Aug 5, 2026 | Blog |
Are you the kind of person who rushes to help when someone falls? I once mistook the height of a curb in suburban Darwin and fell flat on my face on the footpath. People crossed the road to help me get up and supply Band-Aids. A couple left their coffee on an outside table of a nearby café to give support.
I was not badly injured fortunately. More embarrassed than anything. Though in the split second before my face planted, I had already imagined our long-awaited trip south on the Ghan train to Adelaide cancelled by a hospital admission.
The by-stander effect
Would I have been so quick to help a stranger as these people were? In that isolated setting, probably. But research shows that the more people who are around at the time, the less likely we are to intervene or report incidents. It’s called the bystander effect. Leave it to someone else! Look at all those others who have seen this happening! Don’t get involved! It may prove personally costly! Just “walk by on the other side”.
There is condemnation in that “just walk by” expression, even for those who don’t know it is from Jesus’ story. We know that story lauds an unlikely character (the Good Samaritan) caring for an injured stranger on an isolated road. Jesus heightened the point of his story by contrasting the intervention of this first responder with the indifference of two previous passing high officials.
Not my responsibility!
Research some years ago showed that when an incident happens in the sight of many observers, they take longer to respond or not at all. The by-stander effect is heightened. It reminds me of the time in a crowded train none of us moved to stop a child apparently about to run out the open door. We are aware that many people were seeing the incident and left it to someone else to intervene. This was a diffusion of responsibility, to use the researchers’ words. Perhaps also in this instance we also assumed there was a parent or carer somewhere in the carriage who would, or should, grab the child. That’s ambiguous responsibility. So we too often opt out.
Empathy needed
But many of us on that train knew from personal experience how wearing caring for children is. There are moments we are too tired to do what is required.
So what was necessary for us was empathy. The personal response learnt from walking a mile in the other’s sandals. Not sympathy because that implies superiority, but empathy.
Unfortunately, inaction in the face of need got some high-level support in America recently. Empathy only encourages weakness, these leaders argued. Let people learn to be strong, take care of themselves.
Some years ago, when I was in the middle of a struggle to be recognised as a pastor, a group of friends got together for an evening to celebrate and present me with a specially designed “trophy” for my effort in that struggle. It was great encouragement to persist. No diffusion of responsibility there. No ambiguity. No by-stander effect. Together they were demonstrating empathy though it was not their struggle. I much appreciated it.
Finding others who have experienced what we experience is a strong source of connection and energy to persevere. Alcoholics Anonymous is a good example, with each member holding the others accountable. And earning the welcome to do that by their own vulnerable sharing.
Empathy the last frontier?
I’m currently trying to fathom the impact AI will have on our understanding of what it means to be human as God intends for us.
In 1987 I wrote a column in Zadok Perspectives titled “What is Human?”, wrestling with the wonderful gift from the Creator of our humanity. More recently (in 2022 – only a few years ago), I put it on the website I had at the time because it still read well. But not now!
So much is happening in the AI field that makes us rethink our understanding of what can be duplicated at extraordinary speed and complexity by machine and what is uniquely human. AI is not just walking robots coming for us or Hal the computer going rogue as we previously imagined it! It is the prospect of all cognitive abilities so outperforming us we won’t be needed. Nor wanted.
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Deep Mind, has said that their goal is to imitate all human capacities, up to and including empathy and creativity. Empathy?
Empathy may be the last, along with creativity, to be conquered, but will AI get there? I find that hard to accept. But meanwhile, let’s hang on to our wonderful humanity. And not be by-standers by practising empathy in all our relationships.
Jennifer Turner
Jul 24, 2026 | Blog |
Do you recognise this painting? Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal explores Jesus’ story about an errant son coming home. Within a dark setting, Rembrandt represents the father’s warm love by his dramatic red cape and the light cast on his face and hands as he embraces his ragged son. The father’s welcome is unexpected. The cultural expectation of the time was that a father should reject, not forgive, a prodigal son who has brought disgrace on his family.
The publisher chose this painting for the background cover of my new book, Home with the Good Father. I was delighted with the choice, and we picked up Rembrandt’s warm red for the décor of the room where we held our local book launch. The picture is very fitting because the prodigal story is the starting point for my imagining what might happen next for a son returning home to love and acceptance.
Last week someone buying my book told me he just had to read it! He too had been a prodigal before he came home to God.
“I identify with the prodigal’s older brother”, I told him. “And there’s a chapter about him too.” He confessed that was his current challenge. Burnt out by doing good to earn the divine Father’s approval, he had found his hard work was not appreciated by those around him. He had grown resentful and broken.
The other homecoming
Then I remembered Henri Nouwen’s book, read many years before, which centres on this painting. Contemplating Rembrandt’s image, Nouwen begins by seeing himself as a returning prodigal, glad to be let in the door. He finds true warmth and forgiveness in the Father’s love.
Then with the kudos of teaching at prestigious Harvard, he identifies with the self-righteous older son in Jesus’ story. He is doing everything expected of him. But finds it is not satisfying.
Finally, he hears a challenge to be like the compassionate father, offering “spiritual fatherhood” to those around him. He sees his life representing a movement from self-centredness to other-ing. Gentle, wise, but not intrusive or demanding loving. Nouwen calls this the true homecoming.
Compassionate eldering
We can never match the welcome and grace of the divine Father who has welcomed us home. But we can grow more compassionate and wise like him. And not stay wallowing in our own needs or resentments.
A friend who is a little younger than me calls his current contribution to others, “eldering”. I like this term for the tasks of this stage of my life too. It describes much of what I do and is a fitting way to give back for all I have received over the years from many others along the way.
Coming home
Return of the Prodigal was one of Rembrandt’s last paintings before his death in 1669. Some commentators suggest it expresses his relief at finding there was still a homecoming and forgiveness possible for him after a self-centred dissolute life and neglect of his family.
There is always a path back to forgiveness because of Jesus. But much better to live all of life knowing you are seen and loved in the presence of the Good Father.
Jennifer Turner
Jul 9, 2026 | Blog |
I’ve had some great experiences in crowds. Football games when Eagles were winning! Joining a throng following giant French puppets through the streets of Perth a few years ago, along with a multitude of people also fascinated by them.
In the London crowd during Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee as she and the royal family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
I’ve also had some bad ones. Supporting protesters on a Town Green in the US during Black Panther trials. In India a long time ago, when our blond-haired children were a novelty and attracted frightening attention. Trying to get onto a crowded bus with my suitcase in China and being pushed and pulled.
But in recent days, even in our country, we have seen crowds turn violent in a way new to us. People acting in ways that in a more sober or individual moment they would never contemplate. Smashing shop windows, for example, or overturning cars. Some joining in without knowing what grievance was being protested. The crowd giving them anonymity.
I remember a TV program about the Cronulla riots on their 20th anniversary. Interviews revealed some could name what triggered the riots, but most confessed they did not have a purpose for their actions. Except provide an outlet for their pent up anger – anger at perceived discrimination.
I’ve been dipping into Elias Canetti’s 1984 best seller, Crowds and Power. In a tour de force that won him a Nobel Prize for Literature, he explores the good and the bad of crowds and what draws people together. He suggests that the basic human desire to belong, to relate to others, even touch skin to skin with others in the crush, gives crowds their energy. Creating noise by breaking windows or setting things on fire attracts people into the mob in the early stages of a demonstration, but belonging holds them there.
The downside is that personal responsibility for one’s behaviour is abandoned in a crowd.
Western society loneliness
In my book, Home with the Good Father, I describe some consequences of our Western society focus on the self as the source of all we need. We suffer growing loneliness and the ache to belong. Our social hunger comes from lack of connection with others. Is the crowd with its closeness and freedom from responsibility the answer?
In the Christianity where I find a home, the individual is given great emphasis. The call to respond to God, to follow Jesus, is personal. So is the expectation we listen to and speak with a loving Father. Individual choice; individual journey. That is the story which Jesus told about a prodigal’s return.
But in our inherited human nature we need others. Henri Nouwen says real loneliness comes when we have lost all sense of having things in common with others. In the Scriptures, there is also a crowd, a gathered church. We are brothers and sisters bonded to each other in the family we share.
Where loneliness is epidemic, the church community provides acceptance and friendship. We dare not ignore this opportunity and turn away. We are called to belong to each other, to live in love, honouring one another, joining together in significant endeavours. If some past experience of hurt within a church has left its mark, God’s grace is wide enough to make belonging possible for us now we have, like the prodigal, turned and come home.
An open set
Canetti asserts that to have energy, a crowd needs to be open to others joining. In sociological terms, be an open set, held together not by hard boundaries or hurdles to jump but by a common purpose. Christians believe that our singular focus is Jesus and our shared relationship with him. Moreover, at the return of this God-man to us in power, we anticipate a crowd of witnesses, a festal gathering, over-riding every ethnic and status and gender distinction which human society uses as boundaries.
We are seeing many socially hungry westerners, especially young people, finding community in churches. Let’s keep the doors open, the barriers down, and experience together the good energy of the crowd centred on Jesus.
Jennifer Turner
Jun 26, 2026 | Blog |
Do we want to live in a monoculture? A friend recently surveyed his local food court and observed that without foods from immigrant cultures, the selection of dishes would be very restricted.
And sports writers are commenting on the increasing ethnic diversity of football (soccer) teams in the World Cup. Out of a squad of 26, one European country has as many as 22 men whose parents or they were born outside the country they represent. The same would be true of the UK team or Australia’s Socceroos, though perhaps not as high a proportion.
David Goldblatt, well-known sports commentator and sociologist, reports research showing that the greater the diversity, the further the team is likely to go towards winning the coveted trophy.
Teamwork within diversity, as well as supremely talented individuals, is essential in the beautiful game. And in life.
The Together Project
This blog sits on TheTogetherProject website. It was born out of our understanding that Holy Spirit diversity working together in partnership, is the New Testament model of leadership. Like in a body. So we began our advocating for men and women to serve together. That is, women should be part of the mix, bringing their diverse gifts to leadership.
But the value of embracing diversity and learning from each other is much wider than that. It involves diversity across culture and race as well as gender. People patiently listening to each other and exploring their different points of view. And within a common and passionate vision, each owning what is important to them and receiving feedback from very diverse others.
Marriages as well
The diversity partnership advantage applies to marriages as well. I remember one of my sons returning from a first visit to his girlfriend’s family and remarking how different their family was to ours. I responded that discovering she would bring another background to their future together was a good start. Building a good marriage requires embracing the other’s diverse background, tastes, and interests. And each committing to value and build the partnership together.
When my husband and I were celebrating our fiftieth wedding anniversary, we were often asked what made a happy marriage. We found it difficult to answer. Eventually we described our marriage as a “collaborative work of art”. This expression captures the unique creativity and mutual responsibility that is needed. Marriage does not come fully formed when we say “I do”. It takes partnership over the years. Having reached 50 years, we came to think of kindness and acceptance as the virtues that best expressed the love needed day in, day out, in the ups and downs of life.
And in communities
When I was a town planner, we worked hard to encourage built communities to embrace diversity. Not the whole range of human and housing diversity, of course, because negotiating a path through that challenge is energy sapping and seemingly impossible. Rather, we advocated that each community could embrace a little more diversity in the racial and socioeconomic environment than was an automatic choice. That they could successfully choose to live with people different from themselves and not in a uniform monocultural neighbourhood.
In those years, we lived in an American city and were involved through our church in advocating for the welfare of the neglected slum residents living around us in poverty. It was difficult for our church members to overcome their desire to flee to safer suburbs. Many were recent immigrants to the US, just starting to make a secure life for themselves with hard work and a focus on their families. Yet a few chose to widen their circle, make new friends, and actively engage with the diversity in their street.
The companionship of presence
Now I am in the later stages of my life, I see the growing importance of another form of partnership. When everything else is dropping away in retirement and increasing age, sharing with our life partner becomes even more central. Those who don’t have that partner need to work extra hard to connect with others or become increasingly lonely within the walls of their home.
Companionship, presence, is a key ingredient, even when memory or hearing is declining. Sharing household tasks with a partner is often hard for women who have successfully run the home on their own for many years. Yet it is a great setting to be both partner and companion.
On the other hand, I know of one husband, carer for his declining wife, who was trying to do everything for her on his own. A lifetime of competence made it hard for him to ask for help. Then one day someone pointed out to him that the cleaning, the feeding, the showering she needed, could perhaps be done by someone else. What uniquely he had to offer to his wife was the fruit of their lifetime together. An easy and meaningful conversation and physical presence that no one else could give her. Why not use the precious time they had left to focus on that? And have someone else do the physical and clinical care. That made all the difference.
Jennifer Turner
Jun 19, 2026 | Blog |
“Darkness is my closest friend.” What despair these last words of Psalm 88 express. God has taken away his friends and neighbours and left him desolate, the writer cries. Many biblical psalms shout anguish, but not all end in such dark lonely suffering. Most encourage us to bring our fears and pain to a listening God “who is an ever-present help in trouble” (Psalm 46).
Nevertheless, in our lonely society, we can identify with this sense of isolation, this pain of friendlessness.
Social psychologist Hugh Mackay has written extensively about our Western culture’s “social hunger”. We are created to connect, he says, but we are lonelier than ever. He lists shrinking family size, breakdown of marriage, more children living with one parent, house design and block size restricting neighbourhood connection, frequent change of address, general busyness, social media, and working from home, as all contributing factors.
A wedding song
While yesterday my psalm was one of darkness, this morning’s was a celebratory wedding song. That’s why I love the psalms. I read one every day because they span the whole gamut of human emotions. They give me permission to pour out in prayer to God whatever my feelings that day.
Yet even a wedding song has a tinge of pain for me as well as joy. I had to plan, organise, and manage my own wedding myself. No family, no long-term companions around me. My husband’s church were very helpful, but neither my parents nor friends were present. In the joy of beginning my new life with a wonderful husband, I didn’t think much about it at the time. It was just the consequence of moving to a new country.
Later, I saw it was the pattern of my life. I had arranged not only my wedding but my earlier twenty-first birthday party (in the days when that was a big event). Then for other reasons, I had little maternal support around the birth of our children. All these solo efforts made me very independent and self-reliant, of course. But it was not necessarily a good thing. It pains me now as I embrace the happiness of having my sons and grandchildren around me in a way my parents did not.
The hero child
I could have learned the importance of relationships from Jesus’ story that begins: “There was a man who had two sons . . .” We think of this narrative as the story of the prodigal son who goes away but comes home to his father’s waiting arms. But Jesus actually gives more words in the story to the older son than to the prodigal. And if I’m honest, I identify more with the older son who thinks he can prove his worth to his father by his hard work.
I am what some call a “hero child”. The problem with being a hero son or daughter is that you come to think all depends on you. What may have begun because of birth position (oldest child, only son or daughter) carries over into the rest of life and becomes an impossible burden – physically and psychologically.
In Jesus’ parable the determined independence of the older son alienates him from his father’s love and the grace of forgiveness which the prodigal experiences. He chooses task and obligation over family connection. We hero children do that too. We may even spurn the relationship the divine Father offers us. We fear being dependant because it suggests weakness and personal inadequacy. Even though we come later to resent the burdens we feel forced to take on.
Celebration
Last weekend we had the Perth launch of my latest book. Some friends took over the arrangements for it with great style and energy, creating a beautiful occasion. Reflecting on their friendship later that evening moved me to tears. Again, this hero child had to acknowledge that friendship and family are more important than any hard-won independence and competence, however valuable they have been in my long life.
And like the older son, we hero children are usually not good at parties or celebration. We worry about the cost, the possibility of excess when people let their hair down, the dangers of not being in control, of acknowledging our personal need for others.
Too bad that the great celebration at the end of this age when Jesus returns is pictured in the book of Revelation as a party – a wedding banquet. My hope is that all us hero children learn to look forward to that occasion with joyful anticipation. And value the relationships we are offered with our Good Father and our brothers and sisters in the family of God.
