May 29, 2026 | Blog |
This website, The Together Project, was born out of a passion to reach out across the divide between men and women. Not by about asserting the rights of women, nor of men, but by exploring how to relate and work together. How to develop shalom between genders.
Shalom, this Hebrew word for completeness, well-being, abundance, applies to all of life including between genders. In her book The Very Good Gospel, Lisa Sharon Harper describes how God’s “very good” creation is expressed in shalom. She says that when women hide who they are created to be, some of it still peeps through, and men react as if threatened. The shalom that was the Creator’s intention is sadly missing.
As an African American woman, Harper’s ancestors did not know shalom in the plantations of southern slavery. Nor did she know it herself when young and sexually abused. Nor later, when she was excluded from leadership in her church. But she strongly asserts the “very good gospel”, the good news of Jesus, is God’s way of restoring shalom. God can restore all relations: with our Creator, the world, and between men and women. Reconciliation—restoration, recovery—is God’s intention. No wonder we hunger for it.
Utopia
Being brothers and sisters in the church family, the “body” of Christ, is one New Testament picture we are given of shalom between genders. This ideal, this utopia, is important because utopias influence our decisions and actions now.
In my early years as a town planner, we spent much time debating the ideological merits of ideal plans for development of communities, plans whose wonders of perfection were unattainable. And because they were often unrealised, these utopias went out of fashion. The emphasis moved to the process of community development, not the ideal physical plan per se. By uncovering and reconciling conflicting community values, we planners then sought to express the ideal arrangements in physical and economic terms. But only as a second step. We knew that any process needed direction as well as movement. So before we could plan how to get there, we needed to imagine the ideal, the utopia.
There is an Australian TV series that cleverly makes fun of trying to realise a physical utopia, especially a government-sponsored one. In each episode, despite the good intentions of these hard-working public servants, their plans fail. The storyline usually presents the politicians as the wreckers of the process. And because everyone believes the ideals and policies are important, they feel cheated.
Utopias are important even when they are not realised. Because they express our highest aspirations. They affect how we live and what we work towards. Think of a doctor facing a crowded waiting room day after day but dreaming of a paradise free of needy people. Or an economist who envisions a financial market uncomplicated by the behaviour of consumers. Or the designer of a computer system who would rather not take into account the idiosyncrasies of the people who will use her program. Or the teacher whose love of his subject makes him long for receptive blank slates instead of the complicated young people who fill his classroom.
Many of us think our life and work would be straightforward if people did not get in the way! And families or churches could be perfect if there were no awkward individuals.
Sisters and Brothers with a Good Father
Christian Scriptures present us with pictures of potential shalom relationships. The Apostle Paul, for example, uses the social custom of adoption to reinforce the wonder of being loved and embraced by God as our Father. In this first century Greco/Roman practice, a father who did not have a satisfactory heir adopted a lower-born male. He treated him as a fully privileged biological son. And the son was expected to show his gratitude for the benefits received, by being obedient to the one who adopted him.
The adoption metaphor reminds us of the incredible invitation we receive to come close enough to call God by his intimate Aramaic family name, Abba, Father, just as Jesus did. This is the theme of my latest book, Home with the Good Father.
In addition, when we accept this invitation, we get a new set of relationships. We receive a family, brothers and sisters, a church community. In a society where loneliness is epidemic, such acceptance and friendship are so valuable. It is a privilege to be called to belong to each other, to live in love, honouring one another, and to join together in significant endeavours.
Of course, this is an ideal, a utopia. But if some past experience of hurt within a church has left its mark, God’s grace is wide enough to still make belonging possible. The “very good gospel” about Jesus can start us on a pathway to shalom, including shalom between genders. Because God-given shalom is a life enriching process, as well as an ideal.
Jennifer Turner
May 19, 2026 | Blog |
Ebola has broken out again in Africa. Until recently, I was often teaching at conferences for church leaders in many of these countries. Though not in the Congo.
The previous outbreak began in 2014. At a Kenyan conference that year, among sessions on the Bible, counselling, mentoring, leadership, we added a new topic. It was one about a disease that hits hardest on those who have the least knowledge of or protection from it. We spoke about Ebola.
The epidemic had not reached the area of the conference. In fact, London or Paris were closer to the centre of the 2014 outbreak than Kenya was. But we were all aware of the danger. Where health practices and infrastructure are poor, the risk of infection is much higher.
Churches as community centres
Some of our listeners that year thought health matters had no place in a church leadership conference. But Christian churches in Africa are critical for community preparation and response.
I once saw a map of neighbouring Rwanda showing the areas the 3 hospitals in the country served. The map revealed many places with poor access to services. An overlay was added showing the health clinics. These are the usual way people received medical help in remote districts. But there were still many areas not served by trained personnel. Then someone had inked in the local churches. Suddenly, the whole country was covered by centres of potential care and health information. Clearly, the churches could be important to effective preventative health coverage.
For Ebola, however, there is a second way churches and their leaders are critical to an effective response. This devastating epidemic spreads through contact with the secretions of infected people. That includes from the blood and vomit and diarrhoea of those who have just died.
Ill people are usually cared for by their family, and the family is also responsible for preparing the body for burial. Anyone caring for the sick and dying is at extreme risk. To protect everyone, informed leaders are needed to warn, even dissuade families from their usual practices.
Moreover, pastors and their spouses are often the first port of call for anyone in distress in the villages. If people are unexpectedly left without a roof over their head for the night, they expect a bed in the pastor’s house. And church people may be asked to help prepare the body for burial when everyone else has deserted the infected family. So church leaders are a potential source of reliable health information. But they are also open to severe danger as they and their people care for others.
Early Christians risked their lives serving the community
Such risky caring was practised in the first centuries of the Christian church. The widespread plagues of the time were devastating, especially in the late fourth century when up to 30 per cent of Roman citizens died. While anyone with any means within the empire “ran for the hills” out of fear of infection, the Christians stayed and cared for their neighbours. Sometimes they lost their life doing so. Historian Rodney Stark suggests that this way of practising Jesus’ compassion is the reason for the growth in respect and numbers of Christians. He observes that this “obscure, marginalized Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the Western world in a few centuries.”
The Together Project website and this blog celebrate togetherness in Jesus Christ – across the divides of gender, race and social status. But such commitment to mix with and serve each other may have a cost. Let us not be risk adverse! We can learn from our African brothers and sisters.
Jennifer Turner
(Photo 2014)
May 12, 2026 | Blog |
A psychologist studying trauma recently said to me that no human relationship is totally safe. Really? So sad.
My mind went to wondering if our God-relationship can be totally safe. I have known some people who as a result of childhood experience of a distant or cruel parent, have great difficulty considering God their Father. Jesus is OK, they say. But that “father” word stands in the way of their relationship.
Calling God Father is especially precious to me because of the incredible spiritual intimacy I have come to experience over the years. Fortunately, I had the gift of a human father I could trust, who I could be confident wanted only the best for me. But not everyone has that experience. Widespread disclosures of child abuse evidence that.
The Good Father
Early in my pastoral ministry I found some survivors of childhood neglect and abuse were helped by thinking of God as the Good Father. This suggestion follows the model of Jesus calling himself the Good Shepherd. His hearers understood the value of this, even though they knew there were bad shepherds who neglected their flock, mistreated or abandoned them.
I’ve noticed a recent return to songs mentioning God’s holiness. What does it mean to say God is holy? The church I was part of in my childhood had a banner over the archway at the front that said, “Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness”. I puzzled over that many a Sunday. Holiness didn’t seem to me beautiful. I wasn’t sure I had much of it, and drawing attention to God’s holiness just seemed to distance me.
Certainly, God is not of the same substance as us, nor would we want a God just like us. However we define deity, God must be other, separate, requiring respect. What is God is both father and holy? When we hear through Jesus that we are invited into a relationship with this divine Other, can we dare to trust this relationship?
The Holy Guarantee
What I have come to realise is that God being holy is our guarantee that the heavenly Father is safe. The holiness itself is the guarantee. So invited into intimacy with this Other will not harm us, will not cause us evil. A holy God can do no wrong, cannot be careless with us. God is challenging perhaps, always expecting the best of us, but this Good Father will not hurt nor exploit us.
An Australian song says: Who else invites me to call Him Father? Only a Holy God.
And Brian Holliday of Dayspring recently reminded us of the reassuring words penned by Teresa of Avila:
God is always there, if you feel wounded.
God kneels
over this earth like
a divine medic,
and God’s love thaws
the holy in
us.
Jennifer Turner
May 4, 2026 | Blog |
One time hiking the Cape-to-Cape track down the coast of Western Australia we sat on a cliff overlooking the well-known lefthanders surf break near Gracetown. We watched the black clad riders below get up and test the waves. And I wondered whether the Creator of oceans enjoys the surf as much as we do.
In the long history of the earth, surfing with boards is a new phenomenon. Yet we are told in Genesis that on the seventh day of creation God enjoyed all that was made. Does that include surfing? It’s hard to imagine. But we know the waves and the swell were there long before we humans discovered the thrill and the fear of riding them.
The Creator shares the natural world with us
Sharing the natural world with us is apparently part of the Creator’s plan for the universe. It is a great benefit of the relationship of love and acceptance God offers to us. Yet, just as in that Genesis beginning, we too can take for granted this connection. We try to domesticate it with our puny thoughts and desires. The Creator, however, always remains Other, beyond and above us. Awe is the gift that reminds us of this.
Awe is that mixture of wonder and fear we associate mostly with the physical world writ large. But when we look for it, we also find awe is prompted by the exquisitely small. Perhaps a delicate flower or the minute building blocks of cells revealed by electron microscope or biochemistry investigation. We can be “awed” in various ways and places and relationships.
Julia Baird recommended in her awe-focused TV program a couple of years ago a daily “awe walk”. Go out of the house or the office with eyes open and heart alert to the natural world around. I would add, even better to do it with others. And with thanks to the God who desires to share closeness with us.
Awe’s mix of wonder and fear
Awe is a gift because its mixture of wonder and fear gets the balance right. It can take us out of our self-focused struggles and connect us to others, including to the One who created all these things. Psychological research shows that the benefit of awe itself is enhanced by sharing it with others. I described in Finding Your Voice how healing in the isolation of the worst Covid-19 year our neighbours found it to watch the sunsets over the Indian Ocean at the end of our street.
Many of the biblical psalms give us words for enjoying and sharing this gift of awe: “The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.” (Ps 65) And their context brings together what prayer also offers – both awe and intimacy in our God-relationship: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Ps 8)
We dare not presume on this relationship our Father God offers us. Nor on what we can offer to each other as we work together. All we can do is say thank you and enter wholeheartedly into these great sharing opportunities.
Jennifer Turner
May 2, 2026 | Blog |
Someone has said: Sitting at a piano does not create a masterpiece, but you had better be sitting at one when the creative impetus arrives!
After dedicating twelve months to writing my latest book, I’ve been reflecting on the creative process. This time I am not just sharing my story of finding my voice. The words and concepts are more theological. I’ve been reflecting on God’s love and what Scripture tells us about it. So I feel I have had to struggle with the big ideas and how to express them in everyday language. They didn’t just flow.
I always want to find words that connect with people who didn’t grow up with the King James English Bible as I did. People who never have time to think deeply about the things on an ordinary day. And who always feel less than perfect in the presence of a high holy God. Or whose experience of their own father stands in the way of feeling safe with the one Jesus called Father.
When I was younger, I could write non-stop for a three-hour exam about something I knew or had studied. And I still don’t have trouble with a flow of words when I speak. But in this book I passionately long for readers to find the incredible intimacy available with our Good Father. But the words haven’t come readily.
I found some funny quirks when I got to the proof-reading stage. Several times I had quoted a verse of Scripture and given it an NIV or other recent translation reference. But I had actually been using the ancient expressions of the1604 King James version I had learnt in my youth. I’m grateful now for that memorising in the past, because today it is not as easy to remember the lyrics of songs, let alone poetry or Bible verses.
Enjoying The Work
But the big question behind a writing project is always: How does the creative impulse come? Can I do anything to prompt it? Is it up to me anyway when I know this is what I am called to do in this season of my life?
For most of us creativity isn’t automatic. Certainly, writing is work; it is just hard yakka! It requires routines and disciplines. At least, it does for me. Though I have a general outline of where I want a book to go, each chapter takes at least a month to build its content and be satisfied with a first draft. Then it is revising, moving parts around, always being disappointed that it is not like CS Lewis’ or Tim Keller’s writing and searching, searching, searching for better words until it is, not perfect, but enough.
I have been reading and listening to other writers describe their writing practice. A thousand spontaneous words before breakfast in the first light of dawn, one says of their method. Others hide away in a café to get the project underway. (I can’t do that, I like watching people too much to be productive in a cafe.) Some go to a retreat setting and write continuously for a month or a week or a weekend. But I like the home feel of my study and library, and the routines with my husband of a morning swim and an afternoon walk along the coast.
Last year I tried at first spending the mornings writing, and giving the other half of the day to mentoring and teaching prep. But I found my mind wandering in the mornings into what I was anticipating in the afternoon. It worked better when I devoted the afternoons to writing on days I had them free. Then it was sheer luxury to be able to turn to the book with no more commitments that day.
Where Does Creativity Come From?
And the creativity? Well, it does come when you sit down at the computer (or desk or piano), though from where is a marvel. It is not just stored knowledge or an algorithm. It is human capability; a person made in the image of the Creator God to be creative. Hurrah for humans! In this age of AI, cherishing our humanity is doubly important, whether we acknowledge the divine impetus or not.
Sometimes, creative ideas or solutions come for me through prayer, on a walk, in the shower or sitting at the desk. Sometimes, being in relationship with a loving and knowing God, I know it is the Holy Spirit gifting inspiration within the ordinary human journey. Dallas Willard calls our body the “power pack” of the spirit. Perhaps that could also be “Spirit” with a capital S. Certainly, it is a partnership between body and spirit/Spirit. And not just for a writer, but in every area of life.
The Genesis origin story tells us that after the acts of creation, God rested and enjoyed all that was made. As a lesser creative, I am enjoying that my book – about being at home with a Good Father in an incredible growing intimacy – is at the publishers. And I have learned a lot more about the creative process under the loving hand of God.
Jennifer Turner
