High School Chaplaincy

Went out to coffee with a colleague this morning. He mentioned that this afternoon he was heading off to the Helensvale State High School Local Chaplaincy Committee (LCC). And that he was not going to accept nomination as chairperson. So… what did I do? I turned up myself and got voted on as the new chairperson.

Basically the role involves chairing monthly meetings of the LCC on Wednesday afternoons. It involves providing pastoral support for the chaplains at Helensvale State High School, Pacific Pines State High School and Upper Coomera State High School. And in the event of losing one of those people, finding a replacement. Graeme Eastwell, from Helensvale Presbyterian, has just finished six years in the position.

Long Bradley high school chaplain Long Bradley has been employed as chaplain at Helensvale State High School since 2000 and works three days a week. His web page is included in the school web site. He provides pastoral care for students, especially in times of grief and loss. He also connects students with appropriate support groups and agencies. As well as this, he attends excursions, camps and other events, runs a lunchtime games-based program, coordinates the Religious Education program, and provides a link between the school, community and churches.

The chaplaincy in schools is coordinated by Scripture Union in Queensland.

One of the big challenges of the year will be getting new churches on board in the new housing areas of Pacific Pines and Coomera. The churches there are all in their fledgling stages and are not in a strong position to contribute financially. But the need is great. Pacific Pines High School had a chaplain last year and are in the process of appointing someone new for a day a week. Upper Coomera State College are in the process of appointing a voluntary chaplain.

Helensvale State High opened just over twenty years ago and is known as one of the biggest high schools in Queensland. Pacific Pines State High started in 2000. Upper Coomera State College has opened in the last year.

Hugh Mackay on Stressed Baby Boomers

Generations by Hugh MackayHugh Mackay’s central audience in “Generations” is the Baby Boom generation. These are the generation most aware of their identity as a cohort, the most likely to buy and read his book.

Mackay in 1997 describes the life of the cohort born in the late 1940s and early 1950s as
a dream start, full of the promise of an endless prosperity, followed by turbulence and hardship in their middle years.

The baby boom is connected with the marriage boom and the economic boom in Australia: responses to postwar optimism. Construction and manufacturing were growing as the older ‘Lucky Generation’ expected permament economic growth.

At the same time, Baby Boomers were growing up in a world polarised by a cold war between two competing ideologies: communism and capitalism.

Mackay points to a fascinating tension between optimism and idealism on the one side and the belief that the world could end in catastrophic nuclear war.

This is the generation who were brought up with a quest for personal happiness, expectation of material comfort and the ideal of egalitarianism. In mid life Baby Boomers have discovered that these expectations come with prices: high divorce rates, two-income households, and STRESS.

‘Elastic Adolescence’

Mackay puzzles over the nostalgia of Boomers who ‘refuse to grow up’.

“They have become the generation who are still determined to stuff themselves into blue jeans in their late forties (partly to pretend they are not as old as they are, partly to remind themselves of how they looked in their teens, and partly to symbolise their determination to ‘stay close’ to their own children). They are still playing the music of their youth and young adulthood…”

This approach strikes me as an example of generational misunderstanding. This generation who will never grow into copies of their parents. It is a generation defined by the development of an alternative culture which was mistakenly assumed to be youth culture only. I see this in churches that expect people in their thirties and forties to suddenly tune in to traditional forms of worship. Or churches that say that their focus on work with the ‘Lucky Generation’ will pay dividends as the baby boomers start retiring. The bad news is that the retiring baby boomers are not likely to switch cultures.

The irony is that the Lucky Generation have the same approach but are not so aware of it. Ask them what they were listening to between the ages of seventeen and twenty five and they’ll break into community singing. The tastes they developed back then haven’t gone away. Likewise their approaches to short hair and formal clothing.

Wanted: Tampons With Beepers

What a heading! It certainly captures the sense of the fast pace of the Boomer generation. Stress for many is ‘inextricably linked in their minds with the idea of busyness’. It’s not just managing their own hectic lives, but also organising the lives of their children.

Shifting Sands: Marriage and Work

Mackay tells us that “Boomers envy their parents for having lived at a time when things seemed more ‘cut and dried’ and when even personal morality seemed more straightforward than it does in the kaleidoscope of relativity and postmodernism.”

I imagine that this envy might surface at times of mid life crisis of early Boomers. Perhaps this is an example of the nostalgia Mackay refers to earlier. But it is superseded by the change of values relating to marriage and family.

It’s the Baby Boomers who started talking about the quality of relationships: the quality of intimacy, quality time. And perhaps because of those very expectations, Boomers surpassed their parents in the rate of marriage breakdown. It could be argued that marriages had broken down just as much before, but had not been allowed to be dissolved. But now, with the relaxing of expectations regarding gender roles, and the increased financial independence of women, divorces could be considered openly. Mackay remarks that the majority of divorces are now being intiated by women.

Boomers left school with a choice of well paid careers before them. Now, in mid life and beyond, many have experienced redundancy or retrenchment. Men and women have learned to adjust to two-income families. Men, in particular, have had to rethink their sense of identity with something other than work.

It all seems so serious

Boomers in Mackay’s focus groups are discovering that ‘life is harder than they expected it to be…. that their beloved freedom has given way to a feeling of being enclosed by responsibilities, pressures and anxieties.’

I’m wondering how much of the distinct values of this generation are coming through here. By taking a group of people facing mid life crisis it would be expected that issues are related to life stage more than to generational values.

Mackay considers the contrast between the exuberance of the anti-Vietnam protests and the heavy-going middle years. He comments that these Boomers are taking the task of parenting more seriously than their parents did.

I agree with Mackay where he says that the Boomers are consistent really. Their whole lives, from young adulthood to middle years are marked by intensity. He writes, “The Lucky Generation are bemused by their Boomer offspring’s solemn commitment to navel-gazing, to self analysis and to the relentless pursuit of personal gratification.”

Yes. This generation are into self analysis. Which is why they are the one generation most open to considering and acting on generational theory.

Men have had to grapple with the effects of the feminist movement. Men who grew up with Dad as the ‘head of the house’ and breadwinner have faced a revolution, a loss of control. At the same time, the emerging ‘rules of engagement’ have not been clear for men. Should they explore their ‘feminine side’? Or rediscover the masculine in new ways? It’s not clear. But in the process of gender redefinition, men have learned how to be more actively involved with their children.

Women have had the opportunity to set their own agenda, taking on choices that are more stimulating and interesting than those perceived to be experienced by the Lucky Generation women. A fascinating insight: the realisation in hindsight that equal rights does not mean that all of those rights have to be exercised at once. The tensions between career aspirations and maternal aspirations are explored in depth by Mackay.

Saying ‘No’ to Religion

“The Boomers might turn out to have been the last generation of Australians to attend Christian Sunday Schools in large numbers.” I’ve met a few from the Lucky Generation who struggle to accept this. However it is clear that the Baby Boomers as adults have stayed away from conventional religion and are not likely to return to it in droves. They’re hooked by materialism.

Mackay describes the belief that solid values came from stable family life, supported by a steady income from a reliable supply of work. Add to this belief the perspectives of Freud and Einstein and we end up with the belief that all answers to our questions are within us, and that everything is relative.

Baby Boomer Gods

Sex
Mackay sums up his section on Baby Boomer sexual attitudes with the stunning sentence:
“Impatient to pair off at an early age, they have been obsessed with pairing off (either in fact or in fantasy) ever since.

Travel
Boomers travel the world discovering themselves in cross-cultural experience.

Food
This generation are proud of their exposure to a huge range of ethnic foods. Coffee is named as ‘heavily symbolic’. And not just any coffee. Expresso coffee in its many forms.

Information
“They consume information as voraciously as they have previously consumed Thai food, experiential holidays, sexual partners or cars”.

Personal Growth
This movement in the 1970s provided a psychological culture of ‘do your own thing’, leaving a legacy of self-centredness. Newly ‘aware’ Boomers leave their spouses to ‘discover themselves’. Mackay admits that many found help in personal-growth courses but remains scathing.

Emotional Hazards of Over-Parenting
Mackay concludes his section on the Stress Generation by exploring their parenting of the next generation.

It’s hard to say if Mackay’s Boomer focus groups were more self-critical than the others, or if Mackay is allowing his generational bias to seep through. The other possibility is that Boomers present different issues when talking to an older researcher. It would be fascinating to conduct some testing on the impact of a researcher’s age on any focus group.

Either way, it is clear that Mackay’s chapter on the Boomers is not kind. He has these people pining for the lost values of their parents but revelling in their materialist lifestyle.

Living Room Community Online in Melbourne

This afternoon I’ve had a chance to connect up with the wider blogging community. The rest of the family are at work (daughter), at play (son) and at a Tupperware party (wife & daughter).

Darren Rowse, at Living Room in Melbourne, talks about the BYO worship night held this last week, on the theme of ‘home’. Living Room look as though they’re very similar to the approach we take at Pacific Parks.

“We are a small group of people seeking to live life to the full and to join Jesus in his life giving process in the inner north of Melbourne. We call ourselves Living Room because we want to be a life giving space where people connect with the teachings of Jesus in natural and culturally relevant ways.
We have no building or formal Sunday service but we’re working at growing in our relationship with Jesus, building community and living out our faith in practical ways in our local area.
We try to keep things pretty simple when it comes to life, faith and how we work as a group and we hope that this is reflected in this site which we hope gives you a quick glimpse of who we are and how we run.”

The Living Room Couch I like it. The idea of meeting in a natural environment where conversation flows. It’s the kind of environment in which Matthew would have hosted his party for Jesus. It’s the kind of environment in which Jesus met with Simon the Pharisee and had his feet ‘annointed’ by one of the local women.

When I was working at Robina Surfers Paradise Uniting I tried to introduce the living room feel into the Sunday night worship experience. We put a leather couch up the front each night, and had our interviews on that couch. A bit like the feel provided by chat shows on television.

I learnt from that setting however that people who go to churches generally expect an up-front ‘behind the lecturn’ experience. People go to cafes and living rooms for a ‘sitting on the couch informal conversation’ experience.

Just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to Yvonne McRostie, a Uniting Church minister in Ashgrove, Brisbane, whose new Christian community has taken the same name “Living Room”. Yep – she’s using the same name as the Melbourne group and working on the same concept. Isn’t it great when Baptist and Uniting networks can borrow from one another!

Darren RowseDarren Rowse, of the Living Room, is also a professional blogger. By that I mean he develops blogs and makes them pay for his time by contracting space to advertisers. The Living Room has a few of Darren’s blogs connected to it: Digital Photography Blog (updated daily), Athens Olympics Blog (finished September 2004), Printers Blog (last posts were December 28, 2004), Camera Phones (updated daily) and ProBlogger (daily tips for people engaging with professional blogging). Also in the family is the unofficial Australian Idol fan blog. Darren Wright, fellow youth worker, is the prolific writer on this site though I notice that he’s not promising any commentary on the X Factor this year.

Stanley Grenz passes on legacy of generous orthodoxy

Just caught up on the news that Stanley Grenz has died. At Paul Fromont’s “Prodigal Kiwi” blog:

What a shock. Stanley would have been 55 this year.

Stanley Grenz is known for his contribution to a progressive Evangelical engagement with postmodernity in the United States.

Stanley Grenz and his books

Stanley Grenz books

Primer on Postmodernism, 1996. The first chapter gives us the beautiful metaphor for modernism and postmodernism – Star Trek as a series. The first series – boldness and certainty. The second series – humility, subtlety and uncertainty. It’s on the list for this research blog.

Theology for the Community of God, 2000. An exploration of the challenges of doing theology, drawing on a wide range of traditions. I’ll be exploring this at some point at God Post.

Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era, 2000. Here Stanley’s paving the way for a more ‘generous orthodoxy’ in which Christians can get over the polarisation between Evangelical and Liberal.

Rediscovering the Triune God, 2004. An exploration of trinitarian theology – forming the basis for a relational approach to Christian faith.

I’m glad Stanley managed to publish so much of his thinking. I’m sad that I won’t get the chance to meet him in person, or dialogue with him online, or see his ongoing development of theology.

The official site of Stanley Grenz is at http://www.stanleyjgrenz.com/

Bad Egg Scam Warnings

Egg is a British online banking firm, offering banking, investments and insurance. They have won recognition of their online efforts to cater for the needs of disabled people. Another outstanding part of their online presence is the set of three quicktime videos, featuring their warnings about con artists, encouraging people to take charge of their own money, using Egg online access. “(The adverts) are about the conmen and women – scam artists – who could try to separate you from your hard-earned cash. Shot in spoof documentary-style and directed by Academy Award nominated documentary director Brett Morgen, they give a dramatic insight into the minds of these unscrupulous characters. Just watch out for them in real life….”

EGG warns against Turf Conman

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