St Matthew’s, Manly is the ‘church of the open door’. The policy saved John Nicholls, who was planning to end his life until he was spotted by an old friend at the door of the church who invited him in.

Sydney has 50 ministry vacancies but only 35 new clergy set to graduate next year. Mission target means one in ten young Anglicans will need to train for ministry in the next seven years.

The Deaf finally have much-needed access to God’s word on DVD via the production of the first major Bible translation into Auslan, Australian sign language.

When Nathan Tasker entered the Southern Hemisphere’s richest song writing competition, he knew the 1000 other entrants would be tough to beat. So it was a ‘massive surprise’ when he heard his own song on the Pacific Songwriting Competition website when he checked last month to see who had been awarded Songwriter of the Year.

Howard Newby had made a commitment to God, but was too shy to go to church. He had just seen The Passion of the Christ, and his fiancé, Michelle, attended a Bible study and was challenging her husband-to-be to become a Christian.

The Rev Mourad Omrani (not his real name), an Arabic minister in the Georges River Region, can’t say where the medical centre is that he meets in with four Arabic speakers for Bible study.

We are in a time of immense change, and we all know that it’s hard to bring the gospel to our region. So I wanted to share some of our latest thinking with you.

In the 41 years Beverley Donald has lived in the Fairfield area, she has observed the growth of many small ethnic based Christian churches, including ten Spanish language churches, and a decline in numbers attending the mainline churches.

It is a tough mission field in the multicultural region of the Georges River. Here Southern Cross continues its series on the new model of parish life cycles by looking at the parish of Belmore.

Letters from the July 2005 Southern Cross

After returning from ten years serving as CMS missionaries in Egypt, Mark, Annette and their four children, have packed their bags to leave Australia once again.

Eleven years is a long time – too long for Elizabeth and Malcolm Richards.

A Sydney Presbyterian minister who claims death threats have been made against him and his family has appealed for help on Anglican Media’s website.

The first female National Director of the Anglican Board of Mission, Linda Kurti, hopes to build on the organisation’s historic work among disadvantaged men, women and children in remote communities in Australia and overseas.

Anglicare’s emergency relief food supplies across Sydney are at an all time low. However, the dire situation for Anglicare’s Rooty Hill office has been averted thanks to the initiative of one Sydney parish.

Sydney Diocese’s top ethicist has cautiously welcomed the softening of the Howard Government’s stance on the mandatory detention of asylum seekers.

Aboriginal Anglican pastor Ray Minniecon says a storm is brewing that threatens to destroy gospel ministry to Redfern’s Indigenous population along with 40,000 years of Aboriginal culture.

For 70 years, Anglican and Presbyterian Church leaders have been battling a ‘cult-like’ church-within-a-church. “In the end, I was told I had ‘a demonic spirit of manipulation and control’ inherited from a great aunt who was the founder of a well-known Christian mission.” And so Philippa Thorn, a life-long church-goer and mother of four, was cast aside from the ‘Fellowship’ group she had belonged to for 40 years.

The Big Brother season has begun. The human zoo is open for inspection, and the usual bunch of annoying but oddly fascinating wannabes are about to become as familiar to us as the people we live with. Our celebrity obsession reveals what we really think it means to be human, says MICHAEL JENSEN

Devotion to the mother of Jesus and the dogmas and practices that have arisen to support such piety have been the cause of division in the Church for centuries, especially between Catholics and Protestants.

“Southern Cross is just a load of propaganda” – the words came hurtling across my dinner table a few weeks ago. From a theological college lecturer, no less. I gave a feeble answer – much like this column – but I knew instantly they had a point.

Ministry needs ministers… and youth ministry is no exception. The desperate need for more youth ministers means parishes should recruit within their own church.

St Luke’s, Mosman is a liturgy-friendly parish committed to evangelism and connecting ‘faith to life’

Modern spirituality invents its own standards and rituals, but the Bible stands as an authority over all traditions writes ARCHBISHOP PETER JENSEN.

The latest re-imagining of the Batman myth focuses on how the caped crusader came to be. What is it that leads a man to don a silly costume, including pronounced pointy ears, and swan about at night biffing bad guys? Surely such behaviour is the domain of the mentally unhinged? Well, yes.

No, this is not a film about wedgies but a surprisingly enjoyable chick flick about four teenaged friends and a mysterious pair of jeans.

Dreams are a fascinating and mysterious part of our lives. They can reveal prophecies and promises. They can cause us to wake in terror. In our sleeping state we experience stories and images that can frighten or delight. In our waking moments the memory of these nightly visions slips away from us. In Elizabeth Knox’s spellbinding novel, Dreamhunter, dreams are more than a physiological part of sleep they are a cultural phenomenon.

Feminists would be appalled at this book. The central premise, that every woman needs a man named Jesus, is promoted by every one of the 21 contributors.

Fractured Families gives an assessment of a group called ‘the Fellowship’ which is mainly based in Melbourne. It had its origins in an intense spiritual movement in the Sydney University Evangelical Union in the 1930s and 40s.