Update given on 26th June

Dear friend of Phil and Heather Baker and of Riverview Church

The process of recovery for Phil continues with no significant change – there are some good days and others that are more challenging. The serious complications Phil experienced after the operation, on the evening of the 12th, is the primary reason for this extension of time in recovery. Encouragingly, the medical team continues to be very optimistic about Phil's recovery but have reiterated the need for patience.

On the basis of this medical advice, we may not be in a position to give further updates for a period of weeks. We appreciate your understanding and patience in this. Again, many thanks from Heather and the family for your continuing prayers.

Update given on 19th June

Dear friend of Phil and Heather Baker and of Riverview Church

Phil has been moved out of ICU and into a ward area. He is comfortable and settled.

He is mostly asleep – with short bouts of wakefulness – and so we are praying for him

to wake fully out of sedation into a full and clear consciousness. We are also

continuing to ask that hospital visits be limited to family and some identified

individuals. Thanks and love to all from Heather.

 

 

Update given on 16th June

Dear friend of Phil and Heather Baker and of Riverview Church
 
Phil has had 3 full days of stability which is very encouraging and for which we are all very thankful to God. The medical team will now seek to bring Phil out of anaesthesia very slowly and carefully as his recovery continues. It is uncertain how long the entire process of recovery and restoration may take.
 
In the meantime, Heather wishes to express her sincere gratitude for the prayers offered for Phil's safety and recovery. Indeed, if you happen to think of Phil please use that as a spiritual prompt to pray for him. A team of intercessors is also in place to assist and support Heather in any specific prayer requests.
 
As the people of Riverview Church, we will continue to walk this journey with Phil and Heather and their family, but we will also honour their leadership by not being distracted from our mission which is both our privilege and responsibility – that is, to lead people to Christ and build them into a worshipping community.  
 
Thank you again for your prayers and support.

Update given at 10pm on Friday, the 12th June

Dear friend of Phil and Heather Baker and of Riverview Church

This evening whilst in recovery, Phil experienced some serious complications. The medical team intervened in an effort to control swelling and pressure. It is appropriate to say that Phil is in a critical condition and the next 2-3 days are very important.

We would ask for continuing prayer – particularly throughout this immediate weekend of the 13th-14th June – for Phil's safety and recovery. Please also continue to uphold Heather and the family in your prayers.

Update given at 4pm on 12th June

Dear friend of Phil and Heather Baker and of Riverview Church

We have just received the wonderful news that Phil's operation has been completed

and that the surgeons were able to remove the tumour in its entirety.

The medical team has confirmed that it is a meningioma and that it is benign. Phil

moved around quite a bit as he came out of anaesthetic – this is encouraging as it

appears that everything is working. They have completed another CT scan and it is

clear – the tumour is completely gone. They will be sedating Phil overnight to keep

him still.

Please join Heather, the family and all of us at Riverview Church in giving thanks to

our God for his mercies. We continue to pray for Phil's complete recovery and

restoration and invite you to join with us in that.

Many thanks for your prayers, encouragement and support.

Update given on 10th June

Dear friend of Phil and Heather Baker and of Riverview Church

On behalf of Phil and Heather, may I extend to you their sincere gratitude for the

messages of support that have been given and the prayers for restoration that have

been offered.

Surgery has been confirmed for the morning of Friday, the 12th June. All of us who

call Riverview Church our home would ask that you join us in prayer for Phil's safety

during it and complete recovery after it.

Many thanks.

Dear friend of Phil and Heather Baker and of Riverview Church …
The leadership of Riverview Church announced over the weekend of the 30th-31st
May that Phil Baker, our Senior Pastor, had fallen ill while on holidays in Denpasar in
Bali. We prayed at that time for his restoration.
Riverview Church seeks to be a place that speaks truth and encourages faith – both in
the good times and in the hard times – and we are now in a place where we can update
you more fully on what has transpired since then.
The original nature of Phil's illness had been in the form of a type of seizure. He
recovered not long after this event but some preliminary tests since conducted in
Denpasar – particularly a CT scan – found something of concern. However, this
preliminary testing needed to be confirmed and clarified via an MRI.
Phil and Heather arrived back in Perth on Tuesday evening, the 2nd of June, and it was
felt prudent to take him straight to hospital. He has been in hospital all week awaiting
an MRI test.
On Friday morning, the 4th of June, leaders from this church gathered – in accordance
with James 5:13-16 – to anoint Phil with oil and pray for his restoration and healing.
On the afternoon of the same day, the MRI was completed. The results of this test
came through on the afternoon of Saturday, the 5th of June, and the news is both
encouraging and challenging.
Phil has a spherical tumour located in the back left of his brain.
The encouraging news is that the attending neurosurgeon suspects that it may be a
meningioma – which is not a brain tumour but a tumour of the meninges (which is the
membrane that covers the brain). What makes this encouraging is that meningiomas
are, in almost all cases, completely benign. They can be removed and the patient can
make a full recovery.
The challenging news is that it is significant in size and is located in such a place that
it will require delicate skill for the surgeons to excise it.
Surgery has been scheduled for this coming Friday, the 12th of June.
We, at Riverview Church, do not believe it is a coincidence that the theme of this and
the next month in the life of our church is "Faith: Expectant." We, along with Phil and
Heather, have decided as individuals and as a church to step forward into this
challenge – that we will speak faith and hope to this mountain rather than passivity
(Matthew 17:20).
On Friday, the 4th of June, as Phil was being anointed with oil and prayed for, two of
our leaders shared scriptures – one from the Old Testament and one from the New
Testament. Paul Morrison recounted the story of David in 1 Samuel 17 who, when
facing a literal giant, ran "toward the battle line to meet him" (v. 48) – not simply
because he was unafraid of the battle but, having already been anointed by Samuel, he
knew that his destiny lay beyond it. Adam Meredith recounted the words of Jesus
when faced with the illness of his friend Lazarus in John 11:4 – "This sickness will
not end in death. No, it is for God's glory so that God's Son may be glorified through
it."
I have spoken with Phil and he has encouraged us to react to this news with courage,
wisdom and a faith-filled trust in God. Phil strongly believes that his time is not over
– that God has much for him still to do – and he's ready for the challenge ahead.
That is Phil's and Heather's prayer and that is our prayer – that we will be a people of
faith and not of fear; that we will hope and not despair; that we will trust in God and
not in circumstances.
The coming days will h ... Continue reading.

Just got back from a theological conference entitled "Trinitarian Theology After Barth" held at Carey Baptist College in Auckland. It was put together wonderfully well by Dr Myk Habets and included such notables as Professors Paul Molnar, Bruce McCormack, Ivor Davidson, Murray Rae etc. It's purpose?

"Karl Barth is acknowledged as the most influential theologian of the modern era. His work has occasioned appreciation, critique, and rejection and works on aspects of his theology threaten to fill entire libraries. It is now possible for scholars to deliberately work in the wake of Barth in areas of constructive trinitarian theology. The Symposium will present essays which exhibit work 'after Barth' in the doctrine of the Trinity. This may involve drawing on aspects of his work directly or that of his students such as Jüngel or Torrance, etc."

A number of interesting and perceptive papers were presented - well done Myk, Carey, Laidlaw-Carey Graduate School and The R.J. Thompson Centre for Theological Studies.

The recent rugby league sexual sargasso sea, has certainly fouled the keel of the NRL these last few days.

Yet in all the reporting I have read nothing about the major culprit.

Night after night our culture is bombarded with programming that teaches  promiscuity is cool and sex is just physical. Shows like 'Entourage', 'Sex and the city', 'Californication and 'Desperate housewives', to name a few are our constant fare. Is it any wonder, values are warped? Add to that the confusion of these same media outlets acting with feigned horror if anyone actually lives out what has been paraded in these multiple 'entertainment' shows.

What we see. What is modeled either off or on screen does leave a mark. If it didn't then advertising would be a waste of money.

So before the libido-driven player and the notoriety-seeking girl is the cool, calculating and value-free media, that will feed the base appetites and then enjoy the ratings from the scandal aftermath.

Moral leadership should be embraced not just by the church, [who are often called wowserish for their efforts] but by the business, political and most of all the media powers of our land.

Ratings and responsibilities.....Get those two in the wrong order and slowly we all begin to see what kind of Australia we are left with.

As you may or not know, Heather and I are taking a bit of a break for much of May. May 1 marked the twenty year mark in our journey of leading Riverview so we are pausing to refresh and reenvision.

Thus my blogging will be on the light side until the beginning of June.

Have heard great reports from the last two weekends. Even some controversy, but as a result people are thinking, debating, talking and praying. Most excellent!

 On the one hand there is too much bland and polite discourse in the church world and on the other, too much caustic judgementalism and diatribe. I hope Riverview continues to be a place where unity and diversity are able to travel together because we all embrace our great quest for maturity. 1 Cor chapters 12 and 14 can only partner with the all important glue of ch 13..

Jarrod McKenna was invited to speak at last night's service here at Riverview Church. Thought you might be interested in some thoughts he had prior to it.

Modern culture tends toward anonymity. We are sealed from the masses who travel in the next lane. Seperated from the commenters on our blogs and webpages. Yet amidst the 'connectedness' of our cyber times the angst and rudeness increases.

For, you see, we can afford to be non-civil. We live close yet are unknown. Thus we can yell at the idiot who cuts us off because we know, and 'it' knows, we will never see each other again. We live out of the 'hitting range'.

Community however forces us to actually interact with those we disagree with or even dislike with minimal friction. So we learn, we understand, in short we empathise.

The yelling at the 'heretics' in the American church, for example, can only be accomplished with this unhelpful combination of internet-fueled multiple opinions with minimum actual real-relational accountability.

Loving your neighbour is easy when we choose who our neighbour actually is. Not, of course, the person who really is next door or in the next seat. They are a little too close for our selfishly-driven comfort.

I think Jesus had in mind the exercise of christian love in the midst of the randomness of a non pick-and-choose community. I think that much of the toxic debate would evaporate if we would re-read and try to live out the story of the good Samaritan.

In short, real proximity and real compassion for the different other.

Just thinking....

POPULATION control is "nothing more than an idea in search of an argument", according to Dominic Lawson of The Times.

Some sections of the British Government are calling for limits to the number of children people can have because sadly, people breathe, which unforgivably, produces CO2.

But, says Lawson ... "Down the years the anti-humans have always been skilful in adapting the fashionable concern of the day to their own peculiar obsession.

"In the 1960s they based their campaign on the notion that there would be mass starvation in Africa and the subcontinent unless those countries learnt to cut back the size of their families; or, worse, they would invade the developed world in their quest for food. The World Population Emergency Campaign ran advertisements in the United States showing a photograph of Africans with grasping hands, with the payoff line "People will not passively starve. They will fight to live". The idea of the campaign was not to feed them but to make them disappear. This is their eternal wail: cull or be killed."

Read the entire article here

Terry Eagleton, writing in the London Review Of Books, takes Dawkins to task in his review of 'The God Delusion'...

".....Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are 'euphemisms' for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn't know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness' is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe's greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don't actually know where he lives....."

Now if the title of this post grabs you, pack your bags and head to Auckland for the conference.

 The reason I am pointing this out is that our very own Haydn is presenting there and will be joined by others like  Bruce McCormack and Ben Myers.

We have a very special presentation on the Sunday night.  As you know we produce multimedia presentations from time to time which are given around the country in business and church settings.

  The latest one we did in Perth was called "The Dark Side of Leadership", and discusses some of the deadly sins and how they apply to life and Leadership.

I will be adapting this presentation for this weekend's Sunday night service at Burswood.

This will be an excellent opportunity to invite colleagues and friends along to Church. The evening will also connect with all of us in what it means to follow Christ on a daily basis both at home and in the marketplace. 

CHINESE WRITER and inventor Lin Yutang said: "When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is setting."

It's a great thought. The moment you allow small vision and small thinking to dominate an activity, you are approving it's decline.

Perhaps my biggest task as a leader is to not become small.

    

I recently spoke on 'The 'Dark side of Leadership'... Talked about a brief clip from the film 'The Downfall', which is an exellent study on the end of the reich and the slow unravelling of a meglomaniacs mind. The inability to 'hear' outside of one's own thoughts and opinions is typical fare in any form of bad leadership.

The guys then had some fun by reshowing the clip, but this time with their own subtitles.....

"The Church which is married to the Spirit of the Age will be a widow in the next."

"There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better."

"Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them."

[If you are interested in the former Dean of St Paul's, here is a cover story from Time magazine sept April 7 1923.]

Just wanted to thank everyone for the outstanding services over the Easter period.

 One longstanding Christian said that the Good Friday service he attended was 'the most impacting church service he had ever been to'.

 Not only did we see nine thousand through the building and over eighty responding to the calls to commit or recommit their lives to following Christ, but nearly sixty were baptized as well.

 Each number is of course a person, a family, a life impacted in some way by the great story of the death and resurrection of Christ. I was thrilled with not only the whole spirit, passion, faith and joy of the Church but also the breadth of the spiritual menu presented. There was something for everyone and the diversity of expression, form, tradition and message shone through. 

 I especially want to thank the many volunteers who served in parking, security, children's ministry, song, music, media, art, stage design and prayer to name a few and of course the many who took the courageous step of actually inviting and bringing friends, neighbours and colleagues.

 This weekend we continue with our Christ Daily theme, so let us all keep this spirit of faith and anticipation of the presence of God.

I'VE just finished reading Theodore Dalrymple's latest book, Not With a Bang But a Whimper. Dalrymple comes up with some great turns of phrase ...

"It turns out that ever-rising consumption is not the same thing as ever-greater contentment."

"One definition of decadence is the concentration on the gratifyingly imaginary to the disregard of the disconcertingly real."

On the welfare state: "We are now a people of the government, for the government, by the government."

"The greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess, might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is."

"To regret religion is to regret our civilisation and its momuments, its achievements and its legacy."

"If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency."

"All the things that men desire are not compatible, and therefore discontent is the lot of Man. A man who understands this will not as a result cease to experience incompatible desires - for example, those for security and excitement - but he will be less embittered that he cannot have everything he wants. An understand of the imperfectibility of life is necessary for both happiness and virtue."

On rap music: "It fills and empties the mind at the same time: fills it with debased notions and empties it of critical faculties."

On the cult of celebrity: "It is the marriage of glamour and banality which both reassures democratic sentiment and stimulates fantasies of luxury."

Emily Levine pointed out in a recent TED talk that economists make the assumption that people always act out of their own 'economic self-interest'.

What has happened then to generosity and acting out of others self-interests?

She uses her Grandmother as the example......  "My grandmother always acted out of other peoples interests, whether they wanted her to or not. If they had had an olympics in martyrdom, my grandmother would have lost on purpose!"

A drunk walks out of a bar and sees a nun standing at a bus stop. He walks up to her and punches her in the face. When she falls to the ground he begins kicking her and screaming, " You're not so tough tonight are you Batman!"

Q: Wanna hear my favorite knock-knock joke?
A: Sure.
Q: Okay, you start it.
A: Knock-knock.
Q: Who's there?