Tired tonight, and a bit depressed. Had a medium-sized car accident today, driving down the single dirt road outside our house. My car is still drivable, but the lady who collided with me (or, as she would probably put it, with whom I collided), her car is lurking like a sad damaged thing at the corner of the street. I don’t think it was my fault, though who can tell? It’s a difficult corner.

On top of that, I haven’t sorted our a job for when my current gig unceremoniously kicks me out at some completely unspecified time, and so I’m probably not going to be able to spend time studying and doing stuff for the church first half of next year after all – though I may be able to swing it for the second semester, I spent a lot of friday talking to people about why they have left cafechurch (not to be recommended), and, as I said to Steve-the-pastor, the whole infertility thing is a bit of a downer too. Also I haven’t touched my novel for weeks. Oh, and there is a reasonably high chance that our house is going to be destroyed in what they are calling the worst bushfire season in decades. Enough spring rain for plants to leap up enthusiastically, but not enough to stop them from dying, turning brown, and then igniting when some idiot with a weird sexual thing for fires decides to have a bonfire in the bush. We put a bunch of letters and photos and whatnot in storage, making the whole thing feel a lot more likely.

In short, what I need is a holiday. And, fortunately, I have one lined up – a fortnight in Goa, briefly passing through Mumbai (or Bombay, depending on your perspective). As I learned last year, when we went to Vietnam and Cambodia, there is really nothing like seeing how people in the rest of the world live to send you home fervently counting your blessings about how good we have it here in Oz.

Not, of course, that I view the difficult lives of people in the developing world purely as some kind of moral object lesson for rich westerners – in fact, I think that going on holidays to developing countries can, potentially, be a really useful thing – at least its a way for people to make a living.

Anyway, talking about India brings me neatly to my real point, which is about living in / with diversity. The church in India is frankly a minority in a very religious, but non-Christian culture, which is a situation which the Western church hasn’t had to deal with for a while- like 1600 years or so. I think that our situation in the west is beginning to closely resemble that of the early church (my new pet topic!). How do they deal with it in India? Perhaps I might get a chance to ask people when I’m there (though probably not – I will probably meet only the sort of people who you meet when you’re a tourist. I tend not to meet interesting people (though I did have a really interesting chat with the sacristan of the RC Cathedral in Hanoi when I was there, hindered by my very poor French)

Whatever the Indians, do, what should we do? My reading of the situation (mainly regarding the formation of the canon) has suggested to me that the early church became increasingly concerned with doctrinal clarity – answering the question: what is it exactly that we are on about here?

I hadn’t really thought about it in these terms, but this emphasis on the distinctiveness of Christianity  was probably seen as pretty weird at the time. All the other religions (except Judaism) seemed content to merge and synretise quite happily (Zeus – Jupiter – Ammon and so on). Why on earth did the early church spend so much time saying “no, we don’t believe that. No, not that either. No, nor that.”, when it would have been so much easier to just roll over and say yes, Jesus is Adonis and God is Zeus and so on?

What can (or should) we learn from this? How so we hold onto our Christian distinctiveness in this society where it is so easy to kinda slide out of things? Are we in danger of  a new Gnosticism, a new Arianism? How do we remain distinct, but not a weird closed sect? How do we hold onto the truth, without failing in love to other people, without succumbing to pride?

I don’t know, but I think the task of the chuch in the west in our generation is to try to answer questions like this.

As a result of my India trip, I may not be blogging very much over the next few weeks (though of course I might be so bored that I might blog like every day), so apologies for that. I’ll have to see how it goes.
Does anyone know of someone looking for a part time java programmer (+ part time web developer) in Melbourne? I could probably turn my hand to other IT things…