Over the Christmas / New Year period while Leni was away in Greece with most of her immediate family, I spent some time staying with her brother in the City. We had some friends over and they were staying in our place, so I took the opportunity to get to know Leni’s brother better. One of the things we did was watch some movies. Growing up Leni and her siblings were into mob films, into the gangster type films and for them some of the best examples of these films are the godfather series. Some of you may be familiar with them, but probably many of us here today, like I was, aren’t particularly familiar with them. There are three films about one Italian man who came to NY from Sicily and ended up in the mob, running one of the big families, passes everything to his son, who then tries to legitimatise his money for the grand children. We watched the extended versions and they went for about 3 hours each.
One of the lines from the second film really struck me. One person was asking the main actor, the son, what did your father teach you? What he was really asking was how did you father survive, and how do expect to survive. And the answer that the son gave was ‘he taught me to think like those around me’. He taught him to think as those who challenge him would think and be one step ahead of them. He was talking about seeing the world through their eyes, not just being limited to his own perspective.
For Christmas one of the presents I got was Steve Waugh’s autobiography. He had to learn a similar lesson. His first tour as captain of the Australian cricket team was to the West Indies. In the first game, the West Indies were bowled out for 52, one of their lowest scores ever. At the beginning of the second test, Australia were playing with two leg spin bowlers who would be more effective the later the game went on, so Steve Waugh won the toss and batted first, thinking that their bets assets, the two leg spinners would win the game for them in the fourth and fifth days. However things didn’t quite go to plan and the aussie lost the game. At the press conference Colin Croft asked Steve, why didn’t you send the West Indies into bat, that is the last thing that they would have wanted to do. And Waugh wrote that from that point on he never failed to take into consideration what the opposition might be thinking.
About 2000 years earlier Paul learnt a similar lesson. He knew that others thought and behaved differently to him and if he was going to reach them with the gospel, he had to think and act like in a way that they understood. In 1 Cor 9:22b he wrote ’I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some’. Paul was willing to do whatever it takes to reach people.
For us from today, we are starting to do things differently. Why are we doing that? Where are we going? And how are we going to get there? But most importantly are you willing to do whatever it takes to get there, to reach people?
For me one thing that is clear is that for those of us who have been in church for 20, 30, or even 50 or more years the way we interpret things and see the world and actions can be very different from those around us. Crows Nest has changed enormously over the past fifty years, but have we? Well today we have. And now I want to help people understand some of the changes and why we have done them, and maybe help us to think about how we can continue to change and reach people here in Crows Nest and the neighbouring suburbs.
One issue that has been confused in the minds of people today is the relationship of churches and money. As I said before while Leni was away we had some friends stay at our house over the Christmas / New year period. The father, the husband, Robert he did his masters’ thesis on a Moslem’s response to Christian missions in the Middle East. He read through past Islamic journal articles that spoke about Christian missions and made conclusions on how they saw Christian Missions.
One of the interesting things that these Moslems did was to go to Christian Missionary conferences and hear what they said. They heard these missionary’s talking about conversions of people that the Moslems had never heard about. It seemed to them that Christians ‘made up’ stories about converting Moslems to Christianity. The other interesting thing they noted was it seemed like the more stories they told about Moslems being converted to Christianity, the more money the missionaries were able to raise from America. What do you think that their conclusion was? There conclusion was that Christian missionaries were about making money. The more stories they told about conversions the more money they made. It was all about money.
Today, sometimes it seems like unchurch people in Sydney have a similar view of what churches are about. At it is backed up often by the way the media portray churches such as Hillsong. This portrayal is that churches are all about money, more money, bigger cars, bigger houses, come and give and be blessed because God is about blessing people. And I see that attitude coming out with some of the Tigers. I have a watch that is a present from my father-in-law, an engagement present, but it is worth about as much as my car. So when some of the players see that watch, their first reaction is ‘guess who’s been putting their hand in the plate’. They are saying that ministers or churches are all about getting people’s money.
So how do we respond to that? Well one thing we do here is by not making a big issue of the offering. We are about worshiping God, and part of the way we do that is with our money. However we will no longer have a separate time for ‘offering money’ to God, because it can easily be misunderstood that money is a big part of what we are about. I’m more interested in people coming to know Jesus than people putting money in the offering plate, and hopefully so are you.
We do make the church’s financial position open and known to members at church family meetings and will be teaching on giving, but it isn’t a major part of the service. Beside which the way the world has changed now means that many people give through direct deposit, which might be closer to what Jesus said when he said in Matthew 6:2-3 ‘when you give to the needy ... do not let your right hand know what your left is doing, so that your giving may be in give in secret’.
Another potential problem we have in communicating the message of Jesus to others in the issue of hierarchy and power within the church. Australians largely see themselves as egalitarian. That does that mean? The American Heritage Dictionary gives the meaning of egalitarian as affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people. A good thing for us is that pretty much equates with Baptist doctrine. We don’t believe in one being above another. We believe political equality within the church, in democracy within the church.
However again this can be confused by others when they see archbishops, or cardinals or popes and assume that all Christianity is about a hierarchy. When they come into church, particularly one that isn’t full and see certain things that can be misunderstood. If we physically put some people above others, then if one comes in with the wrong understanding, it can easily be misunderstood. For us who are regulars here, who understand the way we think and operate and our theology then it isn’t a problem at all, and might even wonder how on earth someone could get it so wrong, but if we put the singers, the preachers, the leaders up high and others down low, the physical will be seen as representing people’s status, which isn’t the case.
One of the good things about meeting in here is that there is no stage, there is no one lifted up higher than others, everyone is physically on an equal place, which represents our equality before God which is the basis for our equality within the community.
The final thing that can be misunderstood is our language. Language is always changing. My mother worked in mental health for many years and one of the things we noticed was that the term that was used to describe someone who is disadvantaged with their mental health often changed. At first it was ‘politically correct’ then after a while people start using it as a derogatory term so a new politically correct term needed to be created. It seemed to be a non-ending cycle because there were always people who wanted to put down the disadvantaged.
Now there are some terms which mean something to us, but mean something completely different to other people, partly because of the way media and others have used it. For many of us, the term church has good and positive meanings. However for many people who don’t have a church back ground church has many bad and negative meanings. It can mean bigots, judgmental, oppressive, kill joys. However spiritual has good meaning. The funny thing is although that most of us would see church as spiritual most non-churched people don’t see it as spiritual. Likewise community can have good connotations. So if we want to get the message to people that ‘church’ is a place where people can connect with other people and with the spiritual reality, church doesn’t cut it now but using the phrase spiritual community might.
It is just semantics and some will think, oh that’s just semantics, they still just a ‘negative meaning’ church. However others might think, well maybe there is more to this that I first thought. Maybe those people have a positive community and a positive connection with the divine, with the spiritual. And if they do come and check it out what will they find? Will they come and feel judged and marginalised, or will they feel welcomed, loved, accepted? If they do, then they have taken a couple steps down the path to wanting to follow Jesus, and that’s what we are all about.
My personal understanding of the history of Northside is that with today’s service some of the regular morning people might be feeling a bit nervous, a bit like we’ve seen it before. However there are a few differences between my impression of what has happened in the past and what we are doing now.
In the past ministers have come in and tried things to attract people to the church. I’m not trying something. I am continuing to do what I and the rest of the evening crowd have been doing for a couple of years now. It has attracted people to the church. It will continue to attract people to the church.
What is today all about? It is about starting to become the spiritual heart of crows nest. Do you want to be part of that? Do you want to see Northside Baptist church become the spiritual heart of crows nest? How are we going to get there? Ultimately it will be living out our values and doing whatever it takes to live out those values. Are you prepared to do whatever it takes?
