Category Archives: college

Shout-out to our church fathers!

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So I have spent the last few days studying for exams and yesterday was a day of Church History study.


While I am still trying to ‘connect the dots’ of knowledge into a solid picture of the 1st – 4th Century Christian church I do know that we owe a lot of thanks to the men and woman would fought so hard for the truth.

Take for example the great Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria in the 4th century. He spent 42 years fighting his cause, 17 of them in exile – he was exiled 5 times! His cause was something that caused great instability in the East of the Roman Empire. And it basically boils down to something we take for granted – that God the father and God the son are consubstantial.
Athanasius was eventually vindicated in 381AD with the adoption of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which is a creed we still say in our churches today. Sadly this happened 8 years after Athanasius died.
So I guess my point is this – praise God for our fathers who did great things!

The Niceno-Constantinopolitian Creed (aka Nicene Creed)

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things came into being, who because of us men and because of our salvation came down from the heavens, and was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried, and rose again on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures, and ascended to the heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, of whose kingdom there will be no end;
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is together worshipped and together glorified, who spoke through the prophets; in one holy catholic and apostolic church. We confess one baptism for the remission of sins; we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Amen.

A new look at Jonah

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One of the great things about choosing not to study Hebrew this year (apart from not having to learn Hebrew) is the subject us non-hebrew student do instead called Biblical Exegesis and Exposition. Its a long name for a great subject. This term Bill Salier has been taking us through the great Old Testament book of Jonah.

I have been loving looking in detail at a story that I thought was familiar – turns out while I knew some of the content I had little appreciation for the amazing way this narrative shows so clearly the compassion of God for his people.
God’s compassion then stands next to the un-compassion (is that a word??) of Jonah. When God showed compassion on Jonah he praises God and declares ‘salvation comes from the Lord’! But he does not want Nineveh to share in this salvation. When he sees God’s compassion for the Ninevites he says he is angry enough to die!
The book ends with the unanswered question from God – ‘should I not care about the great city of Nineveh??’
This amazing book poses 2 questions to us – Am I like Jonah?? and Who are my Ninevites??

Community Living

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Well here I am bursting into the world of blogging – mostly thanks to an afternoon of Greek study and my overwhelming talent of procrastination.


So what does a first year theology student blog about. I have no idea! Tonight I find myself with nothing much to say but here are some thoughts I had a few weeks ago about community living.

Today my first year group (a group of 8 first years who are amazing and get to sit and chat once a week) got me thinking about life in community, and specifically Moore Theological College as community.
It seems this is an issue that is very intense for some people, while others ask ‘what’s the big deal’?
And what is the big deal for me?? Community has amazing benefits – take for example the community I have with the 7 others in my first year group. We are a group made up of 2 single girls, 1 single guy, 3 married guys whose wives do not study and 1 married couple who both study. Among us are people from Queensland, South Australia, various places in NSW and across Sydney and some haven’t moved at all. Some have come from MTS, some have come from secular work. Some have been Christians all their lives and some only a few years. Some have even come from outside the Anglican Church (shocking i know ;)). Our experiences of life, college and community are all different and yet we are able to sit in a room and share ideas and thoughts and, more importantly, our own hurts and joys. Regardless of our different opinions we do this without judgment because we are unified in Christ and are all seeking to love and care for each other. We can sit and be honest with each other knowing that we are safe inside our community. This is an amazing privilege and hopefully an insight into the benefit of Christian community (albeit a small one). And as the community grows so does the scale of the benefits and joys.
But…. the same is true of the downfalls. The bigger community gets the more obvious its disadvantages are. Sometimes at college I feel as though the solution to my problems would be to get away from community – and as a college resident this can be hard to do. Not only do you study, eat and live in community, but walking the streets of Newtown you so frequently see other college students and faculty it seems that the whole suburb in an extension of the community.
And this big brother-ish feel is but one of the many facets of college community life. This didn’t even rate a mention in our discussion today and in fact was not even what I had intended to write about. What we did talk about was the expectations we had of college before we came, the reality of those expectations and relationships between married students and single students.
So the question I really want to ask is this – if community is intended to bring about unity, how can we stop segregation within a group of people who are so obviously different when the basic principle that like attracts like is true even here???