THINK

I stole this from another chaplain's room and thought it was worth sharing.

Facebook Makes You Sad

According to this Sydney Morning Herald article. It's worth checking out. I posted it on Facebook too, but sadly no one liked it.

How to Evangelise Without Evangelising

One of the electives at conference today was on how to be a spiritual support in your school. There are so many questions around this topic that I get the feeling we could have talked all day. What are we allowed to do? What are we not allowed to do? What's in our job description? What does the government say is in our job description? And it gets even trickier when you start bringing up specific situations.

As far as the government is concerned, chaplains are in schools to be a spiritual support to the students. However we have our hands tied a bit. There's a long list of things we can't do, like evangelising or proselytising (what is that again?). It's a topic that's been drilled in so often that you can start to feel a bit like a chef who's not allowed in the kitchen. Or like a black knight with no arms or legs. It's fair enough too. We want non-Christian people to be comfortable with us in schools. I have an atheist mate who has some very strong reservations about school chaplaincy and I completely understand why.

But there's also a lot we CAN do, and it's brilliant that we have the opportunity. Here's how I look at it, and I hope you find this helpful as well....

A few years ago some friends of mine in a simple home church decided to go through the four gospels and try to find out what Jesus actually wants us to do. If we're meant to be living Jesus' way, they asked - following Jesus, trying to be "little Christs," - well what actually is that way? What did Jesus actually tell people to do?

So this group went through all the things Jesus said (all the red letter passages) and took note every time Jesus told his followers to do something. It was quite a long list when they finished, but as they started to take out the repetitions and collate the similar phrases, in the end it all boiled down to seven ideas. Seven things that Jesus wants us to do. This is the way of Jesus right here. Ready? Here they are.

Love your neighbour.

Love your enemies.

Trust God (eg "don't worry about tomorrow").

Follow the Spirit (or "receive the spirit").

Hold your possessions loosely.

Reform yourself, not others ("take the plank out of your own eye...").

Be humble.

If people are doing those seven things then they are living Jesus' way. This is what it means to be a Christian.

And here's the helpful bit for chaplaincy. As I look at that list there are really only two that I can't push much in schools: trust God and follow the Spirit. The other five I can preach everywhere, to anyone, as much as I like. I can tell students that they should love their neighbour and no one will stop me. I can speak strongly about how important it is to be generous, and everyone will agree. At the moment there is a lot of discussion about refugees in Australia. I can have significant conversations with students about how we should treat all people with dignity and compassion wherever they're from - and what I'm actually doing without anyone knowing is echoing Jesus' words to love your enemies.

Five out of seven's pretty fantastic if you ask me. We can essentially help people to become quite a bit like Jesus without them even knowing it. These five ideas are well-respected in our culture (and most others) even if they're not lived out by many people. We just have to affirm them and demonstrate how to do it. And that's all before saying anything about God.

So don't feel that you can't say anything. You can actually say quite a lot of Jesus' message AND help people to start living it. There's of course a lot more to the good news than that, but I think it's a pretty huge head start.

Hope you find that helpful!