As we enter a new year, the world feels an increasingly dangerous place… again. Many of us are running out of expletives as we watch Australia’s premier ally descend further into autocracy, and as it thumbs its nose at international law and basic morality, unembarrassed by the naked use of power for crude self-interest. Most damning is the ongoing support of Trump from what is the new ‘mainstream’ of American evangelicism. Ironically, or perhaps, predictably, given the Christian Right’s shamelessly politicised eschatology, Trump is increasingly looking like a figure from one of those end times texts they love to quote:
Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshipped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God. (2 Thess 2:3-4)
Back home, the floods and fires this summer are, I suspect, but a hint of the changing climate to come. For a long time I have been of the opinion that bushfire is actually Australia’s #1 threat to national security, far greater than that posed by China. But I am now wondering if bushfire has now been pipped by the USA. Meanwhile, the diabolical politics of Israel/Palestine continues to play out in our own politics in ways that no one could have predicted a decade ago. The awful horror of the Bondi shootings has not served to caution the need to attend to such a complex minefield of an issue with care and clarity. Rather, in the face of all of these enormous challenges (not to mention housing, mental illness, and rising inequality), our political class seems incapable of careful thought or deliberative dialogue, paralysed in the glare of swinging polls and backbenchers, and completely unformed in the disciplines of moral courage.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming)
That, at least, is how the world looks from Long Gully at the beginning of 2026. And yet, as I look out the window, our garden continues to grow, providing a lovely crop of stone fruit and, latterly, cherry tomatoes. So far, the damage from fruit fly seems less this year. And the bushland next door continues to thrive as we watch native grasses, long absent, slowly begin to return to our hill.
It is my view that one of the primary tasks of Christian witness—both evangelical and political— in the coming century will simply be to maintain hope in a darkening world. But hope cannot be found in optimism, which is a fool’s gold destined for despair. Neither can hope be found in joining a side and seeking their victory. Rather, hope can only be found in trying to see clearly where the good lies, however inconvenient to the current discourse, and trying to live according to that truth, whatever the rest of the world may do.
To see clearly means to comprehend the structure of reality in its deep spiritual, ecological, social, and moral components. It is the crazy conviction of Manna Gum that the key to seeing into the structure of reality lies in the good news revealed by Jesus: ‘in him all things hold together’ (Col 1:17). Trying to articulate this good news will continue to be our ongoing work through 2026, and we hope you can join us in the great labour.
The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. (Matt 9:37-38)
Jonathan Cornford