Around Melbourne

The mission and evangelism potential of Facebook and other social media for the local parish is enormous, writes Bradly Billings.

Rural Australia could be an incubator for innovative forms of ministry throughout Australia, says the man who has to deal with the challenges posed to churches by fly-in fly-out (FIFO) workers in mining areas.

A quarter of the people receiving counselling for problem gambling admit to having committed fraud or stolen to support their addiction. Probably a similar number do not admit to it.

The Mission to Seafarers looks set to stay in its distinctive 95-year-old home at the western end of Flinders Street – but only after passing up a $2.4 million offer to vacate the site in the rapidly changing Docklands area.

We are living in a time when Christendom is coming to an end, an “extraordinary transition whose significance for Christian and non-Christian has yet to be understood”, according to American theologian Stanley Hauerwas.

Archbishop Philip Freier joined Bishop Andrew Curnow of Bendigo to rededicate and reopen St Martin’s Charlton on Pentecost Sunday after the church was inundated by floods on January 14, 2011.

The process of appointing vicars to parishes needs to take into account the importance of understanding parish culture, according to Archdeacon Richard Condie.

The Church needs to recover “the true experience of Spirit as the central priority in its life if it is to be true to itself, its Lord and its vocation,” the late Irish Benedictine monk John Main wrote in Monastery without Walls.

‘Turning the Titanic: Serving the Parish with Fresh Focus’ was the title of an address Ken Morgan gave to the Eastern Region Clergy Conference. He considers what sank the Titanic and what this may say to the Church 100 years after the sinking.

The Church must be at the forefront of a campaign to prevent violence against women, according to Dr Ree Boddé, who addressed all three regional clergy conferences on the topic last month. She spoke to Beryl Rule between conferences.

Archbishop Freier warned against some of the seductions of our age in his address to the North and West Region Clergy Conference in May. The following is a summary by Ron Browning.

"... We kept praying and I was given the vision of establishing a community garden," said the rector of St Luke's Sydenham, Jeannie Wollard....Then the council read about our plans for a community garden they gave us a grant to enable it to happen.

Archbishop Philip Freier said a new book of interviews with 25 spiritual teachers by the Editor of TMA, Mr Roland Ashby, “exudes optimism in a humanity which is created in the image of God and which by grace is restored, redeemed and renewed”.

“For Jim Stynes, life was more than an accident of history, and this I believe helped him be the person he was.”

Christian faith is grounded in the Word of God written – the scriptures – but sharp differences about how these words work are harming churches today, notably over gender issues, according to the Revd Dr Charles Sherlock.

The traditional Indonesian Christian Sunday greeting “Happy Sunday!” when 33 adult members of the parish’s independent Indonesian congregation were formally received as members of the Anglican Church by Archbishop Freier.

Australia is standing “on the precipice of losing its sense of egalitarianism,” ACTU President Ged Kearney warned at the end of March.

Foreign investors are watching carefully Australia’s dependency on China, according to Professor Frank Milne, an Australian economist who is now a leading academic in Canada.

Australia’s Anglican bishops, meeting in Melbourne last month, have urged the Federal Government to persist with reforms to help problem gamblers and their families.

We live in “a multi-cultural and multi-faith society; therefore multiple voices must be included in the debate,” Canon Dr Ray Cleary said in introducing a public forum, about the role of religious education in schools hosted by Trinity Theological School.

Twenty years ago this year, Melbourne Diocese’s first women priests were ordained. In three separate ordination services, 33 women were ordained in St Paul’s Cathedral during December 1992.

Will Messenger was torn between his church and his work. He had worked as a systems engineer, salesman and consultant at famous companies such as IBM, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey but it was a world alien to those with whom he shared faith.

Two leading philosophers will discuss the topic ‘The role of reason in faith and unbelief’ in a public conversation at St Paul’s Cathedral on 12 April.

The Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral has begun its search for the next Dean of Melbourne to succeed Bishop Mark Burton.

A first-ever conference of 55 multicultural clergy and lay leaders of the Melbourne Diocese, representing 40 congregations who worship in 20 languages, was held on 11 February at St Michael’s North Carlton.

“I am very committed to biblical scholarship... (and also) to the practical application of the benefits of good theology.”

Jesus’ reading of the Bible was quite radical, according to Michael Hardin, a Mennonite theologian, author and preacher from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Relationships in the world of work are as important as personal relationships, according to Dr Michael Schluter, the founder of the Jubilee Centre in the United Kingdom.

When George Hemmings was in Year 11 his parents separated and the foundations of his world collapsed. He was at boarding school, and felt cut off and abandoned, becoming so deeply depressed he even thought of suicide.

Brought up as an Anglican, Helen Dwyer had gone to church all her life. But after completing her Arts degree she went overseas, and when she came home things were different. She couldn’t find a church where she really felt she belonged.

An Asian woman church leader says Christian women in that continent still face a “stained-glass ceiling” due to the patriarchal nature of many Asian cultures, as well as the churches.

Christchurch Anglicans were forced to hold their Christmas services outdoors as yet more earthquakes rocked the city on 23 December, causing even more damage to the cathedral.

Bishop Victoria Matthews of Christchurch has lost her cathedral and its dean, her home, a number of her churches and her diocesan insurer – all in a city she arrived in less than four years ago.

A website inspired by a Cranbourne parishioner, who worked in reconciliation and peace-building after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and supported by the Melbourne Anglican Foundation has won a United Nations Media Peace Award.

It was the meeting of the former atheist who became a Christian, the former Roman Catholic who became a psychic and the man born a Jew who went to an Anglican school and became an atheist.

Two Anglicans have been appointed to lead Australia’s newest and first ever ‘Specialised University’ – MCD University of Divinity.

‘What do you want me to do for you?’ is the question every parish should be asking of its local community, says Ken Morgan, co-ordinator of Archbishop Freier’s Vision for the Diocese – ‘Making the Word of God fully known.’

It is a serious moral problem to make a promise and then wilfully break it, as Prime Minister Julia Gillard has done, Bishop Philip Huggins said last month.