John is a compassionate human who had a little courage in 1981 and still has a fire in his belly.

This occasion was to commemorate great non-violent protestors, Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, of Parihaka in 1881.

There was a hundred years difference, but the same commitment in the face of musket/Red Squad long battons, to square off without violence. Very humbling. To smite or not to smite that is the question.

This short video highlights the day back in 1981 that protestors in Hamilton stopped the game!

So what is it exactly? Trees at the Meteor is a unique experience of Christmas creativity with heaps of ‘Trees of Awesomeness’ on show! This December, the Meteor Theatre on Victoria Street becomes home to 60 plus (not boring) trees that are feast to the eyes. There is colour and beauty and smiles to be had galore! It’s a festive forest of what Christmas means to Hamilton.

You walk in, you look at stuff, you get to escape the stress and claws of Santa – and walk away after an hour and a half of the best entertainment on record. Epic for anyone – it’s a whole family thing!

Trees at the Meteor is all about the festive spirit whilst at the same time giving something back to those in need – helping to make Christmas more about ‘compassion’ than ‘consumption’ – by proudly donating to the Hamilton Christian Men’s Night Shelter and the Women’s Refuge. Experience a Christmas night out like no other.

Trees at the Meteor runs from the 15th to 19th of December at the Meteor Theatre on Victoria Street, Hamilton. A fabulous event for all the whanau! Doors open nightly 7pm to 10pm. On the Saturday there will be a matinee show – to be confirmed. Standby caller!

The $6 entry includes complimentary coffee/hot choc/chai.
There is also a $20 family pass (2 adults /2 kids under 16) with extra kids just a gold coin.

Right now theTrees at the Meteor are recruiting artists so if you have an idea for a tree, have an obsession with all things Christmas or just want to be involved, head over to the Trees website to see what you can do.

This is your invitation to be part of a new season in Hamilton’s social calendar -the inaugural Hamilton Spring Charity Ball has arrived. Kick yourself (not with regret) and your friends into life and help make the world a little warmer – especially in Nepal.

Time to rekindle love or light a fire? Enjoying DJ’s, bands and comedians in different spaces, relaxing with a fine beverage, having a laugh with top AK comedians, troffin’ treats, chilling out with friends – exactly our point. Why should High Schoolers have all the fun ? YOLO!

And the real deal kicks in with local groove merchants Late 80’s Mercedes. Bred by their mothers to bring the night to an epic frenzy of musical joy as they always do. Late 80’s with their infectious, high-energy, pop/funk sound is worth the ticket alone.

On the down beat, supreme comedians James Keating and Tim Muller will make you cackle for sure

The Riverbank Lane is the newest precinct in town. Swanky as. It’s a stunning ball venue with indoor/outdoor flow to the river, multi roomed with multiple bars catering for your refreshments. In the heart of town too. Next to the casino. A stone’s throw to Hood st.

Habitat for Humanity is sending some builders from Hamilton to be part of the Global Village Build where they aim to build a total of 100 houses in a week in Nepal. Our aim is to help our travelling good hearted locals get on a plane and get building. Everybody deserves a home.

And because it’s always tricky getting a fresh venture off the ground, we would like you to become a Spring Ball For Nepal ambassador. It’s not a big deal – just means you’re the party starter in your social circle. We’ll give you a bunch of tickets. You get all excited with your friends …..and if you sell 10 tickets (10 – mix of singles or doubles) you’ll get a complimentary DOUBLE TICKET. True story. And people will thank you ! They might even say after the ball that you’re ‘trending’. Email us for more details.

Date: 18th September 2015
Venue: The Riverbank Lane
Time: 8pm till late
Cost: $50 single or $85 double.

Find tickets at Eventfinda.

Join the fun over on Facebook.

Summer is that time of year where some ministry begins to slow down (unless you are in youth ministry, then you laugh at the notion of “slow summers”) as we as the Church take our collective breath and prepare to gear up for the coming Fall season. This is also the time of year when evaluations of all different varieties seem to occur.

During these “down” months, ministers are having their job performances critiqued by their current congregations, ministers who are in the search process are evaluating the viability of ministry in a potential new call, and churches are (or at least they should be) evaluating their own ministries for either presentation to candidates or to refine what it is they are doing with the pastor(s) that with whom they have already partnered.

Every church, pastor, and region seems to have their own criteria for evaluating the “effectiveness” of ministries that are being undertaken by local churches. As I continue to evaluate the state of the ministry to our youth in my current congregation I have my own criteria I use as well. But lately as I reflect upon such things I have found myself wondering what criteria Jesus would use to evaluate our ministry. After all, it is for His sake that we engage this work. What questions would he ask of the Church and her pastors?

Here’s what I came up with…

1. Are we meeting people on their turf?
He met fishermen on the beach, a tax collector in a tax booth, and an outcast woman at the town well. Jesus did his very best work outside of the “church.” Are we expecting folks to wander into our space or are we actively meeting them out in the community?

2. Are we pointing out the Divine in the midst of everyday life?
“Consider the lilies of the field….” Jesus spent a great deal of time pointing out connections between the “sacred” and the “secular.” Jesus had a funny way of making the common become rather uncommon. Are we creating opportunities for folks to bridge connections between what happens at work, school, and the soccer field and what God is up to in the world?

3. Are we choosing hope over despair?
The people to whom Jesus ministered were broken up, beaten down, and altogether burnt out on their government and their religion. He never let the “experts” who said what he was doing was silly or worthless get to him. He chose to continue to believe in the goodness of God and the potential of the people. In the same way, many in our communities are pretty broken up and beaten down and are pretty suspicious of the Church. Do we succumb to that suspicion or do we keep believing that God is up to something awesome.

4. Are we loving each other (and ourselves)?
Jesus was serious about that whole Great Commandment thing. Are we truly loving those in our midst? And in the same way, are we truly loving ourselves? Just as we are dedicated to the care of each other, we are tasked with being mindful of the care of our own mind, body, and spirit. How have we shown love to others? How have we shown love to ourselves?

5. Are we teaching, or are we dictating?
Any good teacher will tell you that there is a huge distinction between teaching and dictating. Teaching provides safe opportunities for growth, exploration, and trial and error. Dictating invokes fear, suspicion, and snuffs out the light of possibility. The Great Commission tells us to “teach.” How are we teaching those in our midst?

6. Are we practicing radical hospitality?
“So that my house might be full…” Jesus hung out with everybody. He communed with the rich and learned and with the poor and downcast. He turned no one away from the Table of Grace. He embodied the concept of radical hospitality. We bear in mind that this does not mean that Jesus condoned every action or condition of the people with whom he associated, but he did welcome all into his midst. Are we creating an environment of welcome in our ministries?

7. Do we value people over possessions?
Jesus was not a huge fan of stuff. He regularly told people to get rid of their stuff. Jesus seemed to believe that “stuff” was a barrier to ministry as people would often value their stuff over their fellow children of God. Sometimes the Church gets caught up in that same trap. If we were to surrender all of our churchy possessions, would we still be able to do ministry?
8. Do we regularly take “time out?”
Jesus had this really awesome habit where he would regularly run away up a hillside and take quiet time with God. Occasionally he would do this at inconvenient times. It should be noted that Jesus never once apologizes for taking this alone time with God. He knew that to do ministry his spirit needed to be re-filled from time to time. Jesus made this a priority, do we?

9. Do we identify leaders and cultivate them?
We can’t be certain what it was, but Jesus saw something in Simon and in Saul. Here were two guys that weren’t stereotypical leaders. But Jesus saw something in them, identified their gifts, and tasked them for ministry. How are we looking for ministry leaders that already exist among us? How are we developing and equipping these potential leaders for ministry?

10. Have we managed to keep, “the main thing the main thing?”
Life is busy and distractions are many. Churches have a tendency to get bogged down in the minute details and sometimes lose track of the main thing. Are we keeping our priorities in line? Are we using the question, “how will this help make God known more fully” to guide every business and ministry decision? If we are not, why?

Of course this list is not exhaustive, but as we consider how we might continue to put our ministries more in line with the ministry of Christ, I wonder if these questions might be a good place to start. What would you add to this list?

Rev. Aaron Todd serves as the Minister for Education at First Christian Church-Midwest City, OK . Among other things, he focuses on youth, children, young adult, and family ministry. He is married to Debra, who is also a Disciples pastor, and together they have a 3 year old son named Zach and a precious baby boy named Josh. In addition to their human children, they have a 5 year old dog named Amos (named after the prophet). Check out his blog, revaarontodd.com

For an idea of how Broadway United Methodist Church is turning the model of the urban church inside out, look for a moment at its food pantry, clothing ministry and after-school program.

They’ve been killed off.

In many cases, they were buried with honors. But those ministries, staples of the urban church, are all gone from Broadway. Kaput.

Broadway’s summer youth program, which at one point served 250 children a day — bringing them in for Girl Scouts and basketball, away from the violence and drugs of Broadway’s neighborhood — is gone, too. Broadway let the air out of the basketballs. Sent the Girl Scouts packing.

Then peek into the comfortably cluttered office of the Rev. Mike Mather, who is prone to putting his feet on his desk and leaning so far back in his swivel chair that you expect him to go flying at any moment.

Rev. Mike MatherWatch him, inverted like this, until he suddenly gets animated, drops his feet to the floor, leans over, elbows on knees, and shares this: “One of the things we literally say around here is, ‘Stop helping people.’

“I’m serious.”

He is serious. Mather has given years of thought to this, and he’s as sure about it as anything he learned in seminary.

Broadway UMC’s leaders have changed the way they view their neighbors — as people with gifts, not just needs. In what ways does this view reframe the conversation? What difference does reframing the relationship make in the outcomes achieved?

“The church, and me in particular,” Mather said, “has done a lot of work where we have treated the people around us as if, at worst, they are a different species and, at best, as if they are people to be pitied and helped by us.”

With that in mind, Broadway has — for more than a decade now — been reorienting itself. Rather than a bestower of blessings, the church is aiming to be something more humble.

The church decided its call was to be good neighbors. And that we should listen and see people as children of God,” said De’Amon Harges, a church member who sees Broadway’s transformation in terms not unlike Christ’s death, burial and resurrection.

Rejecting charity
In 2004, Mather hired Harges to be Broadway’s first “roving listener,” a position that is exactly what it sounds like. Harges’ job was to rove the neighborhood, block by block at first, spending time with the neighbors, not to gauge their needs but to understand what talents lay there.

“I was curious about what was good in people, and that was what I was going to find out,” he said.

Harges wound up spending hours sitting on people’s porches and hovering near them as they worked in their backyard gardens. He began listening for hints about their gifts.

“I started paying attention” he said, “to what they really cared about.”

Mather, meanwhile, was drawing deeply from the philosophical well of “asset-based community development” — the notion of capitalizing on what’s good and working in a place rather than merely addressing its deficiencies.

John McKnight, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University, is one of the founders of the approach. He literally wrote the book on building communities from the inside out. He describes Mather and Harges as a “God-given team.”

When Broadway invited him to come speak, McKnight spent some time walking the church’s neighborhood with Harges.

“What he’s listening for is their gifts — ‘What has God given you?’” McKnight said. He doesn’t advocate ignoring people’s needs and problems, but rather to look first for solutions within the community itself. Later, he said, institutions and services can help.

“John 15:15 tells us that, at the Last Supper, Jesus said to the disciples, ‘I no longer call you servants. … I call you friends.’ So the final way of defining what Christianity is based on is friendship, not service. … I think Mike and De’Amon are guided by that spiritual principle.”

A key to what’s going on now at Broadway, McKnight says, is the church’s brutally honest view of charity, which McKnight defines as “a one-way compensatory activity that never changes anything.”

Seeing and serving needs
Like so many older, urban churches, Broadway came to its charitable ways honestly, and with the best of intentions.

When the current building was erected, in 1927, the church along the banks of Fall Creek was on the northern outskirts of Indianapolis. It was then a flourishing area primed for growth. Within a decade, Broadway had 2,300 members. The pews were packed. The Sunday school rooms were buzzing.

But by the late 1950s, Indianapolis began to experience white flight to newer suburbs. The neighborhood began a long, slow decline. And so did the church.

By the mid-1990s, weekly attendance was down to 75. The pews were empty. The Sunday school was dark.

Amid the surrounding decay, the church assumed a new role: caregiver.

Broadway, Mather says now, came to see its neighborhood for all of its problems — poverty and abandoned houses, drugs and the related violence, high teen pregnancy and dropout rates.

Mather confesses to being part of that history. He has been pastor of Broadway twice, and during his first stint, from 1986 to 1991, he retooled the church’s summer youth program — the one with the basketballs and the Girl Scouts — and injected it with a new spiritual theme each week. And it took off.

“We felt so good about it,” Mather said, “that I broke my arm patting myself on the back.”

But then Mather was confronted with a heavy dose of reality. In a nine-month span, nine young men within a four-block radius of the church died violent deaths. Some of them had come through that great youth program at Broadway, a program that had done nothing to inoculate them against street violence.

Mather was left to bury them — along with the sense that what Broadway had been doing for its neighborhood all those years had been effective.

Asking new questions
Mather carried that sense with him to another United Methodist church in South Bend, Indiana, where he was assigned in 1992.

Again, he was a pastor in an urban setting. But this time Mather began to probe more deeply into McKnight’s philosophies, into what it meant to be an urban preacher. Finally, he asked himself whether he was living out what he believed, and what he had been preaching.

One Pentecost Sunday, Mather preached about Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 regarding the prophecy of Joel:

“And in the last days it will be,” God says, “that I will pour out my Spirit on all people, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy, and your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.” (Acts 2:17-18 NET)

At a congregational meal after the service, a parishioner asked Mather pointedly, “So how come we don’t treat people like that?”

Mather didn’t understand. Then the woman explained that she was talking about the government food giveaway hosted by the church. To get food, participants had to fill out a form that basically asked, “How poor are you?”

Nowhere on the form were there questions about people’s gifts.

“If we believe that God’s spirit is flowing down on all people, old and young, women and men — and on the poor,” the woman continued, “why don’t we treat people like that’s true?”

Mather saw where she was going. He put aside the government form and, in a number of ways, began asking people new questions. One of his favorites: “What three things do you do well enough that you could teach others how to do it?”

Soon, the church was tapping into people who could repair cars, make quilts, paint, and cook some of the best Mexican food Mather had ever eaten. Through that, some neighbors found new livelihoods. More found a community.

By the time the church reassigned him back to Broadway in 2003, Mather was fully committed to this inside-out approach.

He hired Harges as the roving listener, then started closing ministries from the charity era. The moves were as practical as they were oriented to the new philosophy.

For 30 years, Broadway had tutored neighborhood kids after school. And for 30 years, the neighborhood dropout rate kept climbing higher. So Broadway stopped tutoring.

For decades, the church had been feeding people out of its pantry. But local health officials were telling Mather that the No. 1 health problem facing the neighborhood wasn’t starvation.

It was obesity — often leading to diabetes.

To Mather, it made no sense to hand out carbs in a box and peaches in cans of heavy syrup to people who were overweight.

“We’re not only not helping,” he concluded. “We’re actively making people sicker.”

Instead of handing out food, Mather hopes to help people find long-lasting solutions to problems such as hunger. He likes to tell the story of Adele, who came to the food pantry for supplies for her family and ended up, a year and a half later, using her gifts as a cook to open her own restaurant.

But giving up old ways is difficult. Mather tried to ease the shock to Broadway’s system. He devoted part of one Sunday service to bidding farewell to the dead ministries. That included the thrift shop, which by then was being run by women in their 80s and 90s.

During the service, Mather asked everyone who had ever worked in the thrift shop or had ever donated to it to stand. Many did. Then, in unison, the congregation said, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”

Convincing the doubters
Not everyone cared for Broadway’s new approach.

Neighbors were grumbling about services the church had cast aside. There were even doubters among the Broadway staff. Among them was Cathy Pilarski.

Before moving to Indianapolis in 2008, Pilarski had run a mobile latte business in Tucson, Arizona. She needed work in Indy and found it at Broadway – as a janitor. Six months in, Mather wanted to promote her to facilities manager.

Pilarski knew nothing about mechanics or wiring or other building systems. Besides, her head was spinning from everything going on at Broadway.

She responded to Mather’s offer with disdain.

“No, Mike,” she told the pastor. “No, because I think you’re crazy, and I think there are some other people who think you are crazy, too.”

As soon as she spoke the words, Pilarski regretted them. She had always fancied herself as someone who liked to think outside the box. Here was a pastor taking a chainsaw to the box. And she was resisting. That revelation told her that maybe she should trust Mather and his vision.

When she did, Pilarski came to see that Mather was less interested in her cleaning skills and her knowledge of building mechanics than in her social skills and her experience as an entrepreneur. More than the building itself, he was concerned about building community.

Such rewiring was going on across the church.

The church’s governing council stopped rehashing committee reports at its quarterly meetings and instead began inviting people from the neighborhood and the congregation to come in and tell them about the work they’d been up to.

Harges began connecting people with common interests. Within four blocks of the church — the same area where young people had been dying years before — Harges found 45 backyard gardeners. He brought them together around a meal. With no agenda.

The gardeners liked it enough that they began to meet monthly. None of them individually had seen their green thumbs as a gift. Together, they began to realize that they had something valuable. In a neighborhood that’s part of an urban food desert, they’ve begun planning their own farmer’s market.

Broadway is even passing on the art of listening to young people.

The Rev. Mike Mather talks with the youth during a service at Broadway United Methodist Church.

In each of the last six years, the church has hired 15 to 20 kids from the neighborhood to learn from Harges and then head out into the neighborhood as part-time roving listeners.

The information they’ve been bringing back has enabled other interest groups to form in areas such as art, poetry, music, law and education.

From these gatherings, people have found jobs, collaborators and friends. There are still hungry people who need a meal. They just find it now among friends.

“The whole idea is that we extend beyond the physical structure of our church and that we grow community — and that we know community — in real ways,” said Seana Murphy, who lives near the church.

Recently, she invited people from the church and the neighborhood with an interest in education for conversation over meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

The people around her table included a woman who grew up in a housing project who’s now attending a community college, a dropout who got a high school equivalency diploma and plans to be a nurse, a college administrator, and an assistant pastor with a Ph.D.

At the meal, one woman mentioned she had struggled with depression. Now, Murphy said, others will know to check on her from time to time.

Making connections
Tamara Leech, an associate professor at the Indiana University Fairbanks School of Public Health, has been studying what Broadway is doing for the past six years.

Social cohesion, Leech said, is a key to improving life in what she calls “neighborhoods of the concentrated disadvantaged.”

“The neighbors see Broadway as a place where you can go and ask for help. Not for goods or services,” she said. “You go there for connections.”

Leech hopes to win a grant to do a long-term study of Broadway and its neighborhood. But, for now, hard data is scarce. At least from a theoretical basis, Leech said, “What I do know is that Broadway takes an approach that makes the most sense to me.”

Anecdotally, both she and Mather have heard about people finding jobs through their Broadway community connections. Others have found the encouragement to enter college or technical programs. Leech points to a partnership with the state health department in which the church brought together teen mothers, many intent on having more babies right away, with older women. Two years later, none of the girls has had another child.

Mather says the neighborhood is much less violent than in the 1990s, but he concedes the causes of that are hard to isolate. For one thing, some homes that were once abandoned or occupied by the poor are now being inhabited by middle class families.

Change also is evident in what’s going on in Sunday school classrooms that sat dark for decades.

Today, they are filled with an unusual collection of small businesses that rent space, together with fledgling organizations that get space for free. Meeting in the church now is a metropolitan youth orchestra and an eclectic mix of artists and, on Sunday nights, 50 or more gamers.

There’s a dance studio and a pottery shop and an office for a small architectural firm. The church acquired a commercial kitchen license, and now people from the neighborhood use it for catering startups.

Pilarski, the onetime doubter, is in charge of managing all this. She still thinks her pastor is crazy. “Certifiable,” she said, joking.

But in each busy corner of the church, in each of the hundreds of faces that now pass under its roof each week, she sees something that was missing for a long time — the majesty of God.

“I want to make sure that God is glorified not only in that sanctuary but in every corner of this building,” she said.

Some of that bustle has spilled over into the sanctuary. Sunday morning attendance has climbed past 200. But in the Broadway economy, that’s almost an afterthought.

Broadway has died to its old self, giving up the things that were holding it back, said Harges, the roving listener. The church’s resurrection has come from seeking the gifts of others.

“Our role in this place is to become like yeast — that invisible agent for social change. It is not about us as an agency inviting people to witness God here. Instead, what we want to do is to see God out of this place.”

__

This article written by Robert King and was originally published at Faith & Leadership – A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. Words and images have been re-published here with permission from Faith & Leadership.

So when Cyclone Pam hit, you had memories of the people you had met and their struggles. You could picture it. It was like a bad thing had happened to my family.

My nine year old daughter felt it more. After watching the News one night she glue sticked posters on the dining room wall. They were pleas of help. Little ad campaigns. To no one else, but our family.

I ate meals every single day looking at those heartfelt drawings by my daughter and I wondered what our family could do for Vanuatu. One idea was to have a fund-raising concert called ‘Van for Vanuatu‘ where Hamilton musicians would play the songs of Van Morrison and Van Halen and maybe the odd Vangelis piece…that didn’t happen luckily.

What did happen was that my oldest son Jackson and I went to Vanuatu for ten days. We volunteered with a bunch of New Zealanders from Gisborne and ended up in a squatters village in Port Villa. A collection of hustled together sheds/shacks with dirt floors and lots of rusty buts – home to a village of people living hand to mouth.

We played up our soccer skills and down played our importance in being there. We negotiated with the chief and the elder of the village and soon sussed out the needs and got to it – with the help of the locals. We made roofs secure and water tight. We made walls for a widows house, chainsawed a fallen tree out of the stream causing a dam, dug new toilets and made a shelter for our doctors and nurses helping the locals.

It was another world and one of the best weeks of my life. Other worlds are great to visit. To see my son, with all privilege of western culture engage with people that have so little – but have so much in terms of spirit and joy, was brilliant. Unforgettable. To see him sweat alongside and make friends with his Vanuatu brothers on iron roofs is worth the ongoing malaria pill swallowing. Other worlds make you reflect deep on your own world – maybe it just isn’t what its cracked up to be

Vanuatu is a great holiday place. But many tourists would never feel what it’s like to be part of life in a village. I’ll definitely be going back – and I’ll taking as many as I can with me.

Written by Dave White – Incedo community worker

But Hamiltonians with heart will have a laugh at our own expense for those up over theres that we cares about…TAHI, RUA , TORU , WHA , RIMA !!

Five very funny comedians, fresh from the New Zealand International Comedy Festival, descend from the big city of Auckland on a mission to be sidesplittingly hilarious.

So put your hands in your pockets, drag your butt, vote with your feet, and help Nepal get back on theirs.

Saturday 17 July
Meteor Theatre – Hamilton
Show starts 7.30pm

Tickets: $15 – All proceeds going to Red Cros Nepal Relief
Get your tickets from iticket

Wine and Beer available!

Comic Relief for Nepal – a night of non-stop laughs for the Red Cross earthquake appeal. Brought to you by Incedo, Free FM and Wash Your Mouth Out.

For more information, please visit ‘A Different Conversation’ on Facebook.

The debate on sexuality seems to be predicated on a belief that “I’m heterosexual and that’s okay” with the accompanying belief that “You’re homosexual (or lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, inter-sex – LGBTI) and that’s not okay.” Foccault argues that such language gives the “I’m okay” party a position of power in the argument and disempowers the “not okay” party. But, if we start from “I’m heterosexual and that’s not okay”, how would this affect the way we approach and debate sexual orientation in society and in Christianity? It seems to me that there are good reasons why I should not adopt the dominant position in this debate by assuming glibly that I’m okay because I’m heterosexual.

I’m heterosexual and that’s not okay because heterosexual males in society and church:

• perpetrate a lot of partner abuse – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual – and, as a result, women are suffering;
• are responsible for far too much paedophilia and children are abused emotionally, physically, spiritually and mentally;
• are the prime broadcasters of sexist jokes about women that take away their dignity and women are demeaned;
• continue to prevent gender equality by denying women certain roles and women are discriminated against;
• control the media that promote women, especially young women, as sex objects for the visual, emotional and sexual gratification of heterosexual men;
• are as promiscuous as males of other sexual expressions and undermine the sanctity of committed relationships, spread infection, promote casual sex, hurt wives/partners/girlfriends, and devalue sex;
• are responsible for almost all the hate and prejudice crimes against people of different sexualities that damage the victims physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally and leave them fearful and stressed;

… and therefore I am compelled to conclude that “I’m heterosexual and that’s not okay.”

This is not about the rightness and wrongness of different expressions of sexuality. It is a plea. Particularly to those of us in the church, to drop this divisive, unhelpful and hurtful approach. It is a call to embrace a discourse that might reflect more the way of Jesus who, when confronted with those whom society, and, in particular, religious leaders, had declared not okay, chose to say that they were okay in a discourse with them that was honest about their situation, humble in its exposure of their condition, and loving in its acceptance of them.

What might happen if we say, “I’m heterosexual and that’s not okay and I want to be honest and humble and loving as I engage now with what it means to be a sexual person and follow Jesus and to engage with the experience of those who are of an alternate sexual expression and, especially, with those who are LGBTI and want to follow Jesus”?

This article was written by Incedo member Mal Green and originally published on the Red Letter Christians website in July 2012.

With the outdoor life just outside the tent flaps, we make the most of Gods awesome playground. If someone turned up at the camp they’d possibly find a big sign that says, “Gone fishing or caving, or swimming, or tramping, or kayaking”.

And as young people make the most of the summer fun we take them on a journey through stories, experiences and relationships that invites them to be part of Gods story in our world. Every year a great team of volunteers makes it happen for kids from many backgrounds needing a place to have a darn good holiday.

Contact us for more information on the Breakaway Summer experience.

Contact us for more information on the Breakaway Summer experience.