My boss went to a CEOs meeting of UnitingCare agencies in Brisbane this week and came back with her head and heart full of great passion and resolve. Discussions with her and the coordinator of our Diversity program led to the commitment to produce a new resource.

The new package will be education for youth workers, church workers and ministers who want to support young people who are, or who are thinking about, coming out as not straight, but who want to hold on to their Christian faith. Already we’ve established what the resource will contain and how it will (kinda) look. Naturally, it will have to have stuff on Christian sexual ethics and homosexuality in the Bible, because those discussions are always played out in our chruches and affect the mind of every young person going through this process. Yet our main focus should be on managing a queer identity while maintaining a solid Christian one, which means more focus will be placed on dealing with relationships in a young person’s faith community, dealing with stereotypes, embracing a new path of life with God.

I’ve found some resources on the net to help us, such as Soulforce, and, of course, the United Church of Christ in Canada. If anyone out there knows of any other resources, I’d love an email.

And if you’d like to help Cutting Edge develop the resource, you are really really welcome. I mean, really.

Garth, the author of the emergingBlurb blog, is hoping to compile a list of Aussie bloggers and web sites of emerging churches. It’s called emergentlistingoz, and I would be greatly helped by this resource, if it starts to work.

Alan Hartung, who read TallSkinnyKiwi before me, alerted us all to this new site - a MySpace for Christians only, called Xianz. The concerns are obvious - Christians not allowed to talk to others of different age groups, Microsoft owning an online church now, a space for Christians to hide, a space for unreal expectations of Christianity to flourished, unchecked by the world’s standards, etc - yet my greatest concern was this:

Given that there are age-groups within you can and must communicate, my biggest concern was older people disguising themselves as younger people - that way online paedophilia can get really religious! So I tried myself to get in disguised as a younger person.

Don’t worry - I couldn’t get in! You have to be invited into the Xianz community. No lone surfers allowed.

It made me more concerned, and more intrigued. Concerned that it is now even more “protected” by the outside world - to the point where honest discussion on things worldly can potentially be actively discouraged.

Intrigued that it requires a formal process of entry - one that could be called a formal evangelical process? Xianz appears to have established a set of rules for entry and discussion. Ecclesial rules. It is up to the members of the community, not the site itself, to grow the community.

I wonder what other rules are in place? Can someone invite me in, please? I promise I’ll say what my real age is. I’m 29.

Okay, I’m 34.

I came across this blog post by Andrew Bulhak and became quite alarmed. It seems the ALP (normally on the left side of the right wing) has joined in with more religious-right politics on the issue of Internet censorship in Australia.

If the ALP have their way, all web content labelled “adult” will be summarily blocked from all Australian computers not registered through application. “Adult” content won’t be restricted to just pornography, but to discussions on sex, border art, and could even include sex education content, if not properly checked.

The fact that a major party has put it on the agenda means that the government will consider it too, and Andrew writes that this is already the case.