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.
Jun 10, 2026 | Blog |
In my favourite part of Australia, we hiked one year along a dry riverbed in the Flinders Ranges. Magnificent gum trees stretched overhead, seemingly growing without water. Though there was no evidence of it above ground, we knew that underneath was the water table, a river that fed and sustained these gums through long periods of drought.
I’ve always regretted not photographing that long row of red river gums in dust of the Flinders. But occasionally, I’ve spotted a solo tree with its roots deep into nourishing water and captured the image. The one pictured above found underground water on a former Finke River tributary in the West MacDonnell Ranges. The riverbed and surrounding stones were dry enough for us to walk on as we gazed in wonder at the dramatic Standley Chasm further up the valley. Yet on the tree’s trunk were signs of new growth and obvious health.
Psalmist David spent many long years in a similar arid region. He must have seen trees flourishing like this in dry riverbeds. In Psalm 1, he compares a person delighting in God to a tree with its roots in an underground aquafer. It is a great metaphor to encourage us to go deep in our relationship with a God who loves and cares for us. Which makes me ask: Am I personally tapping into that source of life? Am I being sustained and nourished in our culture’s dry environment?
Spiritual water
Stan Grant in a book intended to reawaken us to the spiritual says, “We humans are more than our minds; we yearn for the divine. Cut off from the transcendent, we become miserable, reduced to fleeting entertainment and distraction because we have closed the door to eternity.” (Murriyang: Song of time)
In a discussion recently with a neighbour, I used this word spiritual, perhaps inadvisably. She asked me what it meant and I realised that for some people, it has dropped out of common parlance. The noun spirituality is used of course, but it has become all-encompassing. It gathers in everything from self-focussed meditative practices to exercising in nature to contemplating the stars, but without any acknowledgement of the Creator.
An incredible intimacy
We who have come home to God know our spiritual being involves more than our human body, as wonderful that is. And the spiritual is more than anything our own mind or spirit can generate. It is a personal relationship. We acknowledge this by saying to God in effect: “I have tried to run my own life. But now I want the deeper reality that is found with you. I accept with open hands your gift of true life.”
In my book about being Home with the Good Father, I call what then opens for us an incredible intimacy. We live and have our being deep in sacred territory through God the Holy Spirit who lives within and nourishes us.
Spiritual practices with intention
At a festival celebrating life-giving water in a desert, Jesus gave this invitation, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” Only as we tap into Jesus’ life-giving water can we be nourished and exhibit new growth. Like a tree with roots down deep. But responding to this invitation must be intentional because it also involves the emotions and actions of our body.
When I worked as a consultant town planner in the US, I often had to attend night meetings several hours away on an Interstate highway. Many times, I had to stop the car on the way home and wake myself up sufficiently in the cold air to complete the journey safely. Realising I was sleepy was lifesaving in the moment. But it required a concrete response, a discipline of listening and acting on the warning signs.
Today my sleep discipline is preventative, as well as in the moment. It includes a CPAP machine! That certainly took discipline to get used to! But intentional action is again a lifesaver – for my heart as well as my daytime functioning.
Our spiritual being also requires intention. To take us deep into the connection with God, one practise we must choose is solitude. When we are quiet, we become acquainted with our spiritual being and notice what is going on in our lives. We tap into Jesus’ nourishing water.
Resisting society pulling us apart
There is a further dimension to letting our roots go deep into God. We live in a society that tells us that all we need for personal well-being is found within ourselves. That is, in the self, you will find your reason for being, your identity, your comfort, your resources. You don’t need anybody else. And you certainly are not responsible for anybody else. Just you alone. You do you!
This diminishing of personal connection has the chilling effect of pulling us apart – not only cutting us off from our Creator, but also from each other. But when we go deep with our Good Father, we share life-giving water with brothers and sisters, and that is an act of resistance in our culture.
I for one want my roots deep in God. But rather than a solitary tree, I’d rather be connected to others – in a long line of red gum trees thriving in a spiritual desert and sharing the water.
Jennifer Turner
Jun 3, 2026 | Blog |
I love reading the biographies of daring and creative people. They widen my horizons and give me a taste of a world different to my own.
But I always find myself wondering where the courage to cross new boundaries comes from. Or the daring to attempt outrageous actions. How can such people risk criticism or live with a result less than they dreamed of? Are they ready to navigate failure? And what is the role of ambition?
I have a conflicted relationship with ambition. Early in mid-life I was accused of being too ambitious, of daring to challenge the status quo. I do not have a confronting personality, nor am I inclined naturally to push boundaries, so this accusation came as a shock. Being a woman was the apparent problem in that circumstance.
The Courage of Faith
But in the process, I learned to make a distinction between selfish ambition and humble ambition. (Yes, there is such a thing!) I was compelled to face with courage a new challenge because I believed I was called to it. Later I wrote in Finding Your Voice, a chapter I called “The Courage of Faith”. It was based on one of my favourite sayings: Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it.
Recently I discovered how The Message paraphrase renders Apostle Paul’s words in Romans 8 about being adopted as God’s son or daughter: “This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike ‘What’s next, Papa?’”
That’s how I am trying to face life now in my senior years. What’s next, Father?
So where does the necessary faith and courage come from? Some have it naturally it seems, some only after divine healing of life’s scars. But some appear to be needlessly risk-averse. Regularly downplaying our ability and gifts, the imposter syndrome, leads many to reject opportunities to dare, to lead or to serve. It goes with the territory of being a woman, but all of us can fall into it.
A Secure Base
“Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.” The words come from a British psychologist advocating for children to be raised to live adventurously. Presumably, this needs more than adventure playgrounds, though they are a good start. The recent Adolescence episodes illustrate the parenting deficits many children suffer, even in Western countries.
But it’s not only children who need a secure base. We all do. When I was speaking about this last Sunday, a friend pointed me to a website, The Circle of Security. It has many practical applications of value to parents, teachers, and therapists. As I explored it, I found myself strongly resonating with them.
I had a secure childhood. Although we moved many times (3 Australian states, 8 schools) I knew I was loved and protected by my parents. I had the opportunity to succeed at school and go into higher education, and my parents believed in me. It set me up for an adventurous adulthood.
My parents also trusted me. I rode a Vespa scooter from the age of 16. (That was South Australia in those days!) And then they released me into the big wide world, supporting my decision to move to the US to marry my fiancé, though they couldn’t afford to come to the wedding.
A good start, yes, but now my security rests in more recent experience. I have a great family of my own, a loving husband, children, and grandchildren. And I have received healing of the wounds inevitable in a long life.
Secure for this Season too
In this season, I have found writing books very satisfying. Especially when they are published and the hard copy is in my hands. But it is also scary. It too needs courage. Do my ideas stand up to scrutiny? Is my theology thoroughly biblical? Will people be helped by all this hard work? A secure base is still needed at this stage of life. With the letting go challenges of old age, I find my mind focused on what gives me the necessary security to keep learning and daring.
Best of all, I know I am secure in God’s love. As a forgiven God-born child, I am at home in an incredible intimacy with the divine Father. It is security like the prodigal found in his waiting father’s open arms. So at home with this Good Father and guided by the Spirit, I can grow to be more like my model, Jesus. That’s how I want to live, how I can continue to dare.
Jennifer Turner
Photo credit: Michalovski: “Three Young Men in Fiery Furnace” (Faras Cathedral, Sudan)
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
