From the Editor

On Sunday February 28th this year hundreds of people lined the beach and cliffs
of the Bayside where I live, armed with cameras and binoculars, waiting for
the wave from the Chile earthquake. It was a touching display of our desire as
humans for connection in a global society.

I went on a journey last year, which was why Common Theology was in recess. I called
it my ‘oasis year’. One of our sponsors remarked that an oasis sounded rather a boring
place to be – which I suppose it could be, if one had not slogged for months through the
desert to get there.

Since the mid-‘nineties there has been a rash of books reinterpreting the world – but
with a lens so large it may explain why few of us, individually, could have seen the
whole picture of the future. Only now is a language emerging into the vernacular so that
our culture can re-examine our place in Creation; so that those of us on what appeared
to be a solitary pilgrimage are able, with increasing fluency, to share the experience with
other pilgrims – who miraculously appear out of the mists of confusion and who turn out
to be travelling in the same direction.

It occurs to me that the current situation in the world is not unlike it was in South
Africa in the 1980s. We were few – people who struggled to see clearly in a dense moral
fog. Sometimes (as a white person) one wondered if one was totally mistaken, or mad,
to take on an entire system (apartheid) and claim that one was the only person in step, the
only one to see that the nation was on the road to perdition.

For me, as I reflect on a sabbatical year in the crucible of God’s redeeming work in
my life, I wonder if that great struggle in South Africa was a training ground for another
struggle which we are all engaged in whether we like it or not – a bid for the future of
the human species.

I don’t mean just our concern for the health of the planet (that of course is crucial to
our survival), but the birth of a new way of being in the world. I note that it seems to be
the North Americans who are writing most about a synthesis of ancient and new wisdom
which may lead to a new way for humanity as a whole.

Meg Wheatley’s contribution to the debate on a new way of living has been
significant and her views on leadership are featured in the following pages.
For years now I have been attempting to live differently, in my small way, here on
the eastern edge of this little continent. It is both exciting and confronting to find that all
over the world during the past thirty years others have been quietly attempting the same
sort of thing.

My spiritual director, the late great Francis Cull, told me in 1991 that there was a
new tide of the Spirit in the world which did not entirely fit into the old geography of
the institutional churches. My father had foreshadowed the same message in 1968. I
do believe these two priests’ prophetic insight of a new vision for Christianity is now
coming into sight.

A ‘local’ who has spent many years in the USA, Dr Val Webb, gave her own
perspective on ‘progressive Christianity’ as it is emerging in Australia to a company of
people searching for new ways of being ‘church’, in Brisbane in March (page 10).
From readers’ letters during the past year it appears that many share my view that
our job now in Common Theology is to help recover the language for the new dialogue of
emergent Christianity.

Maggie Helass