Recent Pastoral Notes/Blog Items

Theodicy...!?!

Submitted by John Westendorp on August 23, 2010 - 10:44am

Yep, big word! Never heard it before? Not surprising – it’s a term that comes from philosophy and literally means ‘the justification of God’.

When you as a parent explain to your child why bad things like floods and fires happen in a world that God created good then you are engaging in theodicy.

When you tell an unbelieving workmate why the presence of evil in the world does not make you toss your faith overboard then you base that on a theodicy.

Many of us have been confronted by the argument of a sceptic that because there is evil in the world God is either caring but not powerful enough to remove that evil or else God is powerful enough but He lacks the compassion to deal with those things.

That quarrelsome community

Submitted by John Westendorp on August 9, 2010 - 9:49am

I’d not heard of American author Anne Rice, until a news item arrived in email inbox this past week. I’ve obviously missed something because Wikipedia tells me that with nearly 100 million of her books sold she is one of the most widely read authors in modern history.

Wow…! And I didn’t even know who she was.

But as I read on I wasn’t surprised. The categories for which she especially writes, I’m told are gothic, erotic and religious. Hmmm! I could be interested in the ‘religious’ but as for gothic and erotic…? A check of some of her book titles indicates that she loves writing about vampires and demons. Titles like ‘Memnoch the Devil’ and ‘The Queen of the Damned’ don’t exactly compel me to go to a bookshop to place an order.

Stealing our Heritage

Submitted by John Westendorp on August 3, 2010 - 12:00am

It’s always rather sad when folk declare themselves to be atheists. Little do these people realise that according to the wisdom of Psalm 14 this rejection of the existence of God puts them in a certain unenviable category of people.

Okay…! I know it doesn’t sound very respectful to call our Prime Minister a fool. But when Julia Gillard declared on public television that she didn’t believe in God then according to the logic of Psalm 14 she is a precisely that – a fool.

I readily admit that there have been many fools like her who were great rulers and leaders (by the grace of the God in whom they chose not to believe…!). Nebuchadnezzar was such a fool, before God humbled him and he came to believe in the God of the Bible.

Baptism (3) – The Status of our Kids

Submitted by John Westendorp on July 28, 2010 - 12:54pm

Years ago, when I was a young parent, I was asked by a Christian acquaintance whether or not I prayed for the conversion of my children. That pulled me up… because I knew that I didn’t and his question made me wonder whether I had been remiss in doing something important for my kids.

I told him that I would need to go away and think about that as I wasn’t sure whether I ought to be doing that or not. I also had to think about what he meant by ‘conversion’. In a sense we need to be converted daily from our sinful ways and to turn around and go God’s way. But that daily kind of conversion wasn’t the kind of conversion my friend had in mind. He was talking about that decisive moment in someone’s life when they move out of the Kingdom of darkness and into the Kingdom of God’s beloved Son.

Baptism (2) - From Circumcision to Baptism

Submitted by John Westendorp on July 20, 2010 - 9:39am

My difficulties with infant baptism came about because of my friendship with some Baptists. They convinced me that since Scriptures teaches us to “repent and be baptised!” or to “believe and be baptised!” infants should not be baptised since they can neither repent nor believe. That argument appeared to make good sense. It still does.

The Reformed Pastor whom I talked about that when we were expecting our first child asked me whether I agreed that Baptism means essentially the same thing as Circumcision and that it has replaced Circumcision. I could hardly disagree because the Apostle Paul equates the two in Colossians 2.

When

Baptism (1) – We don’t ‘Christen’ babies

Submitted by John Westendorp on July 14, 2010 - 2:15pm

With the present baby boom in our church we’re going to be having a number of baptisms and that always presents a special challenge for some people who are troubled by the practice of sprinkling some water on a baby’s head.

I sympathise with them.

I grew up in a Reformed Church family where that was the norm...

Shaped by History

Submitted by John Westendorp on July 7, 2010 - 12:07pm

Since marrying for the second time I’ve become acutely conscious that we are very much shaped by the events that happen in our lives.

I wasn’t so conscious of that when I was married to Ali. We had grown up together in the same congregation, taught Sunday School together for a while, sang in the same choir for a couple of years and went to the same youth group. We were both twenty-one when we married so we didn’t have all that much history behind us.

People say that second marriages are much more challenging. A lot more has happened in the respective lives of both husband and wife. Both have become more set in their ways. We’ve found that there’s a lot of truth in that.

A week in politics

Submitted by John Westendorp on June 30, 2010 - 9:44pm

A week in politics is a very long time. That was just so obvious this last week.

Last Monday evening some of our folk were watching a web-cast in which the Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition were quizzed by church leaders on some issues that are of particular concern to Christians. By the end of that week Kevin Rudd had become another Australian ex-Prime Minister and, consequently, at least part of the web-cast had been relegated to irrelevance.

I’m not a political commentator so it’s not my intention to analyse what happened from a political point of view but I do want to comment on two of the moral aspects that last week’s events raised for me personally.

First I have a huge concern about the matter of loy

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