How to write badly well.

Use it wisely, friends.

This week at College we’ve been praying for the students leaving at the end of the year (myself included). People are leaving from all stages. The 1-year course, the Diploma of Bible and Missions, generally has lots of people returning to the workforce or to family and church life with a spouse in one of the upper years. A bunch of people leave after three years with a Bachelor of Theology, and a big group of us are departing after four years with a Bachelor of Divinity.^[1]

I think it’s fantastic that as a college we’ve been setting ourselves to pray for those going out from the community at Newtown. Some are going to professional ministry positions, some to secular work, some to full-time roles in their families, some to a combination of any or all of the above. Asking for God to be at work in their lives and ministries is brilliant—and as someone who often struggles to pray regularly, a great spur and a reminder to me to ask God for his will to be done.

Something I noticed today as we were praying for some of the first years was that a good number of them were women, married to other students. What they put down in the list of prayer points as the ministry or job they were leaving college to pursue was generally along the lines of ‘Wife, Mother, Church member’.

I don’t think I saw a single bloke put down ‘Husband’ as his ministry. They were all—like my prayer points—’Assistant Minister at church X’, or ‘Chaplain to group Y’.

I think it’s fantastic that this group of women value their husbands and their children and their church family so highly that they see them as their primary ministry. But is it a failure in our thinking and our teaching on appropriate gender roles within our churches that the guys don’t express things in this way?^[2] Far too often the discussion about the roles of men and women in church is a ‘women’s issue’.

Nope. It’s an issue for all of us.

Now, most of the blokes I know who are leaving college are sorted on this front. Their wives are their first priority; they love their kids dearly. Above all else. But I fear that if we don’t talk about it, normally and naturally, it’s an easy next step to fail to put it into practice.

So, for the record, I wish to amend my exiting-student-prayer-points. The ministry I am leaving college to (continue to) do is to be a husband to Kristy, father to Elissa, and to minister to those in the church I’m in:^[3]

Sam Freney: Husband, Father, Assistant Minister.

[2] Not that I think that this is the only option for a married Christian woman, or a mother. Far from it. But if this is what she’s doing, I’m sure going to be praying for her.↩

[3] More details to come as they become available. Stay posted. ↩

I love it when random bits of the internet form new connections and mutual explanations.

I read an article this morning about some poorer examples of Twilight defence:

But the people — my God — the people who unironically love Twilight, who scour the Internet to find opportunities to defend it, who suffer weird delusions of grandeur — these people terrify me.

For what it is, it’s interesting. Both for the examples of hopeless comments (presumably made by teenage girls), but also for the counter-attacks in the comments. From both sides there’s a whole lot of “ZOMG you are so wrong you should just shut up and die!!!11!!“, only one side has slightly better grammar. And a superiority complex.

The very next random link was all about language: snarkiness, to be exact.

[Earnestness] builds a case; flippancy gets to just dance entertainingly on a case. One is the way you talk to people who get you, the other is the way you explain yourself to people who don’t. Teenagers are really amazing at one and often really poor at the other; they like being gotten, and they haven’t collected much information yet about what other people’s assumptions even are.

This kind of thing is often really important in Christian ministry—both earnestness and flippancy. The whole project is to establish sincerely and clearly the truth of the good news about Jesus. In lots of contexts, though, the key do communicating effectively is to be (at least partly) within the subculture of the group, whether it’s teenagers or retirees.

That’s where appropriate flippancy is gold. A one-liner that the 14-year-old gets (but maybe her parents don’t) goes a long way. It says ‘I understand you; I get where you’re coming from… and so you can probably get what I’m saying too’.

To pull off that one-liner, though, requires a bunch of cultural know-how. Get to know the people you’re with, what makes them tick, what they watch, listen to, love, hate, talk about, don’t know about. Not just to give you the sociological credit, but in order to really love them—it’s near impossible to love people you don’t know.

Maybe even—just maybe—watch Twilight.

Especially after a system upgrade. A screen shot:

My 4th-year MTC project is looking at where the New Testament quotes the Old Testament but changes it. In particular, where the verb form is changed – like changing a past tense to a future tense, for example.^[1]

I’m just about finished. The 15,000 words are written, and just need a bit of editing. I might post up a few of the interesting cases over the next few weeks, since they’re often puzzling parts of the NT (the parts where you read a bit, look up the OT reference, but they’re not the same. What the?)

So, the appropriate thing to do, I thought, would be to run my project through wordle.^[2] Here’s a representation of my work this year in 150 words:

Looks interesting, right?

Right?

[2] Previous adventures with Fish-Piper-Wordle. ↩