Together we are making a difference

My lounge was full as South African and UK friends gathered for the long awaited first Test between the Springboks and the British Lions. I was somewhat nervous of the outcome.

When the Springboks once beat England 36-0, a son of the Western Cape was so excited that he managed in one leap from his seat to smash some of my room lights on his way up into the air and break a seat when he landed.

Well this time, with my sofa now replaced with a sturdier version, I am glad to report that my Afrikaner son-in-law Drikus, did not make such an impression on my furniture as he and his fellow countryman celebrated his team’s memorable win…

I also appreciated that all the South Africans in the room at least tried to be humble in their moment of victory, even if they didn’t quite manage it.

Not long afterwards I was with my sons Wes and James of English and Welsh descent and we were in reflective mood. Actually we found it hard to talk. To be honest as we looked at the pictures of what had taken place in South Africa that weekend, we were near to tears.

For what we were focussed on were not images of rugby players in the green and yellow of the Springboks or the red of the Lions but of hundreds of children dressed in blue hoodies.

I cannot fully imagine what it must have been like to be there when the Kinder Kerk team of Kings Church International gave out these special gifts to each of the children. But the beaming smiles in the pictures said it all.

Not only do the children now have warm clothes for winter but they also clearly love to wear outfits that say that each of them is highly valued. Blue hoodies are now being spotted all over Robertson.

What particularly struck us looking at the pictures is that so many people are now being blessed because of team work both locally and internationally.

Both King’s Church International in Robertson and in Windsor gave generous offerings to make all this possible.

Both groups are working as one to develop not only the Kinder Kerk ministry but a multi-racial church that reaches out to increasing numbers of people.

Such teamwork for sure can make a dream work. Or to adapt a Biblical phrase ‘how good and pleasant it is when brothers (and sisters and black, brown and white and south African and English) live (and work) together in unity…for there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life for evermore, Psalm 133:1,3.’

The more we see the importance of team and the more we all learn to be team players, then the more we can accomplish.

This is true in every aspect of life. Success will come in marriage when each partner stops focussing on their own individual needs and agendas and starts to selflessly serve and bless the other. To stop talking of ‘me’ and concentrate on ‘we’ is the way to be a fulfilled husband or wife.

A home will be blessed when every one works to discover and develop each others’ strengths and cover each others’ weaknesses. I was brought up to believe that a happy home is where ‘we each live for one another and all live for God.’

A church will be blessed and will become a greater blessing when Christians turn away from being independent and critical and become inter-dependent and constructive in their attitude and behaviour towards others.

Jesus was a great believer in team. That’s why he called and trained a team of 12 and told them in turn to go out and train the whole world to live as His disciples.
No-one can serve and change the world by themselves. But together as teams, especially in teams of 12s, we can bring salvation and transformation to individuals and nations across the world.

It’s great to be part of the same team with you.

Faith, fundamentalism and the fight for students' souls

Accused of bigotry and intolerance, some Christians are threatening legal action to challenge restrictions on their activities

THEY are the earnest-looking, clean-living young men and women who hand out leaflets asking “Do you know God loves you?” and hold prayer meetings while other students are busy watching the boat club captain strip naked after ten pints in the college bar.

But after 83 years of prayer breakfasts, Bible study groups and freshers week stalls, the future of the Christian union on university campuses is under unprecedented threat from students who claim that the societies are homophobic and exclusive.

At a time when Islamic militants are accused of recruiting activists at universities across Britain, at least four Christian unions are threatening legal action against their university student unions after being banned or denied access to facilities.

One has been threatened with pickets and its members told that they are “gutter-crawling scum”; another has been accused of “callous and inhumane attitudes” after one of its members prayed for the souls of homosexuals at a prayer meeting.
More from The Times.

Students sue over Christian rights at colleges
CHRISTIANS on campuses across Britain are preparing to take legal action against university authorities, accusing them of driving their religious beliefs underground, The Times has learnt.
Christian unions claim that they are being singled out as a “soft target” by student associations because they refuse to allow non-Christians to address their meetings or sit on ruling committees.

The dispute follows the associations’ decisions at four universities to ban the unions from official lists of societies or deny them access to facilities or privileges. Christian unions at Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Birmingham universities are all taking legal advice after being accused of excluding non-Christians, promoting homophobia and even discriminating against those of transgender sexuality.
More from The Times.

Religion on Campus
Special feature from The Times.

BA Cross Controversy

How it all began...
In September of this year, a duty manager at Heathrow requested that Nadia remove her cross, which was behind a company cravat. When she refused to remove it, she was suspended from work without pay. BA had said that the airline uniform code did not permit staff to wear visible jewellery whilst on duty without permission from the management.

However, rules drawn up by BA’s ‘diversity team’ and ‘uniform committee’ do permit Sikh employees to wear the traditional iron bangle, even though this could clearly be described as jewellery. BA also permits Muslims to wear headscarves.

Miss Eweida had a petition of support signed by more than 200 fellow employees, and received widespread support from fellow Christians. Nadia believes that the cross is an illustration of her deep faith, indeed, it is a manifestation of her faith, and as such is protected by Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

BA faces boycott as travellers get really cross
British Airways faced the prospect of a growing boycott by international travellers yesterday over its refusal to allow a check-in worker to wear a small Christian cross over her uniform.An internet website was set up to co-ordinate an angry response to the airline's suspension of Nadia Eweida.

And a Church of England vicar went on BBC Radio 4's Today programme to urge people to shun the airline because he said it effectively discriminated against Christians.

The Rev Tony Kelso, from Matchborough, West Midlands, told The Daily Telegraph: "It is ludicrous that British Airways has the Union Flag on their tail fins which is made up of sacred crosses from our United Kingdom and yet it practises this discrimination against Christians.

"They have put themselves in a massive big hole and don't know how to get out."
More from The Daily Telegraph.

Fox News Interview

"Hannity & Colmes" exclusive: Nadia Eweida and her lawyer from the Center for Judeo-Christian Law and Ethics, Paul Diamond.
Read here.


UN Intervenes
United Nations human rights chiefs have raised concerns over British Airways' ban on its workers wearing the cross. Senior UN officials and diplomats regard the suppression of Christianity by a major British company as a sign of worldwide drift into rising religious intolerance.

They are to raise the issue at the weekend at a major international meeting to mark the 25th anniversary of the UN declaration against religious discrimination. BA's refusal to allow a check-in worker to wear a tiny cross will be on the agenda of the gathering in Prague alongside more deadly religious conflicts in troubled parts of the world.
More from The Evening Standard.

Christian Concern for Our Nation
Andrea Minichiello Williams of the Lawyers Christian Fellowship has said, “This application of BA’s uniform policy is clearly inconsistent. We would like to see a level-playing field. BA has allowed some employees freedom to express their faith but Nadia has been denied this right.”
More.

Barnabas Fund
The time has come for Christians to stand up for what they believe, to stand with Nadia in her desire that the cross should not be hidden. Secularism and pluralism have reduced Christianity to a nonentity. Many Christians have unwittingly fallen prey to the gradual neutralisation of the Christian faith. If the most basic symbol of Christianity is to be removed from public life, if the cross is to be viewed as mere jewellery, then the Christian faith will have become invisible in the UK.
Read more here.

BA Boycott
The site www.baboycott.com encourages people to destroy their British Airways frequent flyer cards, photograph the pieces and send the image to them digitally. It also offers advice on alternative flights.

Marcus Stafford, a Norfolk-based web designer who set it up, said: "This case was the last straw for me. I had just got so fed up with attacks on Englishness and Christianity that I decided to take action. "I am not an active Christian, more a cultural one, like most people in this country, but I just thought, no more."

Future generations will hear far more about God and politics

The commercial success of Richard Dawkins's God Delusion may perhaps be owing to readers in Utah keen to burn it. However, it surely also signifies the mobilisation of local secular opinion around his double helix-emblazoned standard.

Because Britain has suffered less from anti-clericalism than continental Europe, much of the argument about faith in this country is of the God-bothering variety. However, there are worrying signs that this quaint Victorian-style debate between dons in tweed and men of the cloth is having a wider impact.

A poll published today by the new think tank Theos reveals public confusion. If 42 per cent of a thousand adults agree with Dawkins that religion is like "the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate", 53 per cent claim that "religion is a force for good in society", with a slightly higher percentage agreeing that Christianity had an important role to play in public affairs.

Encouragingly, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, has forthrightly attacked the notion that Britain is a "multi-faith society", saying: "Almost everything you touch in British culture, whether it's art, literature or the language itself has been shaped by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, by the Bible, by the Churches, worship and belief."

Today's inauguration of Theos is an encouraging sign that intellectual Christians in Britain are not going to flee the battle that militant secularists have long declared, as can be seen from Owen Chadwick's Secularisation of the European Mind, which deals with their campaigns in the 19th century.

There is something encouragingly American about Theos, provided one associates US Christians with its many distinguished public intellectuals, like Richard John Neuhaus or George Weigel, rather than the literalists of dread imaginings.

And how revealing that it is a new think tank, rather than the limp-wristed universities with their cadres of Islamist militants, that has ventured into these contentious areas.

Supported by the Anglican and Roman Catholic primates, Theos will not confine itself to locking horns with academe's celebrity atheists, nor will it simply react to provocations (overwhelmingly involving radical Islamists) that appear to discredit all faith.

Rather, in a brilliant exposition of Theos's remit, entitled Doing God, Nick Spencer indicates that the very notion of a separate public sphere, or what we call civil society, is an indirect offspring of Christian rejection of imperial theocracy, and that Christians have much still to contribute to their own legacy.

Indeed, whether for demographic reasons, which over the long term favour religious believers, or, because of the creeping withdrawal of the state from social provision, future generations will hear a lot more about God and politics.

Spencer makes short work of many arguments routinely used to excise religion from the public sphere, a goal that is utterly ahistorical in a country where the Sovereign is head of the Established Church and daily prayers are said in Parliament.

In Britain, Spencer argues that the withdrawal of the state from welfare provision will reveal a "long-hidden shore of civil society, in which religious groups in general, and the Churches in particular, have and are playing a significant role".

There are some 22,000 religious charities in this country, not to speak of parish or chapel-based voluntary work...

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