An Obadiah Slope Column
Anglicans so much better at cover-ups: Obadiah set through each day of the Brian Houston case, watching the accusation of cover-up fall apart. Now, having read and summarised the Makin report into the abuse committed by John Smyth QC and the ensuing cover-up, he can’t help thinking how much better behaved the Pentecostals were. Within two years of finding out about his father, Frank Houston, he had run it through church discipline and been open about it in the media. There were serious problems with how the Australian Christian Churches handled the Frank Houston case, but they pale in significance with the handling of the John Smyth case. These CofE guys kept it quiet – I mean the Iwerne inner circle and those with a good idea of what had happened. Brian Houston shines in comparison.
Two graphs that look the same: Here are two graphs from widely different sorts of Anglicans that oddly look the same. The top one is an attendance graph from The Episcopal church, and the second is from our very own Sydney Anglicans. Obadiah thinks they look spookily alike – a gentle decline, Covid valley, and a partial recovery.
And a confession: when he first saw the top graph, he asked himself (because the only person close by was a cat), “Why is the Living Church posting the Sydney attendance graph?”
The week’s reading: “What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know god, but the larger fact that underlies it – the fact that he knows me.I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative of knowing me.I know him becaus ehe first knew me . He knows me as a friend, one who knows me, and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.” J. I. Packer Knowing God.
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A word from Amos: “I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
Amos 5:21-25
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Oracle: “Exiles at Home, what our contempt for nature is costing us” Tim Winton’s Richard Johnson Lecture is now available on the Centre For Public Christianity website: https://publicchristianity.org/podcast/tim-winton-lecture
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Flopped: Even having Elton John as co-writer could not save the musical Tammy Faye from being a flop on Broadway. Many readers will realise from the musical’s title that it is based on the life of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. With her husband, Jim Bakker, she co-founded the christian TV program The PTL Club in 1974. By 1989, Jim Bakker had been convicted of fraud and imprisoned.
According to Far Out magazine, “Reviews for the show were poor and were met with derision from critics at the New York Post, who called it ‘a disaster of biblical proportions’. Similarly, The New York Times called it ‘strangely bland,’ asserting that they made a larger-than-life personality ‘smaller than life’.”