Catholic and Uniting Church Christmas messages highlighted the plight
of asylum seekers as symbols of suffering.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/25/1072308629592.html
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CHURCHES reported full houses at Christmas services today, as Australians
heeded the call to embrace religious values.
The president of the Uniting Church of Australia, Dean Drayton, said he was "deeply concerned about the conditions under which asylum seekers are detained, especially the fact that children are involved".
The Reverend Dr Drayton said the story of Christ's childhood is the tale
of a "Port Hedland sort of place", with the holy family being "forced to flee"
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/25/1072308630568.html
Many church leaders also invoked the painful lives of the world's refugees.
"Jesus with his family experienced the plight of the refugee. Yet it
was this Christ who preached hospitality and justice for the oppressed," the
Uniting Church's Reverend Sue Gormann said.
The spirit of Christmas will be celebrated around Sydney with free lunches and gifts for the city's less fortunate.
Over 3,000 people are expected to gather in the grounds of the Ashfield Uniting Church in Sydney's inner-west for its annual traditional Christmas Day lunch.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/25/1072308616444.htmlBack in Australia, the spirit of Christmas was celebrated with free lunches and gifts for the country's less fortunate.
Over 3,000 of the country's needy gathered at Ashfield Uniting Church in Sydney's inner-west for its annual traditional Christmas Day lunch.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/25/1072308628915.htmlJesus fed the multitude with seven loaves and seven fishes, but yesterday volunteers needed a little more substance to serve 10,500 Christmas lunches to the poor, the homeless and the lonely.
This modern multitude dined on ham, chicken, salads, plum pudding and ice-cream as 900 Christian and non-Christian helpers forsook or delayed their own family celebrations to bring some cheer and companionship to those on whom fortune has not shone brightly.
"The homeless and the lonely come because we make them feel this is their home for the day, that we are their family," said Brother Gerry Burke at the Matthew Talbot Hostel in Woolloomooloo, where more than 500 found a meal and friendship.
At the Uniting Church in Ashfield, the Exodus Foundation served 3000 meals.
"No one is too poor to spend Christmas with us," said Rev Bill Crews, who began the custom 18 years ago.
Four thousand were guests of the Wayside Chapel in King Cross, the Salvation
Army served 1000 meals in the grounds of the Redfern Public School and the
Wesley Mission fed 2000 at 50 centres across NSW.
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Dining under a marquee in Hughes St, King Cross, 76-year-old Pat Cann told a young American volunteer handing out presents she would like one for her four-year-old grandson.
"He's in Queensland - I hope to see him next week," said Pat, who lives alone at Mt Colah and caught a train into the city.
Ron Rochester, 59, who lives in parks around Kings Cross and Rushcutters Bay, has been coming to the Wayside Chapel Christmas lunch for about 20 years: "They're good people," he said.His mate, Douglas Blair, 50, told a helper he didn't want greens, just ham and tomato . . . "The food's real good," he added.
For volunteer Debbie Chadwick, 30, of Greenwich, it was a new experience. Normally, she would have eaten Christmas dinner with her mother and three siblings at Campbelltown.
"Myself and my family have got enough, so I decided to do something different at Christmas," she said. "I'm glad I did. It's been much more pleasurable than I expected."
But few among the multitude realised that their host, the Reverend Ray Richmond, who has ministered at the Wayside Chapel for 13 years, was sharing the loneliness many sought to escape.
For the first time in 36 years of marriage Mr Richmond was alone at Christmas. Elaine, his wife and chapel's administrator, was in St Vincent's Hospital, while his four children and six grandchildren are in Queensland or America.
"It helps to be among friends," Mr Richmond said.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/25/1072308630689.htmlReverend Dr Gordon Moyes, Superintendent of Wesley Mission, the Uniting Church's welfare centre, said 5000 people had attended church services across the Christmas period.
"We're actually having Christmas lunch in 460 buildings and that includes hospitals, nursing homes, centres for the unemployed and the disabled," he said.
In Melbourne, Uniting Church moderator Reverend Sue Gormann used her Christmas message to compare the predicament faced by contemporary refugees with that of the first Christian family.
"Jesus with his family experienced the plight of the refugee. Yet it was this Christ who preached hospitality and justice for the oppressed," she said.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,8254341%255E421,00.htmlhttp://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.jsp?sectionid=1274&storyid=684960
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NOTE: A UMTV report is also available. By Nancye Willis*
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (UMNS) - A Web site called "Interview with God," created by a United Methodist Sunday school teacher, is sweeping the Internet, attracting millions of visitors. Created by Reata (pronounced "Rita") Strickland, the imaginary conversation with the Almighty uses a combination of landscape photographs, inspirational text and Shockwave animation. Strickland belongs to Romulus United Methodist Church, located in a rural area near Tuscaloosa. The message of the "interview" is a simple one, touching on such subjects as love, self-worth, relationships and forgiveness, and including God's hopes for his children. An example: "That they live as if they'll never die and die as if they've never lived." A Web site designer at the University of Alabama, Strickland originally set out in the spring of 2001 to develop a site for the United Methodist Church's Tuscaloosa District offices. "I was working on the site, and I said, 'This needs something.'" She had seen a PowerPoint presentation of "Interview with God" and had been struck by it. "The words to 'Interview with God' are very simple," Strickland says, "and yet they have such a power to them. When I first read them, they really touched me deeply. I wanted to do something with these words." When the opportunity presented itself, she knew what to do. "I'll put the 'Interview with God' on here," she recalls thinking. Believing she could improve the visual presentation she'd seen, she developed her own slide show. Pleased with the result, she was not prepared for the reaction. "I expected maybe 20, 25 people in our little town to see this," she says. The district site was quickly overwhelmed with traffic. "Within a week, the site had crashed," she recalls. "I called the people who maintain the site, and they said, 'We've had over 500,000 hits within the last week.'" Strickland moved the animation to her personal site, www.reata.org. Word spread by e-mail lists, and the number of visits continued to build. Within a month, 2.4 million people had seen it, and two and half years later, more than 20 million people have found their way to her online devotion. Volunteers have translated the text into 13 languages. Strickland still marvels at the 15,000 hits the site receives each day. It draws "people from all over the world - from China, Japan, Russian, Europe, everywhere," she says. "I want to talk to them and ask, 'Where do you live?' 'How did you find this?' 'What do you think?'" The reactions of Web visitors are gratifying, she says. "A 94-year-old man e-mailed me, and he said that he did not believe in God until he viewed this." Keeping up with the demand requires 40 gigabytes of bandwidth daily, putting a strain on the Strickland budget. To help cover costs of roughly $400 a month, Strickland is selling "Interview with God" screensavers, posters and T-shirts. She and her husband, Steve, a part-time local pastor serving the Romulus and Pleasant Grove United Methodist churches, believe the Web site's popularity is the result of a higher power. " I cannot explain it any other way," she says. "I did my part and God did the rest," she says of the phenomenon. "This speaks to power - the power of words, the power of the Internet and the power of God." http://www.theinterviewwithgod.com/ http://www.reata.org/interview2.html http://www.christiananswers.net/gospel/interviewwithgod.html
