An Obadiah Slope column
Look, up in the sky: You finally get a chance to catch up with Obadiah – if you live in Sydney. Not to meet up, but to finally catch a great musical that Obadiah saw on Broadway. “Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812” is coming down under finally. It has taken longer than Hamilton, which Obadiah thinks it just about matches.
It takes Ann evening to tell the story of a few pages of War and Peace, of mistaken love (by young Natasha) and a search for meaning and faith (by Pierre). For Vox, Tara Isabella Burton wrote as the show closed on Broadway
“It’s fitting, then, that the climax of Comet isn’t a great dramatic scene — a reconciliation, a duel, a kiss — but a tiny, tender moment between the titular characters, in which Pierre reassures Natasha that she is worthy of forgiveness: that she has her “whole life ahead of you.” Pierre has gotten out of his head for once, and Natasha is able to engage with a man not as an idealized, romantic notion of what she wants, but as a fellow traveler on her road toward self-discovery.
Indeed, the show’s climax is an anti-climax. As the famous comet of 1812 crosses the sky in the show’s final number, Pierre finds relief in how he does not fear it: “The comet said to portend Untold horrors/And the end of the world/But for me/the comet brings no fear/No, I gaze joyfully.”
In a world where sex and faith seem to be destined to collide, Comet is awfully modern.
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Graphic: the Vocational Bible College (VBC) which says “We focus on everyday, working-class Christians”.” training them in ministry to become leaders “grow in Christian maturity and reach the world.”They are a reformed evangelical group who look at their part of Australian Christianity, especially Sydney anglicans and notice whose missing from those churches. That’s people who go straight from school to work. They recently posted these graphs that tell their story.
If Moore College is a university for leaders, Obadiah thinks perhaps you could call VBC the TAFE. Their site is
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A prophecy from 1966: A reader asked Obadiah about the Martyn Lloyd Jones speech allegedly encouraging evangelicals to leave the Church of England at the National Assembly of Evangelicals in October 1966. the Other Cheek reader possibly was not aware that John Stott charing the meeting had perhaps irregularly for a chair, replied urging evangelicals to stay.
For a long time it appeared that Stott, the leader of evangelicals for many years after the encounter had the better of the argument. But now, as the Church of England moves to allow same sex blessings, it might seem that Martin Lloyd jones had the more prescient vision of the future. Evangelicals may face the stay or leave question once again.
Here’s a short account of 1966 and the questions it raised , which did dominate evangelical views in the UK for a considerable time.
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Love: Off to disability sports club awards afternoon. Obadiah was at a table where lunch took a long time because with two athletes were needing to be fed by carer/relatives. It made Obadiah think of how wonderful human love is – people will be doing this all over the world, the dogged tasks of caring for those who can’t care for themselves. Hand feeding is a very intimate and labor intensive act.
It occurs every day in nursing homes, of course. Obadiah has family whose lives were extended by daily visiting and helping staff feed relatives.
But at the table, in the art deco surroundings of a town hall, it felt even more special.
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Prophecy to come true?: Joseph Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict XVI, said in a 1969 radio broadcast, that under pressure from modern ideologies and some defecting to them, the church would become smaller, but more spiritual.
“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality.…
“Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
“The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.”