673 (which is directed to my mobile).
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Women's Afternoon Tea
Today from 3pm at Mandy's in Glebe. If you don't know the address ring 9265 1673 and we'll let you know.
Here's a sample of some of the food we'll be enjoying ...
Feel free to drop in any time throughout the afternoon. We'll order some Thai for dinner at around 7pm.
Looking forward to hanging out with my sisters in Christ.
M
Here's a sample of some of the food we'll be enjoying ...
Feel free to drop in any time throughout the afternoon. We'll order some Thai for dinner at around 7pm.
Looking forward to hanging out with my sisters in Christ.
M
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
So, what are you reading at the moment?
A couple who were visiting at The Bible Talks on Sunday night asked me what I was reading at the moment (apart from the Bible).
I shared with them that I was currently reading The Consolations of Theology, available at Moore Books. Edited by MTC lecturer Brian Rosner, it also contains contributions from other MTC lecturers Andrew Cameron, Richard Gibson, Peter Bolt and Mark Thompson. It's not an easy read, but by looking at a great theologian from the past (such as Boethius, Luther or Lactatius) it demonstrates the great comfort that a true understanding of God can provide the believer. I've really appreciated the insight and practical reminder of the great hope that we have and the comfort it provides.
When they asked me for any other recommendations and I gave them my 3 other favourite reads. I try and read each of these books at least once a year, with another person if at all possible.
They are The Cross of Christ, John Stott, Knowing God, JI Packer and A Call to Spiritual Reformation, Don Carson. I'm pretty sure that each of these 3 are available at the Cathedral Bookshop - why not pick one up after church on Sunday?
I shared with them that I was currently reading The Consolations of Theology, available at Moore Books. Edited by MTC lecturer Brian Rosner, it also contains contributions from other MTC lecturers Andrew Cameron, Richard Gibson, Peter Bolt and Mark Thompson. It's not an easy read, but by looking at a great theologian from the past (such as Boethius, Luther or Lactatius) it demonstrates the great comfort that a true understanding of God can provide the believer. I've really appreciated the insight and practical reminder of the great hope that we have and the comfort it provides. When they asked me for any other recommendations and I gave them my 3 other favourite reads. I try and read each of these books at least once a year, with another person if at all possible.
They are The Cross of Christ, John Stott, Knowing God, JI Packer and A Call to Spiritual Reformation, Don Carson. I'm pretty sure that each of these 3 are available at the Cathedral Bookshop - why not pick one up after church on Sunday?
Monday, September 15, 2008
Escape - Friday 19th September
Join other Christians from all over Sydney for a relaxed dinner and good conversation this Friday night!
Sunday, September 14, 2008
From the Dean - 14 September 2008
The other day I went to the optometrist. It is a strange thing to look at glasses instead of looking through them - leaving aside the difficulty of looking at your glasses carefully when you do not have them on! Glasses are designed to look through, not look at. They are supposed to help us see the world in sharper focus. But, if the lenses are distorted or even dirty, they can distort your vision of the world instead of clarifying it.
For the last couple of centuries western civilisation has been looking at the world through the lens of the public media. The prophets have been the journalists as they mediated and explained the world to society, and ourselves to us.
Journalists have had to fight hard to avoid their message being compromised. They have had to resist the seduction of the media owners' profit motive as well as the government's desire to control public broadcasting. But the fight has become irrelevant in the face of the electronic revolution that is overtaking the world.
The revolution in electronic technology has overwhelmed us. Now anybody can speak to anybody within a few seconds without censorship. We no longer need the public media to describe the world to us. It is like laser surgery - we can see the modern world without our glasses.
Mark Scott, the General Manager of the ABC, is reported as saying: “We are seeing a great transformation from the era of media barons and public broadcasters, controlling all that was seen or heard or read, to a great democratisation of media where anyone, anywhere can report or comment or analyse, and find an audience.”
Naturally such an open and free system has created all manner of problems. For example, the revolution has given rise to the spread of pornography, the availability of on-line gambling, and the rapid dissemination of misinformation. Human sinfulness will always use the technology of the day to rear its ugly head.
Yet the advantages of the new world of communication so vastly outweigh the problems, that it is overpowering all other media. As the telegram is no longer available, so the newspapers, mail, fixed line telephones, and large commercial TV stations are all undergoing threat. Even some basic books, like dictionaries and encyclopaedias, seem to have a limited future.
Today we access information rather than read. We relate technologically rather than physically. Our “friends” on Facebook are people we have never met and yet are more important and even more real to us than the people living next door.
Advertising in mass media has paid for reporters to research and recount the news of the day. Smaller readership means declining advertising revenue. This in turn reduces the quality of journalism - which further erodes readership.
For some time regular readers have noticed the blurred line between editorial and reporting. All news stories have become editorialised. In one sense it is impossible to report without opinionating. All stories are biased summaries. However, objective reporting has been replaced with intentional subjectivity.
Journalists have long argued for the importance, even necessity of their profession. Their commitment to fearless, impartial investigation and exposure of the truth is said to be the necessary foundation for a free and democratic society. But the lack of professionalism, their clear bias, their involvement in creating the news rather than reporting it, their stereotyped way of framing stories, all belie their claims.
Fast disappearing are the reporters who reported what happened. Today journalists create the news by stimulating conflict and then “reporting” on their own homemade stories.
The high moral ground of concern for the truth has become just empty rhetoric used to gain readership and credibility. The moral imperatives of professional journalism are about as believable as “Truth, Justice and the American way”. It is only believed within their own circles.
The public media are now in the optometrist shop trying to look at themselves.
This week the journalist Paul Sheehan complained of the traditional media's political bias concluding “Everywhere there are signs of growing cynicism with the media: an unwillingness to pay for what can be obtained free on the internet, a refusal to shuffle through the old media information portals, and a contagious knowingness and irony about the traditional media's self-proclaimed role as moral guardians and custodians of the public good.”
And Mark Scott expressed his desire for the future of the ABC as “to create a service - online and on television - that allows citizens to watch for themselves key democratic processes and public events: unmediated, unfiltered.”
Unmediated media is a wonderful idea. It is impossible, because the media is the message. But it is a wonderful play on words as well as a great ideal to pursue. To let people speak for themselves and to be heard without intermediaries distorting their message. How wonderful to put the speaker and the hearer in direct contact with each other. This is the electronic revolution that the public broadcasters are struggling to keep up with.
This is the media revolution that Christians have been wanting for years. It suits us as the printing press suited us back at the time of the Reformation. It enables us to speak directly to the world without media distortion of our message.
It is like that greater media revolution that happened in the first century. Then all intermediaries were abolished as God became Man and removed the sin and judgment that separated us from God. Now we no longer need mediums, priests, sacrifices, temples or gurus. Now we are in direct contact with God in the man Jesus Christ. Only the man who is God can be the mediator between God and man.
“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5f).
Phillip Jensen
14 September 2008
For the last couple of centuries western civilisation has been looking at the world through the lens of the public media. The prophets have been the journalists as they mediated and explained the world to society, and ourselves to us.
Journalists have had to fight hard to avoid their message being compromised. They have had to resist the seduction of the media owners' profit motive as well as the government's desire to control public broadcasting. But the fight has become irrelevant in the face of the electronic revolution that is overtaking the world.
The revolution in electronic technology has overwhelmed us. Now anybody can speak to anybody within a few seconds without censorship. We no longer need the public media to describe the world to us. It is like laser surgery - we can see the modern world without our glasses.
Mark Scott, the General Manager of the ABC, is reported as saying: “We are seeing a great transformation from the era of media barons and public broadcasters, controlling all that was seen or heard or read, to a great democratisation of media where anyone, anywhere can report or comment or analyse, and find an audience.”
Naturally such an open and free system has created all manner of problems. For example, the revolution has given rise to the spread of pornography, the availability of on-line gambling, and the rapid dissemination of misinformation. Human sinfulness will always use the technology of the day to rear its ugly head.
Yet the advantages of the new world of communication so vastly outweigh the problems, that it is overpowering all other media. As the telegram is no longer available, so the newspapers, mail, fixed line telephones, and large commercial TV stations are all undergoing threat. Even some basic books, like dictionaries and encyclopaedias, seem to have a limited future.
Today we access information rather than read. We relate technologically rather than physically. Our “friends” on Facebook are people we have never met and yet are more important and even more real to us than the people living next door.
Advertising in mass media has paid for reporters to research and recount the news of the day. Smaller readership means declining advertising revenue. This in turn reduces the quality of journalism - which further erodes readership.
For some time regular readers have noticed the blurred line between editorial and reporting. All news stories have become editorialised. In one sense it is impossible to report without opinionating. All stories are biased summaries. However, objective reporting has been replaced with intentional subjectivity.
Journalists have long argued for the importance, even necessity of their profession. Their commitment to fearless, impartial investigation and exposure of the truth is said to be the necessary foundation for a free and democratic society. But the lack of professionalism, their clear bias, their involvement in creating the news rather than reporting it, their stereotyped way of framing stories, all belie their claims.
Fast disappearing are the reporters who reported what happened. Today journalists create the news by stimulating conflict and then “reporting” on their own homemade stories.
The high moral ground of concern for the truth has become just empty rhetoric used to gain readership and credibility. The moral imperatives of professional journalism are about as believable as “Truth, Justice and the American way”. It is only believed within their own circles.
The public media are now in the optometrist shop trying to look at themselves.
This week the journalist Paul Sheehan complained of the traditional media's political bias concluding “Everywhere there are signs of growing cynicism with the media: an unwillingness to pay for what can be obtained free on the internet, a refusal to shuffle through the old media information portals, and a contagious knowingness and irony about the traditional media's self-proclaimed role as moral guardians and custodians of the public good.”
And Mark Scott expressed his desire for the future of the ABC as “to create a service - online and on television - that allows citizens to watch for themselves key democratic processes and public events: unmediated, unfiltered.”
Unmediated media is a wonderful idea. It is impossible, because the media is the message. But it is a wonderful play on words as well as a great ideal to pursue. To let people speak for themselves and to be heard without intermediaries distorting their message. How wonderful to put the speaker and the hearer in direct contact with each other. This is the electronic revolution that the public broadcasters are struggling to keep up with.
This is the media revolution that Christians have been wanting for years. It suits us as the printing press suited us back at the time of the Reformation. It enables us to speak directly to the world without media distortion of our message.
It is like that greater media revolution that happened in the first century. Then all intermediaries were abolished as God became Man and removed the sin and judgment that separated us from God. Now we no longer need mediums, priests, sacrifices, temples or gurus. Now we are in direct contact with God in the man Jesus Christ. Only the man who is God can be the mediator between God and man.
“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5f).
Phillip Jensen
14 September 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
From the Dean: The Foundation of Father's Day - 7 September 2008
It appears that Father's Day is about 100 years old - at least in the USA where it was started.
Australia's history of celebrating Father's Day may be different. Unlike most of the world, we do not follow the American date of the third Sunday in June. But finding the source of our celebration is not as easy as discovering the American foundations.
There are two common accounts of the commencement of Father's Day in the USA.
The first comes from a mine disaster that killed 361 men. A Methodist Episcopal Church in Fairmont, West Virginia, held a special service on July 5th 1908 to celebrate fathers, seeing that so many had died in the tragedy.
The other foundation of Father's Day in America is more personal. It was the story of Mrs Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington. When she was 16 her mother died in childbirth leaving six children. Her father, a civil war veteran, raised the children as a single parent. Sonora's deep appreciation of the father lay behind her desire to honour fathers. It was while she was in church on Mother's Day 1909 that she thought of celebrating fathers with a special day.
With the help of the ministers fraternal and the YMCA she organised the first citywide Father's Day. Her plans were to hold it on her own father's birthday (June 5), but could not organise it in time. So it was held on the third Sunday in June 1910.
It seems that from these two events the modern idea and celebration spread across the nation and from America across the world.
It is not surprising that both ideas were connected with church. Not just because, in the early twentieth century, the church was the centre of social organization - but because family, honouring parents, giving thanks, and fatherhood are all such integral parts of Christianity.
It is not surprising that the celebration went beyond the church into the community as a whole. Fatherhood is part of creation. It is intrinsic to humanity and the concern of the whole society.
What is surprising, and very sad, is the failure of much modern fatherhood. There is today a failure to take paternal responsibility, matched by the failure to respect honour or value fathers and fatherhood. Words like "patriarchal", "paternalism" and even "father" itself are seen as derogatory terms. Through divorce, de facto relationships and sexual permissiveness, the "absent father" is becoming all too common, as many single mothers are left to raise their children alone. More concerning still is the danger involved in the growth in numbers of de facto stepfathers.
Christianity has an important contribution to make to society on the subject of fatherhood. We are committed to the Creator God whom we know as our Father. He has always been the Father. For all eternity, before the creation of the world, he was the Father. He is the one upon whom all human fatherhood has been modelled (Ephesians 3:15). He is called the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 15:6, 2 Corinthians 1:3, Ephesians 1:3, 17, 1 Peter 1:3, Revelation 1:6).
Our focus on Jesus does not distract us from the Father. Just the reverse, it models for us the relationship of Father and Son and introduces us to God as our Father. Jesus is God the Son become man. And as the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus is also the Son of God, just as all who are his people - the Christians - become the children of God (John 1:12-13).
The work of Jesus was to do the will of his Father. Ultimately Jesus will hand his kingdom over to his Father as he is subject to his God and Father (1 Corinthians 15:24-28). Jesus' work in dying and rising for us brings us to his Father. For Jesus is the one and only way to the Father (John 14:6). It is as the Spirit of the risen Lord Jesus is poured into our hearts in rebirth that we come to call the almighty creator of the universe and judge of all the world: "our father" (Romans 8:15f, Galatians 4:6).
Fatherhood is built into creation and is central to Christianity. This is one of the bridges by which society can understand the Christian message and by which Christians can make contribution to society as a whole.
As Christians we know the importance of honouring father and mother. It is built into the very commandments of God. We also know the importance of being a father who loves and provides, protects and disciplines his children as God does for us.
We live in a society that is confused about gender roles, unsure of how to raise boys, and with a generation of adult men unwilling to make commitments or undertake responsibility for others. It is the individualism that atheism teaches. It is miserable and lonely for many men as well as women. It fails to reproduce itself as the birth rate drops well below sustainability.
The message of the Bible was never more needed in Australia than today. Let us be bold to declare the greatness of our great God and Father. Let us be bold to uphold the importance of fatherhood in the structure of a healthy society. Let us train up our boys and young men to rejoice in the privilege of taking on the responsibility of becoming fathers. Let us encourage fathers to stick to their task of raising their children in the fear and nurture of the Lord. Let us invite all Australians to come into the family of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Phillip Jensen
07-09-08
.
Australia's history of celebrating Father's Day may be different. Unlike most of the world, we do not follow the American date of the third Sunday in June. But finding the source of our celebration is not as easy as discovering the American foundations.
There are two common accounts of the commencement of Father's Day in the USA.
The first comes from a mine disaster that killed 361 men. A Methodist Episcopal Church in Fairmont, West Virginia, held a special service on July 5th 1908 to celebrate fathers, seeing that so many had died in the tragedy.
The other foundation of Father's Day in America is more personal. It was the story of Mrs Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington. When she was 16 her mother died in childbirth leaving six children. Her father, a civil war veteran, raised the children as a single parent. Sonora's deep appreciation of the father lay behind her desire to honour fathers. It was while she was in church on Mother's Day 1909 that she thought of celebrating fathers with a special day.
With the help of the ministers fraternal and the YMCA she organised the first citywide Father's Day. Her plans were to hold it on her own father's birthday (June 5), but could not organise it in time. So it was held on the third Sunday in June 1910.
It seems that from these two events the modern idea and celebration spread across the nation and from America across the world.
It is not surprising that both ideas were connected with church. Not just because, in the early twentieth century, the church was the centre of social organization - but because family, honouring parents, giving thanks, and fatherhood are all such integral parts of Christianity.
It is not surprising that the celebration went beyond the church into the community as a whole. Fatherhood is part of creation. It is intrinsic to humanity and the concern of the whole society.
What is surprising, and very sad, is the failure of much modern fatherhood. There is today a failure to take paternal responsibility, matched by the failure to respect honour or value fathers and fatherhood. Words like "patriarchal", "paternalism" and even "father" itself are seen as derogatory terms. Through divorce, de facto relationships and sexual permissiveness, the "absent father" is becoming all too common, as many single mothers are left to raise their children alone. More concerning still is the danger involved in the growth in numbers of de facto stepfathers.
Christianity has an important contribution to make to society on the subject of fatherhood. We are committed to the Creator God whom we know as our Father. He has always been the Father. For all eternity, before the creation of the world, he was the Father. He is the one upon whom all human fatherhood has been modelled (Ephesians 3:15). He is called the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 15:6, 2 Corinthians 1:3, Ephesians 1:3, 17, 1 Peter 1:3, Revelation 1:6).
Our focus on Jesus does not distract us from the Father. Just the reverse, it models for us the relationship of Father and Son and introduces us to God as our Father. Jesus is God the Son become man. And as the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus is also the Son of God, just as all who are his people - the Christians - become the children of God (John 1:12-13).
The work of Jesus was to do the will of his Father. Ultimately Jesus will hand his kingdom over to his Father as he is subject to his God and Father (1 Corinthians 15:24-28). Jesus' work in dying and rising for us brings us to his Father. For Jesus is the one and only way to the Father (John 14:6). It is as the Spirit of the risen Lord Jesus is poured into our hearts in rebirth that we come to call the almighty creator of the universe and judge of all the world: "our father" (Romans 8:15f, Galatians 4:6).
Fatherhood is built into creation and is central to Christianity. This is one of the bridges by which society can understand the Christian message and by which Christians can make contribution to society as a whole.
As Christians we know the importance of honouring father and mother. It is built into the very commandments of God. We also know the importance of being a father who loves and provides, protects and disciplines his children as God does for us.
We live in a society that is confused about gender roles, unsure of how to raise boys, and with a generation of adult men unwilling to make commitments or undertake responsibility for others. It is the individualism that atheism teaches. It is miserable and lonely for many men as well as women. It fails to reproduce itself as the birth rate drops well below sustainability.
The message of the Bible was never more needed in Australia than today. Let us be bold to declare the greatness of our great God and Father. Let us be bold to uphold the importance of fatherhood in the structure of a healthy society. Let us train up our boys and young men to rejoice in the privilege of taking on the responsibility of becoming fathers. Let us encourage fathers to stick to their task of raising their children in the fear and nurture of the Lord. Let us invite all Australians to come into the family of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Phillip Jensen
07-09-08
.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Fathers Day at TBT
This Sunday at TBT is a special Father's Day meeting. Phillip Jensen will speak on the topic of Disparaging Fathers. The passages to read up and examine are Romans 4:13-25, and Genesis 12:1-3, 15:1-6, 16, 17:15-21.
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