I've just been for a walk in the park with the dog.

A group of teenage girls was practising netball, with some female supervisors.

I was the only male around.

Suddenly, I heard a girl's voice calling out 'Hi Dad!' followed by teenage laughter. It certainly got my attention (BTW I wasn't), and the joke was on me.

Now that I've got *your* attention I want to add a footnote to the Fundamentalist, Evangelical and Liberal post.

For fundamentalists, anyone to their left tends to be 'liberal', a pejorative qualifier. and the more hard-line the fundamentalism, the less certain they are that anyone like these 'liberals' can be a 'Christian'.

I'm apparently not a Christian for one - or more - of them because my prayerful Mormon relative is deemed by me to be a Christian. I'm not a Christian because I believe correct doctrine (*the* hallmark of a True Christian as I read their posts) is only one third of what it means for me to follow Jesus (I'd put love and obedience higher, 'cos the demons and Pharisees - ancient and modern - assent to 'correct doctrinal beliefs'). Read the whole first epistle of John for these three emphases.

Back to doctrine. Everyone who's been around here knows my friend Mark Tindall. He tends to repeat himself. You begin to read his repetitive quotes from Spong, or Fowler, or even Josh McDowell (using a conservative to beat the conservatives!), and you stop reading any further. People who are not fundamentalists get a bit of perverse delight in his sending those people up (FUNNYmentalists or fundaMENTALists etc.). Mark's what you might call a 'liberal evangelist', the evangelism birthed out of his struggle with ecclesiastical and theological and authoritarian stupidity, as he's perceived it.

But because I call Mark my friend (which he is, and that friendship is growing by the week) people with a fundamentalist mind-set have therefore believed that I largely agree with his doctrinal paradigm.

I don't.

I believe Jesus was God: and Jesus' deference to his father-God makes no difference whatsover to my holding to the traditional faith of the Church in that respect.

I've already written several critiques of theological liberalism (see e.g. http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/9090.htm ) and I want my fundamentalist friends (yes!) to understand that in every generation since Christ various liberalisms ('revisionisms') have appeared, and within a generation or three have been discarded as nonsense. There are sound reasons for that: each generation's liberals tend to be locked into the prevailing philosophy/ideology (in ours postmodernism, or redaction studies or whatever).

I believe that a liberal like Spong in his quest to make the church 'relevant' is having the opposite effect, except for intellectually-inclined Baby Boomers and GenXers who've already given up on the Church and the Faith, and get some comfort from having a bishop supply a rationale.

Now don't get me wrong: I like Spong. When he was Bishop of Newark his diocesan committees' minutes were posted on their website. He's honest, transparent, an original thinker in some respects and a brilliant telegenic communicator. I loved it when he told an Australian TV audience how much he loved his wife, who was in the audience, and both of them got emotional!

But basically he's got it wrong. (Again Google our website for lots of articles on him and his approach).

Back to admiring Spong as a person. My fundamentalist friends can't understand that. You reject friendship with heretics, as well as rejecting their doctrine.

Which all reminds me of the Grench who stole Christmas (Dr Seuss): he did it because he had a heart a couple of sizes too small...

Prayer: Lord, deliver me from having a small heart. Please enlarge it to embrace the friendship (as Jesus taught us by his life and example) of people 'unlike' me. May I begin to see that our 'little systems - whether liberal or fundamentalist - have their day; they have their day and cease to be.' Amen

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Shalom!

Rowland Croucher