to put some business jargon in here.
Stay with the primary aim which is growing the kingdom.
If by chance you gaain a tax advantage so be it. If you don’t tough.

Any other belief would and ashould eliminate people from working.

I think that your position is maintainable, but in answering why there is a law against discrimination, the answer has to be because the community elected people who decided to make that a law and have not chosen to object that it is a law, therefore indicating that it is within the boundaries of what is acceptable for society at large.

Why does individual self-interest militate in favour of anti-discrimination legislation? Because the vast majority of Australians are a part of some sort of minority and don’t want to be discriminated against. They will therefore support anti-discrimination legisislation protecting them in particular. They will also support anti-discrimination legislation that protects other minorities, because they acknowledge the risk that to oppose it would jeopardise their own protection.

The law is quite specific - as stated in the ruling. The organisation must be formed “for religious purposes”. This affects Christian schools also.

It is without doubt that part of the purpose of the Church is to help ‘disadvantaged’ people in society, as the COACH program does. But this is not percieved as a “religious purpose”. In fact, promotional material, constitutions etc are sometimes carfeully worded to make it obvious that these organisations are NOT a religious organisation in order to access government, and some philanthropic funding (I know - I have applied for such funding)

You can’t have it both ways, word the documentation of the organisation to NOT sound like a religious organisation in order to get funding, and then try to get exemption from other laws because you ARE a religious organisation.

Our school articles clearly state that we are a religious organisation, and this has prevented us from accessing some funding. However, we are therefore able to claim that our successful employees must have a “Demonstrated personal Christian faith and commitment, with a proven reputation for integrity”.

Regards
Janet

When people find out that I’m a christian, they often respond with “Really?! You don’t seem to be the kind of person who would be a Christian”.

I don’t find that insulting - because whenever I ask people to unpack that statement, they say things like “well, you have really progressive politics”, “you have a diverse range of friends”, “you’re fun to be with”, “you care about the environment and social justice”. So clearly the popular view of Christians is that they’re politically conservative, narrow-minded, boring, and don’t care about anything much!!

Very exciting! Must more than creating a holy place that only Christians can engage and work in.

I’m involved in an organisation that does a lot of stuff revolving around building community with people on the margins in the CBC. Some of them are on the street, some aren’t. We’ve never engaged in overt evangelism, b/c we figure that the people we connect with are more exposed to overt evangelism than anyone else!

It’s interesting that out of that approach, we’ve seen a lot of the volunteers become interested in Christianity, and a lot of the ‘patrons’ become interested in it or become more confident in their expression of their faith.

Every christian organisation should be evangelising and that by definition can only be done by a christian.