On the Road 49 – The Arts

Just published is OTR 49, an issue focusing on the arts. You can find it here:
http://www.anabaptist.asn.au/index.php?type=page&ID=3124
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AMUC 2011

AMUC brochure

AMong the Urban Community 2011 is firing up. It’s a camp/retreat that exposes people to urban poverty and social justice issues from a Christian perspective. Please find the publicity attached.

On The Road #44: Heaven, Hell & New Creation

On The Road: Journal of the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand #44 has hit the newsstands! For those who came in late, I’m the editor.

Some great articles with a wide range of perspectives on eschatology, and some other good contributions.

Download it here as a pdf: otr_44

To subscribe, send me an email – nathanhobby at gmail.com

On The Road 42

Earlier this year I took on the job of editing the journal of the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand, On The Road. This month my first issue came out!

You can download it here. It contains some a paper on Ephesians 4, an article about smacking and family values, a reflection on Gandhi and Jesus and some reviews.  You can subscribe for free; just email Mark and Mary Hurst – details in the journal.

On The Road is an electronic pdf journal featuring articles, essays, news and reviews from an Anabaptist perspective.
Some of the recurring themes are:

• Justice and peacemaking
• Radical discipleship
• Believers’ church ecclesiology
• A theology of non-violence
• Christian community and new monasticism
• The Mennonite church
• Anabaptist history

(Issue 42 only covers a few of these.)

Christian Centre For Social Action website

Do you know about the Christian Centre for Social Action in East Vic Park? It’s a fascinating place, an ex-post office converted to a drop in centre for the needy and a battle station for advocacy and justice. One of the great things they are doing at the moment is sending shipping containers full of stuff to East Timor (first aid kits, desks, clothes). The postage is horrendous.

I’ve set up a website for them –
http://christiancentreforsocialaction.wordpress.com

I’ll occasionally add news stories and anything else I’m told. There’s not much there yet, but you might want to check out the newspaper articles about the homeless man (a friend of the Centre) fined for sleeping under the causeway.

Subscription made easier

Sorry, this is just a maintenance announcement. But a potentially helpful one!

I’ve just added two subscription buttons that if you’re observant you might have already noticed in the right hand column.  You can now get new posts sent to your email inbox or to your RSS feed aggregator. (If you don’t know what the latter is, you should probably go for the former.)

Vose Seminary booksale

The seminary where I work is having its annual booksale: 20 000 books on every subject, from 9am to 2pm at Vose Seminary, 20 Hayman Rd, Bentley, Western Australia. If you miss out on the big day, come along during business hours Monday to Friday until the 24 April and we’ll be selling the left overs.

This is particularly the place to go for secondhand Christian books in Perth. Don’t waste your time on Elizabeth’s Bookshops overpriced and rather impoverished theology selection.

2009 Anabaptist Conference : New Monasticism

I was at the Anabaptism and New Monasticism conference in Melbourne from 23-26 January. The speakers were all associated with intentional Christian communities and ‘New Monastic’ to lesser or greater extents; the term isn’t one any of the groups had consciously adopted.

I want to share my impressions of four Melbourne communites who spoke (there were others speaking too, with just as interesting stories to tell):

The Community of the Holy Transfiguration from near Geelong are a group of Baptist monks who have been living in community for forty years; that’s a significant achievement to my mind. But the thought of living in community with the same people for forty years horrifies me. I don’t think I’m very monastic. Too easily people say that someone has become ‘like family’; forty years is truly becoming family to each other. To me, it seems they are psychotherapic in outlook: the community is built around a group of broken people trying to recover through community.

Jahwork is a community of five households in Doveton. They seem to have the most similarity to Peace Tree in Western Australia. They have energy and youth and have managed to sustain five households with no designated leaders and working by consensus. They have common meals every night that everyone is invited to. This year they are taking over a cafe.

Urban Seed and UNOH are more structured. I’ve spent a long time being suspicious of ‘structure’, but it seems to me that it could make a big difference to communities being sustainable. At nearly 28, I’m ready for some structure.

Urban Seed is a series of Christian households in Melbourne supporting the work of the NGO. I visited their household in the city and was so impressed. They work with homeless people and the urban poor every day in their drop in centre/cafe. They seem to have negotiated common life really well too and have a good balance between ministry, work, life – without those being too compartmentalised.

UNOH has a board and formal policies about the shape of the common life of its houses. UNOH missionaries commit to one or three years and they truly live ‘embedded’ in their neighbourhoods; they must spend eight hours of their day in the local neighbourhood. From what the speaker, Gabriel, said, they have thought through many of the hazards of the mission. Missionaries are given one day a week for personal enrichment – in his case painting; this is in addition to a sabbath day. Their whole family goes to another house away from the neighbourhood for a day. UNOH seems truly effective over the last fifteen (?) years and I’m going to read one of the books by Ash Barker, their founder, because I think they’re doing something amazing.

(Last year I wrote about how radical Christianity needed to learn from the Sydney Anglicans who have a disciplined, designated path for adherents to follow; in UNOH in particular, I think I see just what I was calling for. Whether I would be up for it is another question. But the idea of living in any of these last three communities appeals to me, from my first impressions; I think they’re living the kingdom really well.)

All the communities face the problem of what to do with people outside the core group. There are opportunities for associates to work with them in the projects they are doing in their local communities. But what of people who work nine to five and don’t have time during the day to give? Hospitality fills some of the gaps; the open table policy of some of the groups must give associates a good opportunity to participate. The UNOH community who spoke run Rainbow Church, which impresses me a lot: by creating a gathering that all can come to, they are including so many more people. The world is crying out for churches built on a radical vision of God’s kingdom, gatherings of people even for those who can’t or don’t want to live in intentional community.

Wolfgang Simson in Melbourne

House church leader Wolfgang Simson is in Melbourne very soon – www.simplechurch.lifeexpedition.org.

I don’t know what to make of him myself – prophetic, crazy or both?

Photos from Tom Sine

If you were at the Tom Sine event at Vose Seminary, last week, you might want to see these photos from the night….
http://vose.wa.edu.au/view/news/20080430113407/