Couldn't Help Noticing

Loneliness of the long distance letter writers

Actually, not so lonely this time!

A couple of weeks ago, The Weekend Australian Magazine (part of the Australian Newspaper) printed a somewhat unbalanced article about Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen (unfortunately not available online). CHN readers will be astonished—or perhaps not—to learn that the main gripe against Peter was nothing to do with his personal character; rather it was with views held by him that go against the prevailing Western secularist zeitgeist.

Three Friends of the Briefing managed to make it into print in response:

Letter 1. Jensen-mania has struck again but the question I was left with after reading the article was, “Why is it that the people with the greatest humility are the greatest targets?” Jensen is no “shrinking violet”, but neither is he angry, arrogant or aggressive. He holds to his convictions and for that I am thankful.

Rev Nigel Fortescue

Letter 2. I read with interest your article on Archbishop Jensen. What bigotry! Such a depressing record of narrow-mindedness, intolerance and refusal to acknowledge obvious truth. Peter Jensen, on the other hand, came across as a thoroughly warm and engaging human being.

Gordon Cheng

Letter 3. Peter Jensen's “narrow world view” has been standard Christian teaching for two millennia. It is still accepted in much of today's Christian world (eg Africa, Asia, and South America). He explains the biblical position with courage, clarity, and courtesy. In reply he receives inflammatory descriptions from opponents and journalist alike, along with egregious errors of fact. Yet even his detractors admitted his integrity and kindness. Readers can judge for themselves where the greater prejudice may lie.

Rev Sandy Grant

Bible reading

The Bible Society is reporting that the last Australian Church Life Survey showed that only 19% of church attendees read the Bible daily or on most days; it also showed that 12% of respondents read the Bible a few times a week, 5% once a week, 27% occasionally and 37% hardly ever or never.

A number of Bible related ministries are working together to try to improve these less-than-impressive statisitcs, suggesting that local congregations set aside a week in each year as Bible Celebration Week—a week when the focus is on helping individual Christians develop the discipline of Bible reading 365 days a year.

For those looking for good resources to suggest for this purpose, may we suggest the three Daily Reading Bible booklets? These resources have a number of real benefits:

• they contain everything you need, including the Bible text for the day—so you can do them just aout anywhere;
• they don't give pat, superficial “devotional reflections”;
• through strategic questions and “points to ponder” they focus on the key message of the Bible passage;
• they model good Bible reading habits in a brief format;
• they are not dated, so people can do them at a pace that suits their circumstances and can change to something else for a time without ‘falling behind’ some imposed schedule

Find out more about Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3. (And look at for Volume 4 soon.)

Cruden’s Completely Mad Concordance

Through this short article by John Piper, I was recently made aware of the extraordinary author of the famous “Cruden's Concordance”—Alexander Cruden.

Apparently Mr. Cruden began his work of painstakingly recording the occurrences of every word in the King James Version Bible (of which there are 777,746) in the 1720's, and his ‘complete’ concordance was first published in 1737. (Quick thinking readers may have worked out by now that this was BC—Before Computers.)

Cruden's Concordance has never been out of print since then. Even today there are 18 editions available.

However, there is some debate as to whether Cruden was also as mad as a cut snake. Sadly there seems reasonable evidence to suggest that he was—such as his propensity to obsessively stalk and propose marriage to women he barely knew.

He also sought for himself the official title of “the Corrector of the People”, and a Knighthood so that, as he wandered the countryside chastising people about their immoral behaviour, they would consider him more authoritative. In seeking the Knighthood, he bent the ear of many an official and dignatory, and he complained vociferously at their lack of attention to his request. (Although Cruden comments that the Earl of Paulet “spoke civilly to him; for, being goutish in his feet, he could not run away from the Corrector as others were apt to do.”)

He was, at the very least, an “eccentric”.

But as Piper points out, his obsessive ‘folly’ of attempting to record the occurrence of every word in the Bible has been an enormous blessing to students of the Bible for hundreds of years. God can, and often does, use even the oddest people to bring about his divine purposes.

[More about Alexander Cruden. ABC Interview with Cruden's most recent biographer.]

The word of the Lord increases and prevails mightily

Praise God for the repentence of the students at Sutherland Shire Christian School in response to hearing God's word.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reports today and according to a press release from the school itself, students at the School have handed in thousands of pirated CDs to be destroyed, after being challenged about God's commandment not to steal.

It is estimated that the CDs were worth $50,000 retail.

It reminds me of Acts 19:18-20:

Also many of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices. And a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily.

May God use this costly, committed act of repentance by the students—a Christian act which not even the SMH could ridicule—to help make his Gospel known.

Social chaos in Russia

This CHN comes from a correspondent in Russia:

What we are seeing, in short, is a country with nuclear weapons that is enduring a slow motion version of the medieval Black Death.

Such is the alarming assessment of Russia's population decline by New York Times journalist, David Brooks (New York Times, April 28, 2005). He's not overstating the case. He points to a number of causes, the first being the crisis in the Russian family—Russia now has three divorces for every four marriages, an astounding rate of family break-up. The second is the falling birth rate: the average now sitting around 1.2 births per woman, while according to recent statistics Russia has about 160 deaths for every 100 births. Thirdly, people are dying younger in Russia. Life expectancies here are now approximately equal to those in Bangladesh and are below India's (average male life expectancy is about 57.5 years). Ruinous lifestyle choices, especially alcoholism, are the largest contributor to this.

Brooks continues with some interesting remarks:

The paradox of Russia is that as life has become miserable in many ways, the economy has grown at an impressive clip. We can look back on this and begin to see a pattern that might be called Post-Totalitarian Stress Syndrome. When totalitarian regimes take control of a country, they destroy the bonds of civic trust and the normal patterns of social cohesion. They rule by fear, and public life becomes brutish. They pervert private and public morality. When those totalitarian regimes fall, different parts of the society recover at different rates. Some enterprising people take advantage of economic recovery, and the result of their efforts is economic growth. But private morality, the habits of self-control and the social fabric take a lot longer to recover. So you wind up with a situation in which high growth rates and lingering military power mask profound social chaos.

So what does all this economic and social theory have to do with us? Let us illustrate with a recent experience. We were going around our bible study group sharing prayer points and getting very bland requests, but when the husbands went to one room and the wives stayed in another, the masks came off. With worrying regularity the women were sharing serious concerns about their family life and the struggle to persevere. Consistent with the statistics above, it is difficult to find models of functional family life in Russia, and it's even harder to find households built on God's grace. Indeed, almost without exception, the people we have gotten to know here have come from very broken families. Many don't even know their fathers, and those that do, might be ashamed of his alcoholism and violence. Every country and culture has its problems, but it is hard to comprehend the extent of Russia's social problems.

Understandably, our Christian friends are hungry for nurturing and direction. We often feel like we're struggling as we manage our household, and we know we could be a better Christian example. Yet many of our local friends comment on how our home is like a breath of fresh air for them; even our flawed efforts are being used by God to encourage and teach his people.

Please pray that God would continue to transform the lives of Christians in Russia, so that they may become “blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which they shine like stars in the universe as they hold out the word of life”. (Phil. 2:15-16a)