The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

 …….

This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them as well. This is why instruction manuals are so important.

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole new motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model.

Only eleven days before our first ever church camp.  We’re excited to be joined by Bryson Smith from Dubbo who wrote the book ‘Faith’ – published last year by Matthias Media.  It’s a topic we’re keen to explore together given the huge misunderstandings on the whole question of what it means to trust Jesus as a Christian.

It’s also our desire for the weekend to be a great opportunity for building relationships with incoming students and existing members of Campus Church.  What a great way to start the year.

You can register online through the church website.

Campus Church celebrated her first birthday last week with style.  Twelve months of public meetings on Sunday nights at Ilam School have brought all kinds of encouragements for us as a church.  People are getting converted, increasing numbers are getting involved in serving others and there are dozens of stories of growth and challenge.

To celebrate the occasion, we shared in a huge mudcake.  Agnetha Korevaar the Head Residential Advisor at Bishop Julius Hall blew out the single candle:

As a church we’re really thankful to God for providing for all our needs in the last twelve months and look forward to seeing Campus Church used to care for and challenge a new generation of university students passing through UC.