Tenterfield

Today I visited Tenterfield on the last stage of my Prayer Journey. I travelled up Killarney Gap Road and encountered a few kangaroos along the way and a total of 6 floodways with small amounts of water over the road.

I stopped at Killarney Gap for a photo, reminiscing my summer bike rides there.

 

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The drive past Killarney Gap was marked by fog as well as the water courses. The fog was patchy but persisted to Glen Innes. Tenterfield itself was quite warm and sunny.

 

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Tenterfield is a very historical town with many old buildings. It is known as one of the birth places of Federation with Henry Parkes making a famous speech at the Tenterfield School of Arts. It is also known as the birth place of singer Peter Allen.

Once again, I prayed God’s blessing on the town. I declared that, although it was famous for its past contributions to the nation, its best days are yet to come. As in many places, the denominational churches are in transition with some older churches having closed in recent years. I prayed that Tenterfield would see a revival that will bring Christ to the centre of the town.

Just out of Tenterfield is this stunning rock

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That concludes my Prayer Journey. In 5 days I travelled a total of 3,200 km. The area enclosed by the four towns I visited is about 400,000 square kilometres or about half of the state. I didn’t do this to have a crazy road trip but simply to obey God.

Wagga Wagga

Wagga Wagga is the biggest inland city in NSW with a population of 55,000. This compares to its rival Tamworth which is not far behind at 47,000. The south-eastern point of our prayer journey is only 3 hours drive from Hay, so it was an easier day.

We went up to the scenic lookout to look over the city and pray

Once again I prayed for God’s blessing on this city, for the churches to be blessed and for people to turn to Jesus. I thanked God that this city has been a blessing to the Riverina district and I prayed that it would become a beacon of hope for the nation.

When I was at theological college I came to Wagga Wagga for a summer of field education. It was an interesting time. We stayed next to the Turvey Park church in a house which was condemned by the Parish, although it is still standing nearly 30 years later.

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The church building was sold to the Coptic Orthodox Church which apparently has huge dioceses.

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Tonight we are sleeping in Parkes and should get home about lunch time tomorrow. This will give me time to catch up on some things before completing my Prayer Journey with a day trip to the north-eastern point.

Back of Bourke

Today was the first day of my Prayer Tour of Western NSW. From today until Friday I am travelling to some key points on the map to pray blessing on the region and particularly on the churches in the towns.

Today, Tim and I took off early to visit Bourke. Bourke is one of the most remote towns in NSW and the term “Back of Bourke” is a vernacular phrase to describe a remote bush location. It has never been established which is the more remote of “Back of Bourke” and “Beyond the Black Stump.”

For the first time in my life, I have now been to the Back of Bourke and a photo to prove it.

IMG_8391This is the Back O’ Bourke Exhibition Centre, where they have a daily show, which we missed by about 45 minutes, and art exhibitions etc.

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The town is located on the mighty Darling River which is looking splendid right now, being full of water after good widespread rains last month.

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In the middle of town there is a tourist precinct featuring paddle steamer cruises, coffee shops and the like. The Crossley engine is a fuel oil engine nearly 100 years old, which found its way to a property near Bourke after starting its life producing electricity in Sydney. It has been lovingly restored and now the Shire pays someone to maintain it and run it for a short time each day. Doesn’t sound like much, but there were 50 people watching an old stationary engine turn over. this afternoon.

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From the stats on the notice board this engine produces about 138 BHP or 103 kW of mechanical power. The tiny engine powering Tim’s Hyundai i20 produces 55 kW. Engines have come a long way in 100 years!

I prayed by the river for apostolic blessing to be released in Bourke, for the Darling to always be a source of prosperity for the town and for the churches to grow in their love for Jesus and for their neighbours.

Seeing Bourke alive with hundreds of visitors made me realise what potential there is for development of the tourist industry in Narrabri. We are a bigger town with as much history as Bourke (albeit with a much less spectacular river) and we just don’t seem to do anything much to encourage people to stay in town.

Today was the north-western extremity of our Prayer Tour. Tomorrow we head south, again to pray blessing on God’s people.

Nature More Diverse Than We Know

So a scientist thinks that there could be 10 times as many species of plants and animals than we know.  This not only demonstrates the huge creativity of the Creator God, but it also puts the lie to all those ads by such mendacious groups as WWF and their ilk who make claims such as “70% of all animal species have died”- if we don’t even know how many there are now, how can we even guess at such a percentage?

From the ABC

Number of plant and animal species could be 10 times greater, Flinders University professor says

Posted about 2 hours ago

The number of different plant and animal species in the world may be 10 times greater than we think, according to a professor from Flinders University.

An Australian team has written to the journal, Nature, claiming the estimate of 8.7 million species could be just a fraction of the true figure.

Professor Mike Lee, an evolutionary biologist with the South Australian Museum and Flinders University, said it was a “known unknown”.

“Knowing how many different forms of life live on earth is probably one of the most fundamental questions a scientist can ask,” he said.

“Despite 300 years of taxonomy, there’s still vast disagreements and estimates range between 3 million and 100 million.”

Professor Lee said the processes to determine different species used to be quite superficial.

“What we’ve done in the main is look at animals with the naked eye, and sort them into piles, and each pile we think is a new species,” he said.

“But when we look at the piles really, really closely, using genetics, it turns out each pile isn’t really just a homogenous set of individuals.

“They might be very similar, but nonetheless subtly different species.”

Number of species in the world could be up to 90 million

He believes the real number could be closer to 90 million, and that is important for conservation efforts.

“If we thought there was only one African elephant, we might not be concerned that all the elephants in the forest were going extinct, because we might think there’s plenty of the same thing out on the savanna,” Professor Lee said.

“But of course if you know there’s two different species, and the African forest elephant is a unique and irreplaceable genetic and conservation resource, then you’d be really concerned if it’s going extinct.”

Professor Lee said it was not reassuring that there might be more species out there, because they could also be falling extinct without our knowledge.

His letter to Nature was co-written by Paul Oliver from the Australian National University.

20 Reason Why Euthanasia Corrupts Everything.

Euthanasia is the latest feature of the culture of death to be promoted in the West. The positives are trumpeted in the media but the full story is never told. Here are some reasons why euthanasia is bad for us.

From Lifesitenews.com:

20 reasons why euthanasia corrupts everything it touches, and must be opposed

There are many in-depth analyses of assisted suicide and euthanasia flying about the Internet as the debate heats up in the Canadian Parliament and Senate. I’ve written several myself. Today, however, I want to give twenty summarized reasons for why people should reconsider euthanasia. Canada’s media – with notable exceptions like theNational Post’sAndrew Coyne – have consistently promoted assisted suicide, with the result that many of the consequences and implications have not been adequately considered:

1.  Assisted suicide suggests that for people to “die with dignity,” they must die faster. The underlying insinuation of the “Death with Dignity” movement is that those who do not opt for an expedited exit are not dying with dignity.  

2. Assisted suicide undermines the supposed purpose of the medical establishment: To heal patients, save lives, and reduce pain. To refer to killing patients as a “medical service” is an assault on medicine and on the English language. 

3. Assisted suicide reduces those who qualify for this “service” to second-class citizen status. If someone without depression does not qualify for assisted suicide, for example, but someone with depression does, the state has effectively judged the life of the person with depression as being less valuable. 

Read the full article here

Stephen McAlpine: Don’t Let Your Church Be A Hanoi Jane

Stephen McAlpine has some solid warnings on the “two-speed church.” Well worth reading.

Don’t Let Your Church be a Hanoi Jane

Once again The Australian newspaper’s Foreign Editor, Greg Sheridan has hit the nail on the head, in an insightful article today, entitledChristian churches drifting too far from the marketplace of ideas.

His opening lines are a cracker:

Australia’s Christian churches are in crisis, on the brink of complete strategic irrelevance. It’s not clear they recognise the mortal depth of their problems.

The churches need a new approach to their interaction with politics and the public debate, and to keeping themselves relevant in a post-Christian Australian society.

I wish I’d said as much myself.  Hey, Ididsay as much myself.  It’s a year ago this week since I wrotemy most read post ever, with dealt with this question exactly. And that post has raised a lot of good conservations in the past twelve months, taking it to a level of debate and push back that I had not envisaged.

Now, as an aside, there was a distinct possibility raised earlier this week that Greg Sheridan was going to ask my opinion on these issues, as he has been reading my articles recently, but I guess he had enough to go on.  But if he had, I guess I would havea)succumbed to hubris and,b)told him what I am about to say now.

And it’s this:

Just as there has been a two-speed-economy here in my home city of Perth during the now, sadly, historical commodities boom, there is a two speed religious economy in Christendom recently, and only one speed will survive our cultural malaise.

The slow speed religious economy is headed for disaster.  And it is made up of two groups; traditionalists and progressives.

The traditionalists have pretty much aligned with the state down the years, and include such behemoths as the Catholic Church. It is this group that Sheridan has in his sights when he memorably states:

The churches cannot recognise and come to grips with their strategic circumstances. They behave as though they still represent a living social consensus.

They remind me of South Vietnam’s government in 1974. It over-estimated its strength and tried to hang on to all of its territory, including the long narrow neck of its north. It did not retreat to its formidable heartland in the south, which would have been vastly more defensible. Had it done so, it might have survived. Instead, the next year, the armoured divisions of North Vietnam invaded and Saigon lost everything.

These lumbering giants are dying the death of a thousand cuts as they fail to realise how much the culture has shifted against them.  As Sheridan points out, less than 10 per cent of Australian Catholics attend Mass on a given week, down from 74 % in 1954.

But for every foolish South Vietnamese general who fails to see the writing on the wall, there is always a treacherous Hanoi Jane on your own side who will dig the knife in a little further, right?

Hollywood pin-up girl Jane Fonda earned the nomenclature “Hanoi Jane” for her support for the communist North Vietnamese as they steamrollered all in their path on the way to victory.

And so the slow-speed-economy church today has the Hanoi Jane of the progressive, post-evangelical churches, along with the pretty-much-moribund Uniting Church and Anglican Church (save for some noble exceptions).

These Hanoi Jane churches are unlike the “vegetable love” of the traditionalists, in that they are onlyminutely slower than the culture.

How much slower? About two seconds slower.  The culture jumps in one direction, be that ethical or whatever, and these Hanoi Janes’ suddenly find voice, scampering around and shouting “Me too! Me too!” to whoever is bored enough to be listening to them.

And all this despite clear evidence that this reactive approach to the cultural zeitgeist has been an abject failure for almost a century!  Hanoi Jane churches would rather die than stand for any gospel convictions. And die they will. History has borne that out.

Read the rest of the article here

New Life Springs Up in Australian Desert at Will Graham Event

New Life Springs Up in Australian Desert at Will Graham Event

Friday, June 3, 2016

Erik Ogren (June 3, 2016)

“In Alice Springs we harvested fruit that we did not sow. Particularly among the indigenous people, Dr. Bell and other missionaries planted the seeds of faith in Jesus Christ decades ago, and we were able to see the result last weekend.”

(Charlotte, NC) — [BillyGraham.org] Evangelist Will Graham returned to Australia last week – a continent on which he’s preached biannually since 2010 – to share the hope of Jesus in the arid Outback. The three-day event, titled Reality, was held May 20-22 at Blatherskite Park in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. (Photo via Billy Graham Evangelistic Association)

Alice Springs is located in the approximate center of the continent, nearly equidistant between Darwin on the northern coast of Australia and Adelaide on the southern coast.

In this remote town of 28,605, nearly 6,000 people attended the weekend event.

“Some of you have a broken life and God doesn’t use band aids. God wants to completely change you,” said Graham from the podium. “Salvation is a Person and His name is Jesus. Jesus can change everything in life. He can change your life tonight!”

At Graham’s invitation, a total of 549 people made a commitment to Jesus. An additional 297 responded for prayer and spiritual support.

Reality featured five different events over the course of the weekend, including evangelistic outreaches on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, a KidzFest program for children on Saturday morning, and a combined church service for the city on Sunday morning. (Photo via Billy Graham Evangelistic Association)

Reflecting on Reality, Graham referred to another evangelist who traveled the same territory more than 45 years prior. Dr. Ralph Bell, a longtime ministry partner of Billy Graham’s, spent two months preaching in and around Alice Springs in 1969, and—Graham says—paved the way for the success of this event. “In Alice Springs we harvested fruit that we did not sow. Particularly among the indigenous people, Dr. Bell and other missionaries planted the seeds of faith in Jesus Christ decades ago, and we were able to see the result last weekend.”

This was Graham’s fourth time preaching in Australia, dating back to 2010. He’s shared the Gospel in Gunnedah, Moree and Tamworth (2010); Orange, Lithgow and Bathurst (2012); and Broken Hill (2014).

Will Graham’s grandfather, Billy Graham, preached extensively on the continent in 1959, 1968, 1969 and 1979. His 1959 tour, which covered Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Launceston, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, is widely viewed as a watershed moment in the early years of Billy Graham’s ministry. Will Graham’s father, Franklin Graham, preached at multi-city tours of Australia in 1996, 1998 and 2005.

BillyGraham.org

Piers Ackerman- Vote Labor in haste, regret at your leisure

Piers Akerman

 

SHOULD Labor leader Bill Shorten win office in 41 days, homosexual marriage will ­become a reality across Australia just 100 days later. 

This has nothing to do with fairness, equality, human rights or any other humbug the homosexual lobby and the Marxists lurking close behind their agenda may wish you to believe.

This is about Labor being pushed to the Left by the Greens, radically altering customary practice, dramatically changing the way children are reared by removing either a male or a female figure from the family unit, and setting the stage for a generation who will forever be robbed of a better shot at life.

For it is the demonstrably evident fact that children raised in stable heterosexual families will, on the best available statistics, be best equipped to deal with the world.

That, as unpalatable as it may seem to those homosexual couples (as sharing, caring and warm and loving as they may be) who have chosen to adopt or create children through IVF or surrogacy, is just how it is.

The consequences of adopting homosexual marriage are not benign. It is not just about having two little Ken dolls or two little Barbies in bridal wear on top of the wedding cake.

Those who would change the Marriage Act to redefine the traditional union of a man and a woman know they are merely stalking horses for massive societal change such as are already being experienced in the US, where, in a giant grab for exaggerated victimhood status, the homosexual and gender-confused lobby have now managed to have President Barack Obama force all state schools to permit children use whichever lavatory they feel fits their sexual orientation — not necessarily their biological and chromo-somal identity.

I doubt whether many young girls will feel pressing need to express their inner manliness by fronting the urinals or even entering the boys’ (should they still be labelled as such) loos, but I suspect there will be a rush of hormonally charged teenage boys anxious to entertain their inner sheila and barge into the lavatories and change rooms traditionally set aside for females.

The new anti-gender laws have already restricted freedom of speech, and they will here, too, as there has already been a ridiculous try-on in Tasmania mounted by transgender activist and Greens candidate Martine Delaney.

Delaney lodged a complaint against the Catholic Archbishop of Tasmania Julian Porteous over a church booklet which carried the unthreatening slogan “don’t mess with marriage” and made the case accepted universally for millennia that marriage should be a “heterosexual union between a man and a woman”. To change the law, it said, would endanger a child’s upbringing.

Earlier this month, Delaney withdrew the charge in the face of the Church’s obvious defence — that it was plainly false to assert there was nothing distinctive about a man and a woman, a father or a mother.

As much as Penny Wong and her partner may delight in calling themselves parents of the children who live with them, neither is a man, neither is a father and neither can provide the male presence under their roof that is the ideal in a true family.

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating famously noted that “two blokes and a cocker spaniel” don’t make a family, and that was Labor’s view until a few years ago.

A more recent Labor PM, Julia Gillard, crossed the floor of the house and sat with then Opposition leader Tony Abb-ott, to vote down a Labor backbencher’s private member’s bill to amend the Marriage Act and permit homosexual couples to marry.

She wasn’t alone. Her treasurer, Wayne Swan, environment minister Tony Burke, trade minister Craig Emerson and former PM Kevin Rudd, joined her in voting down the motion 98-42.

Then the homosexual lobby arced up its campaign.

False statistics about the percentage of homosexuals in the community were flung about (internationally, the agreed number seems to be somewhat less than 2 per cent).

Claims that bullying of gender-muddled children forced some to at least contemplate suicide, if not carry through with their intention, were laid though no statistics bear this out and the statistic which seems most available would ­indicate that the primary focus of anxieties among those who do report bullying is to do with their body image or ethnicity.

This has not stopped those, like Victoria’s socialist Premier Daniel Andrews, or the members of the grotesquely misnamed Safe Schools Coalition, headquartered in the truly ­bizarre Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and ­Society unit at La Trobe University, from supporting the teaching of such skills as “penis tucking” and “breast binding” to prepubescent children.

Shorten, should he be elected, won’t just redefine marriage, he’ll destroy it.

As lesbian Russian author Masha Gessen told the Sydney Writers Festival four years ago “fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there”.

“Because we lie that the ­institution of marriage is not going to change. It’s going to change and it should change.”

Two months ago Labor senator Joe Bullock resigned as a matter of principle over Labor’s stance.

He said he couldn’t remain in a party which proposed to deny its members a conscience vote on the homosexual marriage question.

He made his decision after attending the Labor Party’s ­national conference and finding himself, to the best of his knowledge, the only one to vote against this proposition.

“How can I, in good conscience, recommend to people that they vote for a party which has determined to deny its parliamentarians a conscience vote on the homosexual marriage question? The simple ­answer is that I can’t,” he said.

Australians should ask themselves whether they want this radical change forced on their society when they vote on July 2.

 

Full article

Greens Want To Kill Christianity

I don’t know how any christian can vote for the Greens given  their anti-christian agenda.

From Andrew Bolt:

The Greens are on the road to declaring Christianity illegal:

The party’s LGBTI policy, ­announced by sexuality spokesman Robert Simms and gender identity and intersex spokes­women Janet Rice, also promised the end of religious exemptions in anti-­discrimination law…

Vowing to strip the religious exemption from anti-discrimination laws, Senator Simms said the party wanted to stamp out sexuality and gender identity-based discrimination. “Under current anti-discrimination laws, a gay man can be fired from working at a private school and a transgender person can be turned away from a religious homeless shelter,” he said. “We shouldn’t be giving ­religious organisations a get-out-of-jail-free card and the right to discriminate. Allowing a right to discriminate undermines the effectiveness of these kinds of laws. These exemptions can ruin someone’s life.”

The Greens’ move comes a week after an anti-discrimination complaint against Hobart Archbishop Julian Porteous was dropped. He had been accused of humiliating gay, lesbian and transgender Australians by distributing a booklet on traditional marriage.

And the Greens are meanwhile panicking Labor into restoring a program that effectively demands primary school children consider being gay or of no real gender:

Labor is considering restoring the controversial Safe Schools prog­ram after the Greens promised to roll it out fully….

Labor may reverse changes the Coalition made to the program this year amid an outcry over 11-year-olds being asked to role play as gay teenagers.

Labor’s education spokeswoman, Kate Ellis, told The Australian: “We established the Safe Schools program and we think it does incredibly important work.

“In contrast, the Liberals are cutting the program entirely next year…”

Full article here