by Australian Christian women. Since September 2015

“But do you really think the miracles in the Bible happened?” This question was posed to me by my friend Edith. She is courageous, generous, kind and open. She’s also an atheist. She’s fine with me having a faith, but in her experience, Christians are not well-considered, thoughtful people. I think until she met me she had not really met a Christian who could ‘give an answer for the hope they had’. So she’s curious about how I can be a Christian and interested in the sciences

Nehemiah Chapter 4 is a beautiful story of God rebuilding ruins. All the people of God had been gathered and they began to rebuild the walls around Jerusalem that had been laying in ruins – but they face some strong opposition to the rebuilding. This was not just a little wall that they were building, it wasn’t a picket fence around the city. The wall was going to be 12m high, 2.5m wide and have 34 watchtowers. Yet the wall began as ruins that had been laying in disrepair and

Influential pastor, author, and theologian John Piper was recently asked for his thoughts on the tsunami of powerful men exposed for sexual abuse in the wake of the crimes of Harvey Weinstein. The question referenced a past article that Piper summed up as follows: “egalitarian assumptions in our culture, and to a huge degree in the church, have muted — silenced, nullified — one of the means that God has designed for the protection and the flourishing of women. It has silenced

We women often complain about the absence of our stories in our country's history, especially in the history of the church. The truth is that extraordinary women were doing great things but unless told it takes only a few decades for their stories to be lost. Linda Banks understands this and, with her husband Robert, has produced a book about one such woman who by the grace of God changed the lives of hundreds of Chinese boys who lived with blindness. Amy Oxley Wilkinson was

The realisation that a loved one has Dementia is heartbreaking. As we travelled along the road of mum’s Dementia, it was hard for us to find our way. It was hard to live through this grief. A grief for things-that-are, and things-that-will-be. How do you grieve when someone is still alive? How do you rejoice in a life that is diminishing? Simple joys seep away as recognition is lost, words evaporate, consciousness disappears? How do you care for someone who is lost in a frig

Tell us a little about yourself: The first thing you need to know about me, is that I plan my day around coffee. It used to be custom in Turkey that if a husband did not provide his wife with enough coffee, that was grounds for divorce. Also, I like puns. I’m the Associate Academic Dean at Morling College, where I lecture in Church History and Old Testament. I’m slowly working towards my PhD on Song of Songs. I’m an indolent poet. I’m married to Will (who provides me with ple

Tell us a little about yourself I have worked as a journalist for the past 18 years, reporting on topics ranging from local politics through to photography and home decorating. I blog about "life, love, and spirituality" at It's a God thing... and enjoy taking acting classes in my spare time. I'm also half-way through a Bachelor of Ministry at Morling College. I'm married with two school-aged children, and we recently moved to Sydney's south-west to serve a church in Beverly

What kind of woman comes to mind when you think of a Holy, or a Godly woman? I recently asked this question to several of my friends and these were some of first words they said, modest, pious, chaste, and passive. When I asked myself this question I kind of imagined a painting of Mother Mary. A renaissance era type, where Mary has very soft facial features, kind eyes, and her head is just delicately tilted to one side. These responses and imageries left me to wonder, is our

Here in Tanzania, when you become a Christian, you give up drinking alcohol. There’s little cultural distinction between drunkenness and social drinking or drinking in moderation, so becoming a Christian requires a wholesale rejection of alcohol. Meanwhile, many Australian Christians see no issue with drinking alcohol where it does not lead to drunkenness and even point out that the Bible makes the distinction: surely when Paul tells Timothy to take a little wine for his stom

My hackles always rise a little when people make statements about “what the Bible says about women” because (at least from my reading) outside of the story that Jesus died for all sinners, including both women and men, the Bible doesn’t follow a narrow cultural narrative defining women to a particular role. Which makes sense, right? Since we are half the planet, we are diverse and we live out our lives in the unique situations that God has placed us with the individual person