An Obadiah Slope column
Missing: As the NSW election draws near (and Obadiah is making a point that people dwelling in other states will want to know about), Premier Dominic Perrottet and Opposition leader Chris Minns (pictured) faced questioning on religious schools, conversion therapy laws and religious freedom.
Each faced a multi-faith forum in Parramatta, with Christian backers including Hillsong, the Sydney Anglicans, the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, the Uniting Church and leaders of other faiths.
Who is missing? That’s right, the Australian Christian Lobby, which would have been at the forefront of engaging political leaders in previous elections.
This is an excellent place to start if anyone seeks evidence that the ACL has backed away from its traditional political role.
The Better Brighter Futures team that organised the multi-faith fora also campaign for SRE- Special Religious Education, the volunteer faith-based religious education in State Schools In NSW (known as RI in Qld). They did a great job.
Another instance of an ACL absence is the prolonged (multi-year) absence of an ACL political operator in Victoria.
Obadiah has sympathy for both sides in the ACL/Martyn Iles split. There’s a case for moving away from political activity and towards evangelism, but arguably producing a narrower base but more activists. But surely the whole organisation needs to discuss the change and agree. That did not happen.
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The Gospel Coalition and the peril of a Christian brand: The Gospel Coalition, based in the US, was launching a new venture, the Keller Centre. It’s a new public Christianity or apologetics resource, maybe making up for the demise of the Ravi Zacharias brand.
Nature abhors a vacuum – and there’s been a yawning gap in the Public Christian info-sphere since the Zacharias’ group met an ignominious end as the personal life of its eponymous founder was revealed.
The Keller Centre is a worthy venture. The world needs calm, rational and scholarly advocates for the Christian message. Obadiah wishes it well and looks forward to reading their stuff. He would love to be a future fan.
But the worthiness of a plan is no guarantee that nothing will go wrong.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. A Fellow of the Keller centre, Josh Butler, the pastor of a church in Tempe, Arizona, was about to have a book published. So why not run an excerpt on the well-known Gospel Coalition website as part of the launch activities? A no-brainer, right?
It was a good idea until the Gospel Coalition audience read it.
It rap[idly became a bad idea as Butler’s overly graphic identification of the sex act with the topic of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman became widely read.
TheOtherCheek summarised it here, and for a time on Friday, surfing the evangelical part of social media was hard to avoid.
The Gospel Coalition took it down after a few hours but made a curious non-apology. They said the excerpt needed the wider context of the book, so they provided a like to the publisher’s website so you could still read the introduction and chapter one.
Apparently, you did not need the context of the whole book. You have to pay for that.
It’s easy to understand the gospel coalition’s dilemma. They obviously got a lot of pushback from their most loyal readers and felt the need to take the excerpt down.
But they did not want to go the whole distance and disown the author straightaway, who was part of the lineup of the new Keller centre.
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The vanishing: Update: author Josh Butler has now disappeared from the Keller Centre’s website, an eagle-eyed reader tells Obadiah.
Hence the link to the publisher’s website.
Poor penguin. First, Roald Dahl and now this is the space of a week.
Obadiah believes the book will quietly disappear from the Gospel Coalition website.
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Downunder: Australia has a local version of the Gospel Coalition, which Obadiah greatly admires.
Their brand new editor, Mikey Lynch, has launched his career with an editorial taking his American cousins to task for going beyond the text. He takes the same topic as Josh Butler and comes up with this criticism towards the end of his piece.
“When Teresa of Avila’s mystic visions, or Puritan spiritual interpretations of the Song of Songs, or Josh Butler’s recent TGC USA article (now removed from the site with a redirect to the same content from the publisher’s site) begin to draw out too much spiritual significance from erotic love and even the act of making love, they too easily go beyond what is written.”
Arguably he buried the lead. It is a gentle admonition of the US Gospel Coalition. Very gentle.
And in Obadiah’s experience. The Gospel Coalition Aussies are a gentle lot., and certainly not prone to rash statements.
But they could have toughened that statement a little.
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A tale of Obadiah’s past: Burying the lead is a well-worn journalistic trope to avoid being seen as a scandal monger or be too blunt about bearing bad news. A classic case from Obadiah’s days on the Sydney morning herald was when the paper wanted to tell the story of two very senior federal politicians from different parties having an affair. So the paper published a very long analysis of the state of Canberra politics and mentioned the affair in one line, about two-thirds into the story.
It is a bit of a giveaway that people feel awkward about a story,
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Can’t let it go: As Obadiah covered the religious strand in the World Pride Human Rights conference, he was struck firstly by a solid determination to push until there is no room for evangelical or traditional faith views on LGBTQIA issues. But the real surprise was a short speech by a Sikh from Kharkiv in Ukraine, who called for “covenanted realism’, which amounted to a plea for all religious and non-religious groups to realise that any one group seizing power has the ability to domineer. He spoke from a war zone and said of the suffering – and extermination of some groups, including Christians and LGBTQIA, in Afghanistan. Unity, he felt, could be built if we could agree to protect the vulnerable. Obadiah hopes he is right.
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Guess what I think: Obadiah inevitably got comments suggesting that calmly reporting World Pride means he is some sort of Christian progressive on LGBTQIA issues. Instead, Obadiah has warm sympathy for that community but finds it impossible to dismiss what the scriptures say. Obadiah wishes he could do that but has learned that part of being a Christian involves finding out someone else is in charge.
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Quote of the week: ”Any Christian who loves Jesus strongly enough to feel ‘offended’ by a mocking joke on television will love Jesus enough to follow his teaching to bless, and not curse, those who do it. I wonder what shape that blessing could take? Will it be merely a quiet prayer, or will it be more tangible? A kind email, or perhaps even huge bunch of flowers? Or chocolate? A nice bottle of wine? A restaurant voucher? The possibilities are endless. What if Rueben was absolutely showered in blessings from those who follow Jesus?“ Adelaide pastor Tim Hein on Channel Ten’s The Project’s crude joke.