My good mate Stephen emailed me this church sign, that he made at Church Sign Generator.

After seeing the last bad church sign I had posted, a friend suggested this should be an ongoing blog project, so I’m kicking it off with a sign posted outside my own local.

Reasons why I can’t stand signs like this:

1. Very little effort in making it visually appealing. You have to stop and read it to get the message, and can’t just glimpse at it and keep moving. And then you realise that by stopping and reading you’ve lost three seconds of your life that you’ll never get back (if you read slowly like me).

2. I feel like throwing up when I see Christians trying to sell their religion with the whole “believe in what we believe in and you’ll get to heaven”. It assumes people are so selfish that they’ll only go to church to get something for themselves.

3. It also smacks to me of bad theology. I don’t know about you, but when people try to sell me the whole heaven thing, I think about all the instances in the Bible that God says she adores this planet, this level of existence. And if that’s the case, why do we spend so much time talking about the afterlife? To me (Is it only me?), this world is enough, and I can’t believe it’s only a testing ground to determine our entry into the next one.

If you’ve got any bad church signs, send them on to me, or post them on your blog and let me know about it so I can link you.

The Coming Out Conference had some great speakers, but the one who I felt really challenged my thinking was Lisa Usherwood, author of The Good News of the Body. Drawing on ther evaluation of a certain para-church mission, “True Love Waits”, Lisa gave us her evaluation of white male Christianity, and the general oppression of women.

I was utterly convinced by her excursus of contemporary Christian society’s ongoing project of subordniating women, and how the value of virginity over sexual freedom and integrity participates in it. What moved me, however, was her argument at how unchristian it actually is, and how unbiblical. First she mentions the call of James and John, who were not called to ministry and give money back to their father’s house, but to the poor. Likewise, the gospels do not claim a disdain on marriage per se, but a disdain for the “father’s house”, and how marriage is seen as the trade of women for its own upkeep.

Then she calls us to consider Song of Songs not just as a book of love, but one of freedom. She describes a woman, so comfortable in her own skin, gender and sexuality that she becomes the embarassment of her brothers, who see her only as an asset to be sold to other men. And she becomes God’s delight.

Throws into question why people like passages from this book read at their weddings.

A few months ago my father-in-law’s wife (a woman with some amazing stories to share, a kind and open heart, of whom I have much admiration and respect) took me aside at a family get-together to talk about my inner censor, well, my lack of one. When I asked why, she reminded me of the last family get-together, when I had talked about having binged on Sultana Bran the previous evening, how it had led to some lower back pain in the morning, how that pain was quickly relieved by a short visit to the bathroom, and how I asked if that is what it’s like to be having a baby.

I confessed, I had no inner censor. That mechanism in every adult’s brain that tells you that even though you may want to say something, you really shoudn’t, was somehow not passed on to me from my parents (though I doubt if my father has one either, but that’s another story).

Anywho, this absence in my brain fell into sharp relief last weekend at the Coming Out Conference. It started on the first day, when Dorothy McRae-McMahon, one of the Uniting Church’s most prolific and celebrated liturgists and authors, who had just told us her painful and joyful coming out story that morning, sat down next to me for lunch, together with three others, including my agency boss. We were sharing stories and joking around and then when in a fit of polite laughter she touched my arm, I flew up hands up in indignation saying “Oh my God, you touched me! You know what’s happening now don’t you?”

The smile on her face turned to a facade of horror and embarrassment when she said “Oh dear, I’m sorry, what’s happened?”

When I told the group I’m now a friend of Dorothy, I saw dropped jaws over the entire table, and my boss was shaking. Then Dorothy started giggling, and recounted to us of the time she first heard that phrase, told to her by a gay male couple, to which she replied, “How do you know my name?”

I was saved from a potential major faux-pas for the moment, only to wait for the second, which happened in the next session, where I presented my paper. The presenter before me had delivered her thesis on how congregations can respond to messages of life and sex presented in pop media to adolescents, where she had shown us a clip from American Pie I, you know the bit where the boys make a pact to lose their virginity by graduation.

So naturally, I presented myself as a PhD student who’s doing research on religion on the Internet, and I’m graduating at the end of 2008, and I really hope to get laid before then, and I’m hoping this presentation will help me along the way. And after speaking for twenty minutes, reminded everyone that I’m a religious Internet nerd, and if they could help me getting laid later, I’d appreciate it. Have no idea why, it just sounded funny at the time. People chuckled politely, because, you know, they’re polite church people, including the UCA president.

Despite all that, everything went very well. The conference organiser approached me a few times, to tell me he’s been approached by a lot of people wanting to hear more, and how he’d like me to come up to Sydney again to give a couple of lectures, and how he wants to publish my presentation.

That night I met up with Matt and Lindsay, and talked all things blogging. We got flirty-fished, but I should let Matt tell you the story (remember that when he talks about “one member of the group” he’s actually talking about me).

The following day I presented my Masters research, which also went down well. A few told me afterwards that they have a new appreciation for horror movies. Well, that was my goal, so I’m a success in my own mind, even if I’m a dickhead in public.