Delight
How would you label the expression on the face of that Ugandan boy?! When my granddaughter started up her new bubble-making machine, the 50 or so noisy Sunday School children stopped suddenly with their mouths open. They’d never seen bubbles and were afraid of them! After being shown that they do not hurt, the children were delighted. Ecstatic, some were still afraid to touch the bubbles and used small branches to pop them. When is the last time your heart was so thrilled that joy and delight registered on your face? Is this even possible in the midst of severe trials? Everything God does is to increase our joy in Him. In the midst of our unworthiness and our pain, God’s love, majesty and tender mercy actually bring joy and awe. He delights in delighting us. “God is good and does good.”1 M... Read more
You get one life. How are you using it?
This is not an inspirational book. It's a hands-on, 44-page guide for living your life deliberately in 2017. But it is rooted in some inspirational truths. This is how the introduction starts: You get one life. Just one. You live it. You use it up. And then it’s gone. Your one life is precious. It’s short. It’s fragile. And it’s permanent. It’s precious because it’s an irreplaceable, customised gift from God himself. It’s short because it precedes the infinity of eternity. It’s fragile because it could end at any moment. It’s permanent because it’s unrepeatable, irreversible, and has implications for you and others for as long as God lives. This is not a practise run. There is no “take two.” There is no backspace on the keyboard of life. The moments come, they pass, and then they are gone.... Read more
A new lease on life for InFocus
It's been over eleven years since InFocus was founded and this year could have easily been the last for this website. But I sat down with some key people behind this website recently and we decided that the website still has a role to play and a purpose to serve. For instance, there are topics that the more mainstream blogs won't feel the need to cover because their readership don't come from a Fundamentalist background. Not only can we offer an Australian point of view, but we can offer a perspective from a Fundamentalist background as well. We can, therefore, provide a bridge between Australian Fundamentalism and more mainstream Evangelicalism. We don't want to be an "abuse blog." We don't want to be an anti-anything blog. We want to be pro-God, pro-grace, pro-gospel, pro-health, pro-gro... Read more
Child protection at church
I was recently involved in preparing a child protection policy for our church. We were given a template by our insurer which was really great as it prompted us to put a policy in place early. Even though our children's ministries are still small, we're now prepared to offer a safe environment and our people are trained so that in the case of a bad situation arising, our people know who to talk to and what to do about it. More than that, our leaders have it clearly spelled out what our obligations are. For independent churches, a child protection policy can easily get overlooked and even where it is not overlooked, developing such a policy can be quite a daunting task. So I wanted to share our policy with you. We have significantly upgraded the template that was given to us. You can downloa... Read more
Why the 2016 Census May Be My Last
Like most Australians, I have seen the slow moving train wreck that is the 2016 Australian Census. As a keen observer of technology, I have been following #CensusFail. It is not my intention to comment on the technical failings of the data collection debacle. Instead, I want to look at the bigger picture of how that data - which is likely to be more biased because of #CensusFail - will be used beyond what was publicised. Philosophically, I have no issue with a census being conducted. One of my first jobs was as a census collector in 1996. Through-out thousands of years of history, census' have been conducted. As Christian's when the government requires something - provided it does not go against Scripture - we are to comply. Besides, the birth of our Saviour in Bethlehem was due to... Read more
