End of year accounting

As we end the year, the big credit crunch of 2009 has brought megachurch leader Rick Warren into the news again.  He’s had a very up-and-down year, starting with the inauguration of a new US president and ending with this impassioned appeal for $900,000 before the clock strikes midnight today.  The more you have to start with, the more you have to lose, but most of the world’s Christians won’t be shedding too many tears, and the idea that (as the article in today’s Orange County Register suggests) the faithful of Saddleback will come up with that kind of cash by the deadline maybe just suggests that they’re not as hard up as they seem.  Or is it all a publicity stunt to get themselves noticed?

More interesting to the church mice is this sign we saw recently in Hong Kong:

Of course, that metropolis is a bit of a consumerist paradise itself – but don’t you just love this as a statement about life, love, community, gospel,  God. This one picture expresses our own prayerful aspirations for 2010  better than any number of words (or dollars, euros, pounds …).  May all our readers experience the same sense of simple yet deep connections in the coming year.

A Conference worth Considering

We don’t normally draw attention here to events in which we are participating, but this one seems to have escaped the radar of a lot of people in the UK who would find it useful.  Sponsored by the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and taking place at the end of January, the theme is ‘Church and Mission in a Multireligious Third Millennium’.  As well as church mice it includes a line up of missiological stars including Stanley Hauerwas, Brian Stanley, Darrell Guder, Bryan Stone, Heidi Campbell, Pauline Cheong, and Andrew Walls – to name just a few.  Further details are here.

Christmas in Hong Kong

Spending a few days in Hong Kong, we could not have failed to notice all the signs wishing us ‘A Happy Christmas’, and the Christmas carols being played in hotels, streets, and tourist attractions – not to mention some serious Christmas trees.  It all makes a change from the endless wrangles back home about whether we should celebrate Christmas (this being too Christian for the UK), or some other sort of ‘winter festival’ (this being secular and therefore assumed to be religiously neutral).  Paradoxically, by comparison with Britain, HK is actually multicultural rather than just claiming to be – and seems to have no difficulty at all recognizing a Christian festival with Christian symbols and the recounting of traditional stories.  It generated some conversation between us as to whether it is easier to be Christian in a post-Christendom culture or in a globalized culture such as Hong Kong, and we concluded that on the basis of what we have seen the genuinely globalized is probably a more open and honest space in which to have faith conversations.  We certainly haven’t needed to apologize about being Christians – and yes, casual people in streets and shops have asked us that question.  Maybe instead of lecturing the rest of the world about freedom, our politicians should listen a bit more and see what they can learn about tolerance and all those other virtues they talk a lot about but seem to find hard to put into practice.