He started over 700 monastries and one attracted over 3000 monks. His life is a call to all of us to allow ourselves to take risks in the great adventure that is following Jesus.

Anyway I’m showing off cuase I got mentioned in Way Out West - MArk Berry’s blog http://markjberry.blogs.com/way_out_west/2006/08/brendan_continu.html#comment-21366135

Do you still have my email address?

greg(dot)colby(at)uchunter(dot)com(dot)au

if you really want to give your ability to talk about this stuff to others a kick start you should read 4 books

Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
The Case for Christ
The Case for Faith
The Case for a Creator all by Lee Strobel

BUT - do not just read them once… esp Mere Christianity

it is one thing to have read someones brilliant arguement, it is another to be able to make these arguements yourself in your own way when put on the spot… when i first read Mere Christianity i loved it but knew that i couldn’t repeat it… so i decided to read and re-read until his words became my own, sounds boring?? not really when you get into it because the more you read it the more you can see the potential and the better you get…

some think that this is a little contrived to ‘practise’ an arguement but this is just an arguement to allow you to witness better- and should not be mistaken for your walk with God which is something you do every day as opposed to practice… think of a soldier with a rifle who practices everyday so that when the pressure is on he can do it without thinking, or a sportsperson who practices their backhand so that when the pressure is on they don’t have to think about it that much……

Janet - Croyden? sorry i didn’t realise i was talking to a pleb… i’ll pray for you… you should really start naming and claiming something

without a ‘why’ people can’t make sense of suffering and lose hope…

its a common thing for Christians to say that it is only ‘with Christ’ that we can have meaning in life, but your average Christian can’t take that arguement any further as they are just repeating what our culture says to itself… it also means nothing to someone outside the Christian culture and can’t interpret Christianese…

that is why i talk on the lines of ‘meaning coming from above’ as the created gets its meaning from the creator (eg the painter and his painting) therefore if there is to be meaning to human existance there has to be a creator…

this of course begs the question of how does the creator (God) gain meaning for himself??? but this answer is very similar in concept to the cosmological arguement for the existence of God as cause and effect cannot go back in time infinitely and there must be a ‘first cause’ that is uncaused… so God in himself is sufficient for meaning to exist as an entity without superior….

the alternative is of course that we have no meaning at all… but then why would we as humans be looking for meaning if it didn’t exist… if we had no noses we wouldn’t have any concept of smell…

It is not my lack of a coherent Christian worldview or my ability to express it that’s the problem… I’ve worked my butt off over that, driven by a passion for truth. (But I agree this is sadly not the norm within the church)

Probably what I need to work on is asking different questions… and a stronger inner drive to reach people for Jesus.

I live in Croydon, not Camberwell… it’s mostly older second cars and Ozkick footy, not Volvos and soccer!!!! (Anyway, I’ll think about your remarks and get back to you.)

these questions are answered by the Christian worldview in a complete and non contradictory way

and the thing is whether your a stay at home mum, dying of cancer in hospital, running the country or starving in africa .. we all have a lifelong quest to answer these questions… as Christians we believe that we have answered these questions… the problem the church faces is how do we get our answers across to our neighbours when (in one sense) they seem to be speaking another language?

if your like me Janet you were brought up in a Christian home where the concept of God, Jesus, Truth etc was assumed and you sort of became a Christian as a matter of course, by osmosis with no real out there salvation event that you could really point to…

i was like that and i found that when i tried to share my faith with others (did you know that Jesus died to save you?) they would look at me like i was an idiot and say things like ‘yeah! saved from what?’ and i’d say ‘weeelll … ahhh … hell?’ or they would say ‘what morals you have are for you alone’ ‘don’t force your opinions on me’ …. basically we would be speaking different languages although we were using english to speak.

i had to learn what language the other people i wanted to speak to understood and then speak on their terms… if they were a postmodernist i would talk about things like ‘are morals really relative’ using examples i would find in our general conversation or in the public eye at the time, or is it possible that truth is universal… this sounds very complicated and philosophical but if you use simple examples any one can join in…

you can’t force it of course, but when the opportunity arises, examples can be made to a postmodern that if morals are relative and agreed upon by the majority in a culture then we have no way of condeming the hutus for killing the tutsies in rawanda in 95… or Hitler for that matter…

so either hitler and the hutu’s were wrong and there are universal morals which depend upon a moral lawgiver or morals are relative and decided upon by a culture and Hitler and the hutu’s were morally neutral (one could even go so far as to say if that was the decision of the prevailing culture it would have been immoral to not kill a jew or tutsie!)

this is just one of exposing the faulty logic that postmodernism is built upon and gives the postmodernist a reason to rethink some of their most cherished fundamental beliefs…

the same can be done for any opposing belief system to Christianity … if it were not so it would mean that some opposing belief system was more logical or true and that there was some fault with Christianity and that we were the ones with faulty belief system that should change…

obviously your conversation with a modernist would be different along this topic so you have to figue out who you are talking to first… sometimes this can be done quickly in a relationship or may take time…

for the volvo driving soccer mum… (when you have the appropriate opportunity) there are conversations to be had which bring up the concept that what we experience with our children can be related to many parallels in the Christian faith…

we love our children with such intensity that only another parent can sympathise but we have to let them make decisions for themselves which can sometimes be the wrong decision and to set them free otherwise we don’t have truely loving children but automatons - an instant parallel for why God gave us freedom of choice….

as much as we love our children we can’t get our meaning in life from them otherwise (dare i suggest such a tragedy) if we lost them, we would be rendered meaningless (obviously false) as meaning comes from a creator (we don’t create children - we beget them, which is why Jesus is described in John 3.16 as begotten, and more specifically in the creeds as ‘begotten not created’)

or use current affairs… ‘did you hear about the murder of that 8yr old girl in the shopping mall? what a tragedy! you know i have gone to church all my life and at church we talk about the concept of ‘total depravity’ where we all have a disposition to do the wrong thing, but in our cushy rich society we have been able to ignore that for the large part, but then along comes something terrible like that and it brings home the fact that there is something fundamentaly wrong with the world when something like that can happen… we believe that the world and humanity was intended for something different than this………’

i havent meant to sound arrogant Janet but it is easy if you know how and you know how it all fits together in a coherent worldview