Our family is entering a new phase of life as Kim and I recently found ourselves empty-nesting for a couple of months: our younger daughter, Mhairi, has been travelling in North Queensland and Indonesia while our older daughter, Amy, has been working on a cattle property in the arid rangelands of Western Australia.
Amy is studying wildlife and conservation biology and has been volunteering for the Australian Dingo Foundation. She has become passionate on the issue of dingo conservation, which has led her to work on a regenerative cattle station (Wooleen Station - featured on an Australian Story on the ABC) that has become known for allowing the return of dingoes as a key method for restoring native vegetation. The dingoes play a key ecological role by controlling the grazing pressure of herbivores (see my article on eating kangaroo in this edition).
We expect all members of the household to have returned later in the year, but it is a taste of things to come. It is prompting Kim and me to begin to think about what the new season means for how we structure our time and energy.
Jacob and his wife Andi are back from Mongolia and have moved into the Grace Tree Community in Coburg, Melbourne. As it happens, Simon and Julie Moyle from Grace Tree recently came and shared with the Seeds Community here in Long Gully for our retreat day, and it got us thinking: what has happened to the idea of intentional mission communities/churches that seek to give discipline and structure to a whole-of-life Christian ethic? Twenty-five years ago, there were quite a number of such communities just in Victoria, and a network that meshed them all together. Now there are few left. How are the next generation out there in the church world thinking about discipleship, mission, and community these days? If you have thoughts on these matters, I would be keen to hear from you.
Following this thought, in May I ran a four-part webinar series on re-visioning the church in Australia. The webinars discussed some of the challenges facing churches in post-Christian Australia and some of the deep questions about structure and form that this is prompting, as well as how these relate to our understanding of the gospel. Underpinning all of these things are questions of economic structure.
The core idea of the webinar series is this: before churches can answer any of these questions well, they need to reclaim an understanding of the church as a new social reality in which the relations between people are placed on a fundamentally different basis from those we found in mainstream society. As a new social reality, it must also be an alternative economic community: one that thinks about money, work, and property in wholly new ways.
Manna Gum has no firm answers to any of these issues, but we have many questions to ask and a few ideas to share. This webinar series was an opening shot in what will be an ongoing exploration over the coming years.
Check out the promo below for our A Different Way week in November. It is starting to fill up, so if you want to come, don’t leave off registering too long...
Jonathan Cornford
