Category: Stories & Feature Articles

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Stories & Feature Articles

Sermon: The Hymns of Charles Wesley

Rev Geoff Blyth, retired Uniting Church minister, preached recently at St George’s Cathedral, Perth, for their celebration of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism. Following is Geoff’s sermon on ‘The Hymns of Charles Wesley.’

A You-Tube video clip turned up on our computer which caused us great hilarity and quite a deal of thought, if not nostalgia. It is called: “Methodist Blues” The singer, Garrison Keillor, makes reference to many of the characteristics of Methodism. But the lines that have stayed with me the most are these:

“Now Methodism was started by John Wesley, not Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley.”

Methodism was started by John Wesley

When I retired as a Minister of the Uniting Church in Australia in 2001 I went with my wife, Esme, to take up a one-year appointment with the Methodist Church of Britain in the Kirkoswald Circuit and the ten congregations up and down the Eden Valley in Cumbria. Not only were we exposed to the People called Methodist, we stood on the spot where John Wesley had preached to the people of Gamblesby, right there near the barn where the whole village turned out to hear him. I preached regularly at Temple Sowerby where at the chapel door there was a stone and plaque declaring that: ‘John Wesley preached here in this village on two occasions…’

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Star St fundraising success

For Lent Event this year, Victoria Park and Districts Star Street Uniting Church decided to adopt the Sri Lankan Interfaith Pre-school Program, setting a target of $2400, which will feed 20 children for a year. The Uniting Church in WA agreed at its annual Synod meeting in 2013 to support the program which is run by the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka.

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Lanterns at Dusk: Preaching after Modernity, by Bruce Barber

Lanterns at DuskBruce Barber is a Uniting Church minister and selfconfessed preacher. The title of this book is a reference to Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman from The Gay Science of 1887 in which  a madman lit a lantern at noon and ran to the marketplace crying that he was looking for God. The parable announces the death of God under the auspices of the Modern age.

Bruce’s  analysis is genealogical in that he traces the changes that have occurred in Christian theology from the early church to the Medieval  to the Modern and, for the lack of a better term, the post-Modern. This does not mean that there are no people who now understand theology in the mode of the preceding eras, but it does point to a succession in which theologies outlast their usefulness. This genealogy of ideas goes some way towards explaining why, in our day of the Modern-post- Modern cusp, preaching has become largely unintelligible and  alienated from general discourse.

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An Informed Faith: The Uniting Church at the beginning of the 21st Century, edited by William W Emilsen

An informed Faith010William Emilsen is deeply committed to collecting observations about, and recording the history of, the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA). He was a founder of Uniting Church Studies, and earlier edited the collections Marking Twenty Years (1997) and The Uniting Church in Australia: The first 25 years (2003).

An Informed Faith has chapters on spirituality, ministry,  scholarship, The Basis of Union, management, politics, Uniting Church schools, ecology, the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, living cross-culturally, other faiths and  evangelical and progressive Christianity. Authors include Ian Breward, Chris Budden, Tony Floyd, Katharine Massam, Marion Maddox, Michael Owen, Geoff Thompson and Val Webb.

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Seeking refuge in music

The simple idea of starting a music class in the Villawood Detention Centre, Sydney, has created a vast network of instrument donors for asylum seekers in detention. Sydney-based  volunteer music teacher Philip Feinstein established classes inside the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre around two years ago. He has now expanded the Music for Refugees project to include almost all Australian immigration detention centres, including Christmas Island and Nauru.

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Hope and hardship: the gift of clean water

Two weeks ago I was in Papua New Guinea visiting a UnitingWorld water and sanitation project in a picturesque village at the eastern-most point of the mainland. Whenever I travel, I  always find it quite jarring to see such beauty and such struggle co-existing together. The people of Papua New Guinea are strong and resilient, their country one of the most beautiful  and resource-rich in the world. Yet, we’ve heard much in the Australian media recently of their many challenges. While the tension between hope and hardship may be an ongoing  reality for humanity, the lives of many of our Papua New Guinean neighbours could easily be improved.

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Collective climate action

Rev Dr Jason John

Rev Dr Jason John has devoted his life to environmental issues with university degrees in zoology and environmental studies. Add in an ordination and you  have a ministry with a passion to care for creation.

With a PhD in evolution, ecology and theology, Jason is well equipped as the keynote speaker at the upcoming God of Sea and Sky conference, this July. Eco-theology may sound like a  relatively new term to some, but Jason says the concept isn’t new – it’s just new to us as a culture born post-industrial revolution.

“Eco-theology, or eco-faith, is primarily the reminder that there are these very strong links between our relationship with our creator and our relationship with creation,” he said. “In  a sense, it’s not something new. It’s a reminder of something we’ve forgotten.”

There are plenty of references in the Bible to do with caring for creation, and many cultures – regardless of religion – did so for thousands of years. In our modern world, however, we  seem to have lost the way. It’s the creation story that Jason wants to shake up. He believes we have a new creation story: one where God is present throughout evolution and one  where humans, as we know them now, are not the end goal. In his book, Worshipping  Evolution’s God, Jason explains how science has taught us that life has existed billions of years  before us, and will exist for billions of years after we’re gone.

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Learning, leading and passing it on

The chamber is full of representatives from countries located all over the globe. They mingle about the room, negotiating amendments to Resolution 2155  of the United Nations (UN) Security Council: The question of the rules of war. A young man with a suit and pony tail announces it is time to sit back down for the debate, and a representative from China stands and puts forth her case.

I’m sitting in the Legislative Assembly at Parliament House of Western Australia where 15 teams from schools across WA, including three teams from Presbyterian Ladies’ College  (PLC) a Uniting Church in WA school, battle it out in the finals for UN Youth’s Evatt competition – a model UN debate. Sam Herriman, a 19-year-old media and communications  student from the University of Western Australia, strolls around the room making sure everything is running smoothly and occasionally collects notes from members of the Council.

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Could you eat like a refugee?

Burmese people have lived through decades of conflict. Hundreds of thousands have fled their homeland for neighbouring Thailand and now live in refugee camps along the Thailand– Burma border. Some have been living in the camps for decades.

Act for Peace, the international aid agency of the National Council of Churches in Australia, works in the Thai/Burma border refugee camps and is challenging Australians to make a difference to the lives of these refugees. In a new initiative called the ‘Act for Peace Ration Challenge’ they are asking  members of the Uniting Church and communities around Australia to eat the same rations as a refugee from Burma during Refugee Week, 15-21 June, and get sponsored for doing it.

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Moderator’s column: I imagine with Christ, therefore I am a Christian

The Induction of Rev Nich Cole and the Commissioning of Richard Telfer at Trinity North Uniting Church.
The Induction of Rev Nich Cole and the Commissioning of Richard Telfer at Trinity North Uniting Church.

There is an old joke that goes: Rene Descartes went into his local for a drink. When he had finished his first drink the bartender said, “Mr Descartes would you like another?” To which Rene replied “I don’t think…” and disappeared!

To understand the joke you need to know that Rene Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician, often regarded as the father of modern philosophy, coined the phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’ (Cogito ergo sum). You are probably familiar with Descartes’ other great contribution in the field of geometry, even if you are unaware, because  every time you see a graph with an x-y axis you are seeing Descartes work, as he invented the Cartesian representation that you see.

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