An Obadiah Slope Column
Thanks: After three weeks of jury service, Obadiah is back to what passes as normal. Thank you to the writers The Other Cheek has featured over the last little while.
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Thanks again: it turns out Obadiah volunteering to teach scripture at the local public school is not a thankless task. Here’s what the kids wrote to him:
“Thank you for sacrificing your time and effort for us. We hope you have a great New Year and a Merry Christmas. We had an incredible year with you, and we hope you did too.”
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Why a teenage Obadiah never went to Kangaroo Island: Kangaroo Island, with its (then) Koala population, pristine deserted beaches, and fabulous places to stay, would seem a likely holiday destination for Obadiah and his twin growing up in Adelaide. But it wasn’t. The reason was my uncle lived there – a brother my father loved but who belonged to an extreme Pentecostal sect called the Geelong Revival Centre.
Literally, the concern was that we’d be “baptised in the bathtub,” Obadiah remembers his father saying, which meant, of course, being pulled into that church. My older brother David had undergone a bath baptism but had resisted that church, thankfully. But it meant my twin, and I did not go to the island until we were adults.
The Geelong Revival Centre, (GRC) now the subject of a nine-part investigative podcast, “Pray Harder” on Listnr, is an outlier in Australian Pentecostalism. The GRC believes you must speak in tongues to be saved, which is a heresy. Obadiah recalls hearing, as a student at Adelaide Uni, of Geoff Bingham, a former Principal of the Adelaide Bible Institute/Bible College of South Australia, coming across a bunch of revival centre street preachers in Hindley Street and denouncing them as heretics. Another thing for Obadiah to be grateful to Geoff Bingham..
The GRC also has doubled in other odd areas of doctrine, based on reading the Bible in peculiar ways. British Israelism the racist theory that the Anglo Saxons of White Britain and America are the lost ten tribes of israel, and are especially blessed by God, was popular for a short time in quite a proportion of Pentecostal churches, for example the Christian Revivial Crusade/CRE. But just about everyone else has dropped it.
The GRC might just be the time that Christians should stand back from being horrified at a media attack on a church and say “there might be odd details wrong but you have got the big story right.”
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Bad Church news:
Yes it is real but thankfully not an evangelical church going “Christian Nationalist” but a branch of the Unification Church, the south Korean cult founded by self-proclaimed-but-now-dead messiah, Sun Myung Moon. This church was founded as a breaaway by his son Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon. Vice reports that they worship with with AR-15s.
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Good church news: the names of 39 adults leaving Obadiah’s church to plant a new congregation in Burwood North and Concord a few suburbs away were revealed on Sunday. They are a talented bunch and Obadiah will miss them. One of them, who we will call Gavin because that is his name, said that he and his family are unlikely to become missionaries – although that is not impossible – so this was a great chance to do what missionaries do.” Godspeed.