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Why "rewire" the church?  Church has been at the centre of my identity. It’s formed me, frustrated me, deeply angered and hurt me, guided me, and protected me. Some of the most challenging ideas I have ever met, far more radical than the lawn meetings of my student days, have come from the theologians of the church.  There has been a sense of connection to the tradition and wisdom of millennia. And, inevitably, the frustration of tradition hide-bound.  I remember singing the words of a hymn one Sunday morning, “nothing changes here...” and one of the youth group muttered sotto voce to his girlfriend, “God, you can say that again!”   What worked for our  parent’s church doesn’t necessarily work for us.  I notice it often doesn’t work for them anymore, although older people are sometimes more gracious about their frustrations! Life changes, we change, and constantly need to reassess where we are going.

This little church on the web is modelled around the metaphor of an old and treasured house.  It's the house our parents lived in and inherited from someone we never knew.  The house is strong and robust, but needs rewiring.  Our ways of thinking and being need to change to make the house liveable and practical. Otherwise it will be a burden, not a base camp for life.


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Nature will not be denied

Nature will not be denied. Fig Tree Growing in masonry on Gawler Chambers Building Nth Tce Adelaide

Four stories up, there grows a fig tree. This is not some eco-aware roof top garden. It is a wild fig, growing of its own accord. In the harsh environment of North Terrace, unwatered, wlth bricks and mortar for soil, it is alive. It is finding every weakness, every fracture in the building's fabric, and opening the way for more water and seed.

Nature will not be denied. They say we must treat her with care or she will be destroyed. They are wrong. We may well destroy the conditions we need to survive. But nature and life will go on, despite us, and without us. The only question is how much we wish to remain a part of things.

"Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves."   Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park

Fig on Gawler Chambers Building 2008

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
        Gerard Manley Hopkins

Andrew Prior

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