Stephen's weblog

We're running a bit late for the year, but the State Youth Games" information is all ready for 2007. We've locked in the sporting program, speaker (Tim Mander), mhave the brochures printed and the web ready for action. Have a look at the new web on www.stateyouthgames.com . This year is looking like it will be great value - heaps of new teams, sports being done differently and a broader base of people coordinating the event.

The latest and greatest news in our family is that I am now the proud father of another beautiful daughter - Charlotte Ruth Parker, born Saturday Nov 18, 2006, 9:56pm, 8 pounds 7 and looking absolutely beautiful.

She is a lovely little child, sleeps well and is all I could hope for. I've taken 2 weeks leave, and it is just lovely to be able to spend so much time with her, her big sister Elizabeth, and Ruth. I am a fortunate man!

All is going well, and I'm loving them all more each day.

For a few other photos, have a look at her on http://www.parkerbaby.blogspot.com/

One of the other things that has been huge for me this year is the National Youth Ministry Convention. It is coming together quite nicely so far, but is taking truckloads of work. However, the plan is to get almost all of it locked in this year, so advertising etc can go out early.

Basically, the NYMC will be a national event for Christians that work with youth and young adults - youth pastors, school chaplains and teachers, university workers, Government and community youth workers - the whole lot. The goals are to help them to be more fruitful in what they do through encouraging and refreshing them, connecting and networking them with their peers from across Australia and NZ, plus providing high quality training and professional development.

We started off with noone, and now have been able to bring together an amazing team of people to coordinate it, a broad coalition of denominations and para-Church youth ministry organisations as partners, some great sponsors and an impeccable bunch of speakers. Tony Campolo, Duffy Robbins, Josh Griffin and The Skit Guys are the "big name" international speakers, but the aussies are absolutely awesome too. They are all people who are specialists in their field, have an amazing message and are gifted in communication.

So it's exhausting, but it is worth it. For years I've been hoping that someone would organise something like this in Australia, but it never seemed to happen. Back in 1999 when I was travelling around the world I stopped at San Diego on the weay home and went to the American National youth Worker's Convention run by youth specialties. It was fantastic and I thought for years it would be great to have something that was closer, cheaper and especially more Australian oriented.

Every time I suggested it to people who I thought could do it I hit a brick wall. Finally this year a few events came together and an opportunity was thrown our way to do something ourselves. I asked around a number of people I trust, and this time the fedback was very different - it was all - go for it! So a team was assembled, a proposal put together, and soon enough Geoff Risson at the RMT in the Churches of Christ in QLD gave us the green light for youth vision QLD to run with the idea. However, although we're coordinating it, we really don't want it to be a "Churches of Christ" thing, especially as a good Churches of Christ person doesn't care less about denominations anyhow. I really hope that it can be a demonstration of and encouragements towards unity, not some parochial little event.

So in practice I'm working on this two days per week with youth vision, mostly from my home office. Have a look if you're interested - www.nymc.org.au

So work-wise - what's happening?

After resigning from Spingwood, I had nothing lined up for the next year, except my one day per week youth vision wole (www.youthvisionqld.com). As I said before, my plan was to move into chaplaincy / teaching, and I applied for various courses. However, I was also offered a job with the Australian College of Ministries (ACOM - www.acom.edu.au) In the end I took that job and decided not to study for a while - which has turned out nicely, as I have been busy enough without it.

The role is quite good. Mostly I'm involved in admin work, with a small amount of subject facilitation and marking on the side. I do miss preaching regularly, and have done that say half a dozen times in 2006, but mostly at other Churches. Apart from that, I quite enjoy the job. The first few months I was in way over my head, but now I can at least touch the bottom. It's probably good for my humility to be in so many meetings where I know far less than anyone else there - there are some pretty bright cookies around!

So, I started working for ACOM 3 days per week at the start of January, and worked a bit for Springwood unti the end of Jan. From Feb on, it's been 4 days a week total - sort of.

Hi

This isn’t the sort of thing you really want to send in an email, but there are lots of people we want to tell, and this seems the quickest way.

Ruth and I went to Redlands hospital on Wednesday to book her in for the baby’s birth. The pregnancy was going nicely and the baby was now 16 weeks old. When the midwife tried to find the baby’s heartbeat she was unsuccessful. We weren’t too worried, as with Elizabeth it had taken ages to find her heartbeat, and the midwife explained the machine wasn’t very good. When two more midwives, both much older, with newer machines, couldn’t find it, we got scared.

We asked for an ultrasound, and using a low power portable machine they quickly found a sac but couldn’t see the baby properly. We asked for a full ultrasound, and after much waiting we were given conclusive results. Although the sac around the baby had grown properly, the baby itself had stopped growing at about 6 weeks old and now had no heartbeat. Our baby was dead.

On Thursday we went back again and Ruth had a curette to remove the baby. The operation went flawlessly.

So far we think we are coping well. Obviously we are absolutely devastated and have been crying a lot. Unfortunately we and a lot of our family have also got a nasty stomach bug, so nausea and diarrhoea are making life more difficult.

We would appreciate your prayers at this time,


Stephen, Ruth and Elizabeth Parker

(Late 2005)

Wow - a lot of time has elapsed here since I've updated this. I'm tempted to give some entries fake dates, but I can't be bothered. Frankly, I didn;t really feel like updating the next chapter for a fair while, but leaving the last post there doesn;t seem to make sense. So, I've got some free time right now, so here's a bit of catchup from the last year.....

I'm rather excited just now, as we have just had confirmation that Ruth and I are going to have another baby! This is the best news we've had for quite a while. She's about 8 weeks, and is due roughly on May 6th - although expect that date to go back and forwards a bit. We are both very happy. Ruth isn't as sick as last time, but still isn't great. Elizabeth will be 23 months when #2 comes around, and I'm sure she will love her new little friend. She loves babies already. We all can't wait for our family member to come along - it will be great!

A lot of people have been asking me about my plans for next year, which is a fair enough question. Unfortunately my answer isn’t all that clear. On the one hand, I have no idea what I will actually do next year. I want to be as open as possible to anything God might have around the corner for me. I’ll consider secular work, working for another Church and a few different study options. Anyone that wants to talk to me about a job I’ll talk to, but I’ll need to be praying and thinking heaps to discern what will be best for Ruth and Elizabeth and myself.

Whilst waiting to consider any other options, I am making plans to spend a year studying. Fortunately, in 2006 Education Queensland is changing the requirement for teacher training so that graduates only need to complete a 1 year Graduate Diploma in Education instead of a 2 year Bachelor of Education to be eligible to teach. I’m looking at any of QUT (external), ACU, UQ or GU, and all have their pluses and minuses.

I like the idea of being a Christian studies teacher or a chaplain. The consensus seems to be that teaching is my strongest gift from God, and my passion seems to be for young people, so this might just be the best ministry possible for me. It may also allow a bit of travel at some point, provide an income source to explore various ministry options without having to be paid by a Church and allow me to go back into Church ministry in the future if that seems right at the time.


One of the key variables for me is working out what subjects I could be qualified to teach. I have heaps of subjects clocked up for Economics and Theology, plus a few here and there for social sciences and maths. However there isn’t a great demand for economics teachers, and Christian studies will restrict me to private schools, so I may lock myself out of a lot of jobs if I restrict myself to those two!

Anyway, we are simultaneously scared and excited about the future. I’m sure it’s going to be good!

Another great quote is from Mark Sayers – phuture, forge, Red Network, ex salvo, all round good guy
A Chinese proverb is : “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.” Deep.

It’s possible the fish doesn’t even know that the water exists. The water is all that the fish knows – it swims in it, breathes through it, sees through it. Ironically you might think that a fish would know more about water than anyone else, as they spend more time with water than anyone else, but by being so close they can’t actually look at water objectively. One of the few ways a fish would be able to work out what water is would be to jump out of the water, experience the air briefly, and then they would notice the water more as they re-entered it. You need to get some objective distance up before you can see it clearly. We really see how the earth itself is a sphere by going out into space and looking down at it .

For us, it’s almost impossible to understand the situations we are in and the assumptions that we make about them, because we probably don’t even know where we are making these assumptions. For our Churches, it is hard for us as Christians to think through what happens in our Church objectively, as being Christians inside the Church is like fish being in the water.
Two things spring to mind. One, new Christians might have the best perspective on Church when they first enter into it as they have objectivity and are not yet part of the system. The problem here is they probably don’t have much Christian maturity at that stage. The second thought is that to analyse the Church objectively we need to be listening to the voices of those who think or practice Church radically differently to us. Those voices are often annoying, because they are often critical of what we do, but we need to listen to them to help us to jump outside the fish bowl that is the Church and see how someone else views what we do.

It is also rather important for us to understand our cultures, as this will help us to communicate to those around us, and help us to understand what it really means to be a follower of Jesus today. The problem here is that once again we are a fish in water, as we really can’t see our culture clearly enough as we are part of it. We can critique those cultures who are different to us fairly easily, but the culture that we are part of personally is like the air we breathe or the water fish swim in – a fact of life, an assumption that we hardly notice.
What would a non-Christian looking at us from a third world country say about our culture or our Churches if they could see us clearly? Where would they notice our blind spots? What would make them think that we are morally bankrupt?

On the study tour heard an interesting quote from Paul Cameron, the Executive Officer with the Churches of Christ in Vic/Tas. He says that Churches should be a laboratory, not a museum.

It got me thinking….

What actually is a museum? It’s a place where people come to look at things from the past. It is normally backwards and focused on the way things used to be done. In a museum, you are a spectator, you’re not meant to touch the objects or get too involved. You look at a variety of different things, and your job is not to make the place better for anyone else, but to only pass critiques. Yes, lovely painting. Ooh, that sculpture, it’s terrible. A museum is something that doesn’t change very often, and let’s be honest, can be a bit boring. Going occasionally isn’t too bad, but you wouldn’t want to turn up too often. And in the end, there are some people who will just never go to a museum. There are some people that will enjoy going, some people that you can convince to go, and some that think the roof will collapse if they go to inside.

Sounds Churchy enough to me.

I haven’t been to a laboratory for quite a while, but when I used to go to them they were fun. You were always doing things that were cool, making experiments to try to create something new. A lot of the time what we did didn’t quite work, but that was all OK. Each mistake was another step closer to making it work. You never got in trouble for trying something that didn’t work, as long as you were experimenting and heading in the right direction. In fact I did get in trouble a few times for just talking to my friends too much and not bothering to try the experiments. The lab sessions were normally cooperative, as you relied on others around you. Sometimes we’d watch someone else in action doing an experiment at the front, but then we’d have the responsibility of doing it ourselves. After our experiments, we always had to reflect on what it was we’d just done, think how we could have done it better and see what we could learn from our experience. Occasionally there was an explosion, but it was all OK. I’m glad we have scientists who spend their time in laboratories, as by their coming up with innovative ideas and testing them in their labs, our quality of life improves as their experiments prove successful.
I like the idea of Church as a laboratory. Fun, looking to be innovative, experimenting with different things, getting people involved, reflecting on what we do, coming up with new ideas, making the world a better place when something succeeds. Rather than just locking Church into the formula that has been used for the last century, being prepared to use imagination to create new forms of Church, new methods of mission and new ways of becoming like Jesus. What if our best energies were taken out of TV, gossip, sport and making money, and put instead into re-imagining what Church could be?