Christian Converser

Category: Theology

  • Neurodiversity In The Church

    Author Staci McLean is producing materials and giving seminars and support on neurodiversity issues in the church. (Neurodiversity refers to the percentage of the population who have conditions such as autism, ADHD etc). She suggests fifteen to twenty percent of the population of New Zealand is neurodivergent, which is quite a significant number. CCNZ hasn’t…

  • Free Speech And The NZ Church [1]

    Free speech is a topic that receives a lot of attention in society. The issue is perhaps best known worldwide because of the prominence it attracts in the United States of America. This has, throughout the history of New Zealand, led to a great deal of US influence upon our society and culture, including in…

  • Questions about Jordan Peterson and Christian sexuality

    Welcome to 2023 and a new year of blogging at CCNZ. Everyone must have heard of Jordan Peterson by now, as a psychologist, author and media commentator who is often quoted by evangelical Christians. At the same time, Peterson seems to court a great deal of public controversy, probably far more than any minister or…

  • Political Faultlines Continue To Divide US Churches

    Apologies for the slowdown in delivery of posts from this blog in 2022. The authorship has experienced many distractions, much of which have been personal family circumstances. These have been overcome enough by now to resume blogging. A faultline that has emerged this year in the US over evangelical engagement with political culture in the…

  • Is the State clamping down on Christians in NZ?

    At the end of June, a well known Christian activist group in New Zealand failed in a legal challenge to the removal of their charitable status (registered with various government agencies). The revocation of this status is said to be due to their involvement in political advocacy, which is generally held to be non-charitable in…

  • US Theocracy Movement Gets A Boost [3]

    As outlined previously, the shift towards Dominionism / theocracy gained considerable momentum during the term of the Trump presidency and the lingering effects continue to the present day, not least because Trump is likely to seek a second term of office and has never ceased campaigning. Previous Republican presidents, however, saw the potential for the…

  • US Theocracy Movement Gets A Boost [2]

    Along with the previous post in this series expounding the many problems that the current direction of the SCOTUS is creating, it’s time to take a fresh look at the impetus for theocracy and the divisions between different groups of orthodox / conservative Christians along theological and political lines. This is mostly over dominionism/theocracy and…

  • US Theocracy Movement Gets A Boost [1]

    Recent decisions by the US Supreme Court intentionally push North America further in the direction of a theocracy. As explained in previous posts in this blog, the current ideal of theocratic government is strongly intertwined with the significant following that dispensationalist theology has gained in the US since the mid-19th century. The USA is an…

  • Against Gun Idolatry – David French

    David French has written another informed commentary about the gun violence situation in the US, and here we see again the contrast between New Zealand and the American nation, and our different heritages. French sees the key problem as it happens in America today as being one of gun idolatry, and perhaps that is a…