Amen.

Leunig

INDIGENOUS development grants to Hillsong’s benevolent arm have gone almost entirely to employing and providing offices for church staff, with only a trickle reaching Aborigines.

In one case, Hillsong Emerge spent $315,000 in federal funds employing seven of its own staff in Sydney to administer a “micro-credit” project that made only six loans to Aborigines worth an average of $2856 each.
Hillsong also failed to enable a single Aborigine to become self-employed under a $610,968 federal grant to encourage indigenous entrepreneurship.

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They show that far more funds are spent on Hillsong staffers and administration than actual service delivery. One federal grant paid $965,421 to Hillsong Emerge to administer $280,000 in loan funds.

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When The Australian visited the Redfern “enterprise hub” in December, it found flyers in the foyer encouraging local businesses to pay up to $1800 to advertise in the Christian Business Directory published by Hillsong Emerge, but no information on how Hillsong could help Aborigines.

For those who don’t know, Hillsong is an evangelical church in Sydney.  The full article is here.

Now I hope this isn’t just a press beatup and I don’t have to eventually eat my words, but this stuff makes me SOOO angry.  This church has been in the press a number of times, their leaders are millionaires who live on prime Sydney real estate and present a glossy image of an organisation who supposedly help so many people.  I suspect they only really help people who are willing to “tow the line”.  In my mind, these people aren’t real Christians.  I suspect this church is little more than a cult with a lot of money.  It’s a pity, this type of press does so much damage the real churches.

I e-mailed back to say we needed the error messages exactly as they appeared on the screen to diagnose the problem and suggested screen shots as an easy way to achieve this.  Days passed without hearing anything, and I thought nothing more of the incident, assuming the problem had “fixed itself”.

I received a phone call from the same help desk operator.  He was trying to tell me what happened, but he had great difficulty talking as he couldn’t stop laughing!

 Turned out (I still can’t believe this), the user had taken his film camera, taken a photo of the monitor, had the film processed and retrieved the photos a few days later, then mailed the resulting images to the help desk!!

Ain’t technology grand!

This is an old photo, but something of an erie favorite.  It was taken in Western Australia on Boxing Day last year.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s very unusual to see the seaweed and reef so exposed.  Later that day, we heard about the devastating tsunami that hit Indonesia and other Asian countries.  The exposed seaweed and reef in the photo was the effect from the tsunami’s tidal retreat.

How can something so beautiful be created by something so destructive?

The image is being constantly updated, so the snow might have melted by the time you see it.  Might even be night time!  It comes from one of the local school webcams.