Some of the problems for mainline invisibility might be self-inflicted. “They best stop complaining and take another look at their methods of communicating and organizing,” says the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, head of the Interfaith Alliance, a religious liberty organization dedicated to protecting faith and freedom.

“Mainline congregations do not tend to translate their moral convictions into effective political organization and influential social action with the adeptness and passion that characterize evangelicals moving in lockstep with one another,” says Gaddy, who also hosts a show on the liberal Air America radio network. Leaders and activists of mainline denominations might be heeding Gaddy’s advice. Some are raising their profile by reaching out to find common cause with emerging, moderate evangelical churches on issues such as climate change, genocide in Sudan, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS.

Now there is also hope that with the two leading Democratic presidential candidates from their ranks ”” Hillary Clinton, a United Methodist, and Barack Obama, who despite the controversial minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is affiliated with the more moderate United Church of Christ ”” mainliners could have one of their own standard-bearers in the seat of secular power.

Megachurches? Collaboration with evangelicals? One of their own in the White House? Despite low fertility rates and other demographic challenges, mainline Protestantism isn’t fading from the national landscape just yet. In fact, if the budding megachurches are any indication, mainline believers might be hitting their stride, and finding their voice, just in the nick of time.

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When you dial 770-978-5717, you’ll hear a recording that says “First Baptist Snellville is offering you the chance to win one of two $500 gas cards.”

Pastor Dr. Rusty Newman says “we are beginning a revival, ah starting this Sunday. If you attend the service you are able to sign up for a drawing to place your name in at the end of the service stating you were there. Then on Wednesday evening at the conclusion of service we will be drawing for that ability to win the prize.”

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People who don’t go to church may be turned off by a recent trend toward more utilitarian church buildings. By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio over any other option, unchurched Americans prefer churches that look more like a medieval cathedral than what most think of as a more contemporary church building.

The findings come from a recent survey conducted by LifeWay Research for the Cornerstone Knowledge Network (CKN), a group of church-focused facilities development firms. The online survey included 1,684 unchurched adults ”“ defined as those who had not attended a church, mosque or synagogue in the past six months except for religious holidays or special events.

“Despite billions being spent on church buildings, there was an overall decline in church attendance in the 1990s,” according to Jim Couchenour, director of marketing and ministry services for Cogun, Inc., a founding member of CKN. “This led CKN to ask, ”˜As church builders what can we do to help church leaders be more intentional about reaching people who don’t go to church?’”

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There’s a curious landmark pushing skyward from a muddy lot on Fireweed Lane near Gold Cache Bingo and the Grab-A-Dab.

It’s a whitish, pointy, corrugated metal structure that started slowing traffic last year. At the light near A Street, idling drivers gawked as a towering steel cone morphed into what now looks like a stack of giant hatboxes piled 10 stories high.

The mysterious building isn’t yet finished, but describing it has become a neighborhood pastime. It’s a teepee. An upside-down ice cream cone. A pagoda, done in Danish Modern. It’s even piqued the imagination of the construction workers.

“Does this look like a giant wedding cake to you?” one asked on a recent, icy morning.

The building is, in fact, a church for La Luz del Mundo, an evangelical nondenomination Christian group based in Mexico. It’s built in a shape meant to funnel God’s light — in the form of rainbow-colored electric beams — upon the faithful.

When it’s completed, the spire will preside over the dusty mishmash of Midtown, an architectural standout among the bland angles of ’70s strip malls and office buildings, gas pumps and garages. The twisted icon on the roof is already visible from the parking lot of Wal-mart to streets of downtown, beckoning all to a Hispanic spiritual oasis in Anchorage’s Little Korea.

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THE World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) has reaffirmed its long-held belief that offering friendship and love to Jewish people is not enough: they must also be converted to Christianity. In a statement issued last week, the Alliance defended specialist ministries that were aimed specifically at the conversion of Jewish people.

The statement, signed by US and UK theologians, ministers, evangelists, and writers, said that the most loving and scriptural expression of friendship towards the Jewish people was “forthrightly to share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ. . .

“We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, he cannot be the Saviour of the World,” says the statement. Among the 45 signatories are Dr Lon Allison, Billy Graham Center; Chuck Colson, Prison Fellowship; the Rt Revd David Evans, former Bishop of Peru; Mark Greene, London Institute of Contemporary Christianity; Dr R. T. Kendall, an evangelist; the Revd Hugh Palmer, All Souls’, Langham Place; and Gordon Showell-Rogers, European Evangelical Alliance.

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Bishop Lawrence has previously said he will wait a year before making any major changes in South Carolina. That said he has a low tolerance for weak, uninspired preaching.

“I feel unabashedly comfortable talking about my personal experience with Jesus Christ,” he said. “We [as a church seem to] get all tied up arguing about whether Jesus is the only way to God. He is God.

“The trouble with so much preaching in The Episcopal Church is that it resembles a new moralism. We ought to oppose the war. We ought to support the Millennium Development Goals ”¦ It’s a religion of nagging.

“Our preaching needs to be faithful to the gospel of the lordship of Jesus Christ. When our preaching is faithful, the Anglican/Episcopal tradition is more than capable of reaching our culture for Christ.”

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The congregation of St. Matthew’s Anglican Church is growing and moving down the road to a new building.

The church is moving from 66 N. Saginaw in Lapeer to 1009 N. Saginaw, said Pastor Jack Irvin, who has headed the 100-member congregation for six months.

“We’re going to have more room to grow because now we’re limited to 90 people,” he said. “The new place will be able to accommodate 150-200 people including room in the balcony.”

St. Matthew’s first service in the new church at 1009 N. Saginaw will be at 10 a.m. March 9.

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Today Christians celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. It is an unusual feast, for it is not an anniversary of the death, or martyrdom, of a saint but a commemoration of a “turning around” of one of the great teachers and thinkers of the Christian world.

St Luke records in the Acts of the Apostles how Saul, the strictest of Pharisees, was journeying to Damascus to persecute and put to death Christians, the followers of a new way, which he regarded as heretical. They had to be stamped out because they were leading the people of God astray. Suddenly, on the Damascus road, a blinding light from Heaven overwhelmed Saul, the blinding light which in the Jewish tradition was the shekinah, the dazzling glory of God. He falls to the ground and asks “who are you Lord?” To which the answer comes: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” There, at the very centre of the glory of God, is the One whose followers Saul had come to Damascus to root out. Blinded and overwhelmed by this experience, Saul is led stumbling into Damascus. There, a Christian disciple, Ananias, comes in obedience to find the persecutor, and lays hands on him that Saul may receive his sight again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.

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The shuttering shrinks to 128 the number of Episcopal congregations in the diocese of Chicago, which includes about 41,000 members throughout northern Illinois. Church of the Mediator had been the first Episcopal congregation on the Southwest Side, according to the church Web site.

“We weren’t ever able to build up a young congregation again. People leave. Many families die out,” Reich said, as she handed every family an artist rendering of the stained-glass window above the altar. Reich said church members debated closing as early as 1980.

Generations of members returned for the service, many of whom were baptized, confirmed and married in the traditional, stone church tucked along a residential street in Morgan Park, located at 10961 S. Hoyne Ave. More than six dozen people gathered for the final celebration, bringing to mind earlier, more vibrant days of the church.

“Sing as you’ve never sung before. Pray as you’ve never prayed before,” Rev. Donald Frye told parishioners at the start of the service. Frye shepherded the church through its final month after the previous pastor left to head another church. “Take the good from this place and spread it around.”

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MAINSTREAM churches should use the same public relations methods as their evangelical counterparts to stop members defecting to more modern congregations or leaving the faith altogether, analysts believe.

Edward Butler, of industry analysts IBISWorld, said young people in particular were accustomed to being marketed to and traditional methods of religious promotion would no longer work.

“Young people tend to be much more media savvy,” Mr Butler said. “They tend to view things in a much more marketing-based manner.”

But Mr Butler warned against direct-marketing campaigns, saying a more subtle message, similar to those used by Pentecostal churches like Hillsong, were more effective.

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THE Rev. William McDonald Tully, with his bald head bare and his clerical shirt and collar camouflaged by that urban essential, a V-neck sweater in black cashmere, is loping down the center aisle of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, the gently decaying Park Avenue landmark where he has served as rector, and as a bit of a secular entrepreneur, since 1994.

The church is hushed at midday, and dimly lighted. A Christmas tree glows to the left of the altar, and poinsettias ring the pulpit. The public trickles in and out, murmuring at the grandeur, or perhaps realizing that this austere sanctuary once provided the setting for the madcap wedding scene from “Arthur,” the Dudley Moore comedy.

In the pews to Mr. Tully’s left, in varying stages of slumping and dozing but not flat-out sleeping (that and disruptive vocalizing are grounds for ejection), are the homeless denizens of the weekday congregation. “Every once in a while you run into somebody who is incredulous that this could happen on Park Avenue,” says Mr. Tully. To his right is a sprinkling of tourists and prayer-sayers. Musicians carrying lutes and zithers prepare to give a free concert in the chapel. Out on the plaza, the church’s Christmas bazaar is drawing last-minute shoppers.

Peaceable coexistence ”” street people and devout souls ”” is the prevailing vibe, and Mr. Tully is its architect.

“I came here for the risk of it,” he says. His job as rector of St. Columba’s, the largest parish in Washington, “was getting too cushy after 14 years.”

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Roman Catholicism, bolstered by an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa, has overtaken the Anglican Church as the nation’s most dominant religious group, figures obtained by the Sunday Telegraph reveal.

A survey by Christian Research shows that the number of people going to Mass last year stood at 861,000 compared to only 852,000 Anglicans worshipping each Sunday. Leading figures from the Church of England have warned that it could become a minority faith.

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Even in an era of mass immigration that has produced suburban tamale shops alongside halal meat markets and created a market for television programming in Hindi and Arabic, places of worship remain bastions of racial and ethnic uniformity. And that makes the case of one brick church in Springfield particularly remarkable.

On a recent Sunday morning at the Word of Life Assembly of God Church, pink-cheeked Virginia native David Gorman skipped in a conga line in Swahili Sunday school while a Kenyan preacher played an accordion and a Singaporean woman led jubilant hymns. Filipinos analyzed Bible passages in a classroom.

Later, as the Sierra Leonean choir prepared to perform in the sanctuary, D. Wendel Cover, the folksy white pastor, listed the nations of the world and asked worshipers to stand when they heard their homelands.

He seemed a bit dismayed to find just 80 represented.

“Our country’s becoming more international,” Cover, 73, said in an interview. He has led the formerly majority-white Pentecostal church for three decades. “The next generation is going to be American. If the church doesn’t realize that, they’re going to lose a whole generation.”

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The Anglican Church has unveiled plans to reform and modernise the church in Tasmania.

The plan, costing $250,000 a year, has angered some parishioners, who have accused the church of ignoring its traditional worshippers.

With many of the church’s congregations dwindling and some churches recently closed, the Bishop of Tasmania, John Harrower, says it is time to re-engage with the community.

“Out of the church and into the 21st century, out of the church and into the world,” he said.

Bishop Harrower says research shows it’s time for a new approach.

“All the surveys we have done and the statistics we have show that there’s a real need for us to be more outwardly focussed and connect to bring the good news of Christmas, which is Jesus’ love to people and we need to do it in ways that make sense to people that we show Jesus makes sense of life.”

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Here is one section:

III. Some Ecclesiological Implications

9. “Since the day of Pentecost ”¦ the Gospel, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is proclaimed to all people so that they might believe and become disciples of Christ and members of his Church.” “Conversion” is a “change in thinking and of acting,” expressing our new life in Christ; it is an ongoing dimension of Christian life.

10. For Christian evangelization, “the incorporation of new members into the Church is not the expansion of a power-group, but rather entrance into the network of friendship with Christ which connects heaven and earth, different continents and ages.” In this sense, then, “the Church is the bearer of the presence of God and thus the instrument of the true humanization of man and the world.” (n. 9)

11. The Doctrinal Note cites the Second Vatican Council’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et Spes) to say that respect for religious freedom and its promotion “must not in any way make us indifferent towards truth and goodness. Indeed, love impels the followers of Christ to proclaim to all the truth which saves.” [n.10] This mission of love must be accomplished by both proclamation of the word and witness of life. “Above all, the witness of holiness is necessary, if the light of truth is to reach all human beings. If the word is contradicted by behavior, its acceptance will be difficult.” On the other hand, citing Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi, the Note says that “even the finest witness will prove ineffective in the long run, if it is not explained, justified”¦ and made explicit by a clear und unequivocal proclamation of the Lord Jesus.” [n. 11]

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From Friday’s Tablet:

A teaching document published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith yesterday provides a seasonal wake-up call to evangelise. But it maintains a more conciliatory tone than its ”˜One True Church’ document issued last July that upset leaders of other Churches

Evoking our final vision of God, Dante’s Divine Comedy celebrates the divine love “displayed through the universe” (33:87). This verse is cited by a “Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelisation” (n. 11), just published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). The quotation from Dante finds its place within the theme of divine and human love that runs through the document.

While honouring the non-negotiable claims of truth (how could the CDF do otherwise?), this doctrinal note highlights the centrality of love. It calls “the love of Christ for the eternal salvation of all” the “primary motive of evangelisation” (n. 8). The note quotes the Second Vatican Council’s “Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” and declares: “Love impels the followers of Christ to proclaim to all the truth which saves” (n. 10). The document brings love into its conclusion: “The love which comes from God unites us to him … and makes us one, until in the end God is ”˜all in all'” (n. 13).

In calling Catholics to commit themselves generously to spreading the Good News, the CDF puts Christ right at the centre: “The Lord Jesus Christ, who is present in his Church, goes ahead of the work of evangelisers, accompanies it, follows it, and makes their labours bear fruit” (n. 1).

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Fact:

”¢ Almost half (49%) of our parishes and missions have an Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) of 70 or less. The norm – nearly two-thirds (63%) of Episcopal congregations–
has an ASA of 100 or less.

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Few would disagree that Willow Creek Community Church has been one of the most influential churches in America over the last thirty years. Willow, through its association, has promoted a vision of church that is big, programmatic, and comprehensive. This vision has been heavily influenced by the methods of secular business. James Twitchell, in his new book Shopping for God, reports that outside Bill Hybels’ office hangs a poster that says: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?” Directly or indirectly, this philosophy of ministry””church should be a big box with programs for people at every level of spiritual maturity to consume and engage””has impacted every evangelical church in the country.

So what happens when leaders of Willow Creek stand up and say, “We made a mistake”?…

Speaking at the Leadership Summit, Hybels summarized the findings this way:

Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

Having spent thirty years creating and promoting a multi-million dollar organization driven by programs and measuring participation, and convincing other church leaders to do the same, you can see why Hybels called this research “the wake up call” of his adult life.

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I don’t need to remind you that there is a war on for the very soul of the Church. But your courage, if I may say this, humbly, and your steadfastness in the face of a new and speciously sophisticated manifestation of evil has won you many admirers all over the world.
And now I want to suggest to you ”“ it’s time to GO FOR IT. To put up your sails for the wind of the Spirit is blowing. Look after each other, look after Tory and Elizabeth, that family; and Tory and Elizabeth, look after them.

The wind is blowing, and the Lord’s promise is as real today as ever it was. As far as you can, put the unpleasant things behind you. The Lord is doing a NEW THING do you not see it? There are thousands out there waiting to hear that God loves them. There is a task to be done before the Lord returns. There are millions of people to be touched with that sense of joy and peace and purpose and grace and forgiveness and love which you carry as the messengers for God. But it starts, it continues and it ends with Peter’s cry from the heart ”˜Lord, you know everything’ ”˜You know that I love you’. And Jesus’ kind reply ”˜Feed my sheep’.

Let’s have a moment of quiet if we may and I would love to encourage any of you and each of you in your own way with the Lord to re-dedicate yourselves. Don’t get distracted now, time is short. Re-dedicate yourselves if you’d like to and I’m going to end with a little prayer in which you could do that. Re-dedicate yourselves to the service of God, to the welfare of the Church for whom Jesus is coming back and the glory of God’s name in this place.

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I suspect the best course for our little institution within Christendom is to allow it to implode, which seems to be the course of the recent past and present. If we fall apart, then we can be reformed and changed. To put a theological spin on it, if we die, then we can be resurrected. Perhaps in such a setting our focus would be more upon the message of the gospel than the survival of an institution and power games among varying factions.

What would happen if we had to sell our church real estate and meet in our homes? What would happen if we spent all of our endowments? Suppose the average Sunday attendance continues to decline to one or two people? Can we imagine meeting on Sunday with others and talking about God’s presence and activity in our lives over the past week, rather than about sex? Is it possible to attend church on Sundays and not leave frustrated?

Perhaps The Episcopal Church is due for some time in Babylon. It will be good for us, just as it was for ancient Judaism. Then we can remember the gospel message over the institution. Sunday attendance will remain a problem, but perhaps as a matter of pews that overflow instead of being empty. Then visitors might just stay.

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John Stanley has been trying for years to save people’s souls over cups of coffee, but he can’t drink it.
“I did, until all this immigration stuff started,” Stanley said. “Now I’m too nervous as it is.”

A tall, lean Australian who favors paisley shirts, keeps his long hair tied in a bandanna and rides a donated Harley, Stanley is an unlikely looking Episcopal missionary.

His mission is odder still. A bright, airy coffeehouse, seemingly plucked from the suburbs and dropped among the abandoned storefronts of Aliquippa, Uncommon Grounds is Stanley’s base for starting a spiritual and civic revival of the decaying former mill town.

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He begins his talk about lessons learned as a church planter with common-sense advice about how pastors can blow off steam. Driscoll, 36, plays T-ball with his three sons or feeds ducks with his two daughters. Hardly the stuff that provokes raging blog debates and church pickets. As Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church in Seattle has grown to 6,000 members in 11 years, quiet moments like this with his family have preserved some of his sanity.

“I’m playing hurt right now,” Driscoll confesses to prospective church planters at a March meeting of Acts 29, his network of 170 churches around the world. “I wore out my adrenal glands at the end of last year, just living off adrenaline too much. My sleep has been really jacked up for some months.”

Those glands must have a little something left in the tank, because Driscoll warms up when he recounts the history of Mars Hill.

“My first core group was single indie and punk rockers committed to anarchy,” he says. “Needless to say, they didn’t naturally organize themselves or give generously. If I would have said, ‘Everybody tithe,’ it would have been in cigarettes.”

Driscoll can’t stand in front of a crowd for long without stirring things up. That’s what you get from a pastor who learned how to preach by watching comedian Chris Rock. Before long, he has the audience going. “If you’re going to be a fundamentalist or moralist ”¦ pick things like bathing with your wife to be legalistic about,” Driscoll says in his distinct, gravelly voice. “Don’t pick something stupid like, ‘Don’t listen to rock music.’ I don’t know who’s choosing all the legalisms, but they picked the worst ones. Eat meat, bathe together, and nap””those would be my legalisms. Those are things I can do.”

Driscoll “comes off as a smart-aleck former frat boy,” according to The Seattle Times. Guilty as charged. If he hasn’t offended you, you’ve never read his books or listened to his sermons. On any given Sunday at Mars Hill, it’s possible that a visiting fire marshal will get saved. But it’s just as likely that a guest will flip him off before walking out.

The spectrum of response speaks to his sharp tongue””his greatest strength and his glaring weakness. But Driscoll also disturbs many fellow evangelicals because he straddles the borders that divide us. His unflinching Reformed theology grates on the church-growth crowd. His plan to grow a large church strikes postmoderns as arrogant. His roots in the emerging church worry Calvinists. No one group can claim him. Maybe that’s why they all turn their guns on him.

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Q: When you look at the overall scene, how key is the current moment for the future of the worldwide Anglican Communion?

A: It’s a very crucial time. The decision upcoming of the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church will put the Episcopal Church really on record in its response to the Communion and the Windsor Report, though it’s already made its will very clear from the meeting of the House of Bishops last March and the meeting of the Executive Council in June. But nevertheless it will say very clearly to the world where the church stands in not turning back and continuing on the course that the Episcopal Church has in fact been on for many years. But just as importantly and in many ways much more significantly in terms of the positive movement of the church and the realignment is the Common Cause Council bishops’ meeting at the very end of September, an unprecedented bringing together of biblically faithful and orthodox Anglicans of a number of different jurisdictions going back to those who separated from the Episcopal Church with the Reformed Episcopal Church in the 1870s. There’s been a tendency in some groups to break free from the Episcopal Church and then in turn separate and splinter. This is a historic and unprecedented uniting, a reversal of that pattern of smaller and smaller groups, but rather bringing groups of a number of Global South jurisdictions as well as others to form a biblical, united, missionary Anglicanism here in the U.S.

Q: Is that what is happening? I’ve heard people call this the Anglican Union.

A: I think the participation of the Global South and others in the consecrations in Nairobi and in Uganda demonstrate that very clearly. My understanding is that primates representing probably 75 or 80 percent of the worshipping Anglicans in the world were represented by their archbishop at the consecrations in Nairobi. And, clearly, while there weren’t as many representatives present in Uganda, that same level of support was there.

Q: What message is that sending to the U.S. Episcopal Church and also to others watching the Anglican Communion?

A: I think there’s vibrancy in biblical Anglicanism that we see in so much of the Global South that is tremendously attractive. Our experience here in America is that this kind of passionate faith and unapologetic proclamation of Jesus Christ is magnetic for people. There are many who are drawn to it, and I think it’s sending a very positive message far and above any political message within the church. It sends a missionary message that we want to be about the positive proclamation of Jesus Christ.

Q: Others are still saying “we still can find some kind of common ground, we can still find a solution; people need to try to find paths toward unity.” Is that still possible, and is it still something to work toward?

A: I said at my consecration in Uganda that the only real unity is unity around the person of Jesus Christ. If what’s being sought is some kind of artificial, fabricated institutional unity to paper over foundational differences over who Jesus is and what he has done and what his work on the cross means for us, then I don’t think there’s any future in that. If we can come together around the person of Jesus and his unique and saving work on the cross, then all things are possible, but it has to be a true unity based on biblical faith and the uncompromising gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Instead of falling into the temptation of offering criticism, I ask myself what is good in what has occurred? The great church revolution ”“ whether our service is expressed formally or more informally – has captured three good things for us.

First, relationships. The church of 1959 contained many nominal Christians. Amongst us, the Graham Crusade was most effective. But the day of the local church as the community at prayer was on the point of extinction. Some decades later, we can trace the great change which libertarianism has created in the world. Who could possibly have predicted the revolution which has overtaken an institution as solid as marriage, for example? We can now see the absolute need for churches to become communities in themselves, sets of relationships in which people can care for one another, meet each other marry each other, befriend each other. Today about 61% of Sydney Anglicans attend small groups ”“ groups which hardly existed in churches in the early 1960s. We have retained community where the world has been against it.

When the congregation meets, therefore, we must encourage, support and nurture relationships ”“ first with God and then with each other. To this end, formality or informality is not the issue. Either may foster relationships; either may hinder them. But it is certain that the mere repetition of what we used to do will no longer be meaningful. Furthermore, it is not biblical. Whatever we may think of modern church life, it far better fits the picture of the church we have in the New Testament than church life in the 1950s. This is one of the reasons why so much that succoured the spiritual life was found amongst the parachurch organisations and fellowships instead of the local churches. Look at the teaching about how to behave in Ephesians and Colossians. You will find that in order to obey it you are required to have close relationships with those you go to church with. We are the Body of Christ, not a collection of people who happen to live in the same suburb.

In thinking of relationships we also need to think of what we offer others. Human relationships are one of the most attractive products of the gospel. The older churches were accessible because people had prior knowledge. Thus Mr Bean knew more or less what to expect and even could sing the hymns. Now, however, entry to a church building is as foreign an experience to most people as it would be for us to enter a Hindu temple. This is compounded when the insider’s behaviour is inexplicable and inaccessible. Our churches are part of what this nation needs. Let us make them more open to the outsider.

Second, reality. It is hard now to imagine the gap that exists between the piety of the older church and that of the newer one. But our social life has taken a turn away from formality, away from ritual, away from ceremonial. This may be illustrated in a hundred ways. It all represents a hunger for reality judged in personal terms; we may not like it; we may regard it as a sign of bad manners; we may think that informality is no more a sure bearer of spiritual reality than the formal. We may indeed think what we like. But the change has occurred, and if we wish to be missionaries within this culture, it must be reflected in what we do in church, at some levels. We must recognise that for many, many people, old church ways sound like the very epitome of the inauthentic, as well as being incomprehensible and deadening. I think that what we have done is to say that the Christian faith is serious and it is personal, authentic and spiritual.

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LONG ago, the Gideons learned to spread the gospel by putting millions of New Testaments in hotel rooms around the world. If Sydney’s Anglican archbishop, the Most Reverend Peter Jensen, gets his way, Sydney Anglicans will be handing out more than 1.5 million gospels in their neighbourhoods.

The costings are done ($1.8 million), the speech he will give to the diocesan synod today has been finalised: Connect 09 will become a reality if the synod approves the initiative tomorrow.

Annual synods, or parliaments, are a clearing house of diocesan business, usually accompanied by a grab-bag of motions covering concerns of the standing committee (executive), plus a few from individuals. It would be unlikely for Sydney to rebuff the archbishop’s latest Bible idea. But it remains to be decided which part of the New Testament will be chosen, which version, and the exact mix of books versus media such as CDs and MP3s.

“I favour Luke,” says Jensen. “It’s the longest, it contains some stories not in any other gospel, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, and to my mind it most powerfully tells the Jesus story.”

It also contains a version of the parable of the talents, the story Jesus told of servants being given money to manage while their master was away.

One hid it. Others, to their master’s great delight, invested and increased it.

Likewise, Jensen is keen on the creation of spiritual wealth. “I’m always thinking how best to communicate the good news of Christ to our generation,” he says.

Jensen is a man very comfortable in his theological skin, a man for whom the “Jesus story” is revealed first, last and always in the Bible. He is also very clear about the job in front of him. From the moment he took to the stage at the State Sports Centre in Sydney’s Homebush Bay in 2001, wearing sunglasses and rapping to Isaiah 53.6 in front of a crowd of 4000, he has fought for relevance.

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A rock ‘n’ roll bar with a neon “Pabst Blue Ribbon” sign in its window and truck-driver kitsch seems an unlikely setting for a room full of devout Christians gathered for prayer.

But on a recent Sunday evening, a small crowd gathered in the back room of Trash Bar in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood as a band warmed up onstage. Friends greeted each other with handshakes and hugs by the bar; some sat in the ripped-out car seats that line the bordello-red walls to chat.

By the time the band began to play “Glory to God,” about 40 people had assembled. Some were clean-cut, casually dressed young professionals; others sported tattoos, T-shirts, and sneakers. Many closed their eyes and lifted their hands while they sang along with the band. Some knelt to the floor or sat with their heads in their hands as they prayed.

A small crop of evangelical groups like the Church at Trash Bar have begun gathering in informal locations throughout Williamsburg over the past year, holding services in bars and cafes and promising an open environment for those who have given up on traditional churches but remain interested in worshipping in casual settings.

The Church at Trash Bar is one of a handful of New York congregations affiliated with the Vineyard Church, a looseknit Pentecostal denomination of about 1,500 churches worldwide.

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Evangelical Protestant churches have joined an effort by Roman Catholic, Orthodox and other Protestant churches to create a common code of conduct for religious conversions to preserve the right of Christians to spread their religion while avoiding conflict among faiths.

The World Council of Churches, which with the Vatican started talks last year on a code, said Wednesday that the process was formally joined by the World Evangelical Alliance at a meeting this month in Toulouse, France.

The aim is to ease tensions with Muslims, Hindus and other religions that fear losing adherents. In some instances, converts and foreign missionaries have been punished with imprisonment or death.

The kidnapping by the Taliban of 23 South Korean Christian church volunteers visiting Afghanistan last month underscored tensions. At least two of the 23 have been killed.

One accusation against the South Koreans is that they wanted to meet with converts from Islam. But their church has denied that they were trying to spread Christianity.

The World Council of Churches, which is based here, said the code of conduct should be an “advocacy tool in discussions with governments considering anti-conversion laws” and should “help to advance the cause of religious freedom.”

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