Unpretentious Gem

(Image from theage.com.au)

As part of the VATE (Victorian Association for Teaching of English) State Conference which I've just been on for the past 48 hours, I was fortunate enough to hear two Australian writers speak. The first I will not name, not because there's anything wrong with him, but because I'd rather not sound like I'm criticising him personally. However, I will say this about him: he is a successful film and television actor who has recently branched out into writing, starting with his memoirs, and then putting out a novel last year. He was an incredibly charismatic and engaging speaker, and, judging by what he read of his novels, he has quite a skill with telling a story. He had us all entertained with the extracts he read.

That being said, there was something about listening to him speak that made me quite uncomfortable, and for a while I couldn't put my finger on it. For the first half of the night, he spoke about a film he had acted in, a certain award-winning Australian film written and directed by his wife, now on the Year 12 VCE English syllabus and taught in almost every Victorian school. As he described the movie as "a great film", "a wonderful piece of cinema", etc., I resisted every (very Australian) temptation to think of him as self-aggrandising, a "tall poppy". Why shouldn't he be upfront about the movie being great? I asked myself. After all, it was other people's work he was acclaiming more perhaps than it was his own. He spoke very highly of his wife, and of his fellow actors, and did not say anything particularly arrogant about his own performance.

Then came the moment when he moved onto talking about his books, which he did so with a bit of a mumble, and some posturings of humility. "Well, I my might just go on about me books for a while," he said, a couple of times. Explaining why he had decided to start writing, he made the following comment: As an actor, he said, you have a "used-by date". So the trick is to recognise that, and "bridge the gap between when you start to go off and when you become a nice bit of yoghurt". The metaphor was a funny one. We all laughed. Mumbling some more, he tried to cover up the point at which he started reading from his book. He then entertained us all with a reading. It was clever; it was touching. We laughed; we didn't exactly cry, but you get the idea.

Yesterday, I had the great privilege of listening to and meeting the lovely, 26-year-old Australian writer Alice Pung, author of one of the most well-received first novels of the last couple of years, "Unpolished Gem", an account of growing up in Melbourne's Western suburbs in a Cambodian immigrant family. Alice had a beautiful Western suburbs accent, spoke simply, with the occasional grammatical slip, but with clear intelligence. Her description of the novel was humble, straighforward and entertaining. It was quite an intimate, personal experience to sit only metres away from her while she described a book that revealed so much of her life and personality. When the woman chairing the discussion asked her to read from her book, she seemed a little embarrassed, had no passage chosen beforehand, but read clearly and with simple but striking flair. The readings were unembellished and touching, and all the more expressive for being unprepared.

Later in the session, I took the opportunity to ask her a question. Having heard her speak a lot about the pressure to succeed in a migrant family and the impact this had had upon her, I wondered if her first novel had now brought up a new kind of pressure to succeed for her. Was she being pressured to write another book? How did that make her feel? When she answered this question, I was able finally to put my finger on what had made me feel uncomfortable by the previous night's author. Alice described how her Buddhist faith - not about religion as much as a way of life - makes her think about what is best for others rather than herself. She had written this first book, she said, because she had something she wanted to offer society, particularly migrant communities. She would only write another book if she thought she had another one worth offering to society.

The difference was clear. The first author wrote because he wanted to remain in the public eye, and his talk, despite all his attempts to appear down-to-earth and humble, was influenced so clearly by that. Alice, on the other had, wrote because of what she thought her writing could offer others. Clearly an introvert, she had no need to be in the public eye. She just had something worth expressing.

I bought a copy of the book, and very much look forward to reading it. I think I'll read the other author's memoirs sometime as well, but I know which author I preferred meeting.

Wanted: One church community

Sometimes I feel as if my life is being governed by two completely opposing forces. In the past, those forces have manifested themselves in the equal but irreconcilable desires to settle down and to move. This year, as I begin, a little confusedly, to make my home in the Northern suburbs, I'm finding that less of an issue. Now, it's more the tension between wanting to mix with people unlike me, and to fit in.

For some time I've found that there's a certain amount of contact with a wide variety of people that I need to feel balanced and well-rounded. I love the feeling of learning from people whose experiences in life have been nothing like mine. I love just how varied society can be, and I love getting to know lots of different people.

But there are a couple of issues that I tend to come up against reasonably often. Here they are:

1) Much as I love mixing with a wide variety of people, most people like to mix only within their own group, so I'm restricted to those who also like to meet lots of different people.
2) I'm quite shy, although you wouldn't always know it, and so, while I often like getting to know lots of different people, this isn't always as easy as I would hope.
3) I hate feeling like I don't belong.

Here I am, right now, having chosen to move to an area where I knew there wouldn't be so many like-minded people, and in some ways I'm loving the diversity and having my horizons broadened. On the other hand, I'm struggling with the lack of like-minded people. I don't want to be surrounded by them. I get sick of people like me, and I get sick of my own company. But I still need some contact with people who see the world like I do - and it's rare enough for me ever to meet anyone with the same outlook on life as me, so I'm wondering sometimes why I've willfully placed myself in an area where I'm reducing the chances of finding like-minded companions.

But here's the paradox: for me to meet people who are truly like me, they can't be complacently sitting in their huddle of like-minded companions. They too need to be out there having their horizons broadened, and associating with wide ranges of people. They probably also need to have a heart for the less glamorous, less privileged, areas of society. Meaning? On one hand, I'm reducing my chances of meeting them by making the move to this area, but, on the other hand, I'm increasing my chances.

Kind of confusing, isn't it?

I suppose at the moment this lack of companionship is at its most pointed in my search for a church community. Christians are in the minority wherever we go. And then there are fewer evangelical churches in the area I've moved into, meaning that I've chosen to move to an area with a reduced representation of a minority group. But...I could go to a church in another area, filled with people like me, but a) would not be being faithful to the direction I feel God has given me in my life, and b) would not be going to church with people who have a heart for the North-West.

I guess I've just got to keep praying, and keep trusting. It's not as if I'm completely alone at the moment, but it can be difficult to know how much we are supposed to belong, when we've already chosen to move out of our comfort zone. I know that God can be trusted. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see what happens next.

Revival in Darebin?

I think I've always had a fairly trendy, underground sense of how an "Emerging Church" would look. Down-to-earth, organic ministry has always had something of a Northcote, Bohemian feel to it in my mind, and it's interesting to think about whether or not that's always the most appropriate form of ministry. Sometimes I suspect we break so far away from the "mainstream", Christendom model of church that we assume "our" style of church is somehow more natural, more relevant and, well, more Christian.

I've finally gotten around to reading my brother's copy of Tom Sine's "Mustard Seed vs. McWorld", which I've had on my shelf for a good three and a half years. I've only just started it, but something has really stood out for me in what I've read so far. Very early on in the book, Sine has this to say about the "postmodern" or 21st century church: "Unlike many of the successful boomer churches of the nineties, post-modern churches are not interested in highly programmatic, user-friendly models that can be replicated. These young leaders are creating models that are much more relational and that are unique to each situation" (my emphasis).

Here's why this stands out to me: I'm not sure that this is any way a fault of the emerging church as much as a fault of my understanding of it, but I know that sometimes my idea of how to do "postmodern church" is itself a little "programmatic": put together some musical artistes playing something that sounds like a Sufjan Stevens and Marc Byrd collaboration, drink Fair Trade coffee during worship, followed by a visually engaging (and interactive) sermon on renewing the city for the kingdom. Now, this all sounds quite cool to me, but the question is, will this approach to ministry be "organic" (natural and symbiotic) in all communities? Well, if I were to find a church two suburbs to the south-east of where I currently live, yes, I have a feeling we'd fit right in. But in Thornbury or Preston? No, to do organic ministry there, you do need to reach out to families, to a variety of ethnicities; and has anyone thought of reaching out to the massive Koori community (the largest in Melbourne, apparently)? Is it possible for one church to minister to all these groups?

Last week I started checking out a very small, evangelical congregation in Thornbury - mostly elderly people, the second largest group being young families. Not my demographic at all, but does that mean I shouldn't try to serve there? The teaching is very engaging and interactive (although not technological - not necessarily a bad thing, disappointed as Rob Bell would be), and they do community very well. Small churches put almost everyone else to shame on this front. I've been welcomed with open arms, even though there's no-one else quite like me there. And so I suppose I'm realising that, while my idea of urban mission would not go down brilliantly in this church, that doesn't mean we can't find unique ways there, as we can anywhere else, of engaging the locals in an active, organic sense of what it is to live out the Gospel in the City of Darebin. I'm a far way from knowing what a potential revival in Darebin could look like, and I want to avoid even suggesting that revival is needed. Sure, the church looks nothing here like it does in the Bible Belt, or the inner-eastern suburbs, but is that a problem? I'd like to see it grow, but I think that first we need to start by encouraging what's already here - renovating, perhaps, instead of revolutionising.

More questions at the moment, but it's a good place to start, I think, asking questions, instead of pretending you have the answers.

With a little help from my friends

One thing that I've found especially rejuvenating about the last couple of weeks of holidays has been contact with people close to me but who circumstances prevent me from seeing all that often. The move to a new area, new church (still in progress), has left me often spending most of my time with people I didn't know this time last year. The result? Well, I suppose on the positive side I'm making a lot of new friends, which is terrific, but the negative side has been the lack of terribly many people who know me well.

It's amazing how much difference it can make just to spend time - it doesn't need to be a huge amount - with people who know us well. The change it can make to our perspective is incredible. For instance, earlier this week I had coffee with my former housemate. We parted ways (not acrimoniously!) at the start of the year when I moved to the North and he moved back to Hawthorn. We were talking about how our old church was progressing (he's still going there), and then we got onto the topic of where I was now going to church. I shared with him my concerns - my issues with a church that I was attending for a while in there, but which turned out to be too far away for me to feel really connected to the community or to what it was doing ministry-wise. And what had seemed a very difficult decision to make - to move on from that church and find somewhere closer - was made to seem so simple by this comment that he made: "Well, staying there would have defeated your purpose in seeking a new church anyway." And instantly, it all came back to me - the many conversations I'd had with him, and others close to me, about how I was going to move onto a new church because I believed I needed to find one that would be ministering to the area I was moving to. Yes, I'd remembered that all the way through the decision-making, but it's incredible how clear it all sounds when someone can say it back to you, when you don't need to fill in all the gaps, explain all the pros and cons, when they can just say, "Well, yes, that was what you were thinking in the first place."

There have been many more positive times with friends and family this past fortnight. That was just one that stands out to me. Today I've spent almost the entire day hanging out with good friends, and I feel really refreshed and like a lot of things have been cleared up in my mind. It makes me realise how lucky I am that, while I don't have huge amounts of time to see my friends at the moment - I'm busy, they're busy, most of my friends don't really live nearby - the difference they make when I do see them is huge, a massive Godsend. Maybe I should be praying that I can have more times like this throughout the school term, to rejuvenate me while I'm working, rather than holding out for the holidays to renew in this way. I think I will pray for that. But it also makes me realise that I should be praising God for all the times like this that I do have, because, rare as they might seem, I'm so lucky to have them at all.

Birth of a blog

Does the world really need another blog? Almost certainly not. In fact, I suspect it could do with fewer. But here's a new one, for what it's worth. Let's hope and pray it can be useful to someone.

Here's where my life is at right now. It might help explain why I've chosen to set up this blog.

This year, I have, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, done exactly what I was always told not to do. It's my first year of teaching, and here's the advice we were all given last year - avoid too much change in the one year (a piece of advice given by a graduate who had, in his first year, moved out of home and become married). No, I'm not married, but I did decide to move to be closer to work - only fifteen minutes away from where I was living, but it feels like another world. And no, I'm not one of those sheltered tribal types who feel like life has ended when they move into the house next door. I've moved around quite a bit, and am, I like to think, fairly flexible. But here's why it was a big step.

Before this year, I had been living in the inner suburbs of Melbourne for five years. I had developed something of a community there - as much as you can in the city - helped no end by my involvement in a small Anglican community church in West Hawthorn, where I had managed to make a lot of like-minded friends. But here was the difficult thing. For a while, our pastor had been teaching about "impacting the city" for God, and I found the teaching very challenging and, well, moving. No pun intended, but, on the other hand, pun intended. Reaching a point when I felt distinctly that it was no longer Hawthorn or the inner city that God was wanting me to impact, but the Northern and Western suburbs, I moved. My sense of God's direction for me was confirmed when I got a job at the school that had first given me that sense of calling, a very large government school in the North-Western suburbs (hence the convergence of North and West). I then moved into a share-house in the North, about fifteen minutes from my school, and the more that this became my life, the less relevant that Hawthorn seemed to me. After a huge amount of prayer, I came to the difficult but clear conclusion that I was to move on from my current church.

So here I am. I've moved houses, started a new job, and have been, for the last several months, without a clearly defined church community.

I'm hoping that, if I'm still writing on this blog in a few years, I will find that this strange, transitional phase of my life has developed into a clear sense of God's direction for my life - or maybe it won't, because God, though He gives us all the direction we need, is rarely very talkative about where exactly He is taking us, or why. But here I am, and we'll see where I go next.