[Editors’ Note: We apologise for the quality of the last two Mailings.  We were on the road in Tassie and sending out the Mailings from different computers.  The layout got messed up in the sending.
We leave Friday for another fundraising trip to North America.  We will be speaking in churches in New Brunswick Canada, Kansas, Colorado, Ohio, and Pennsylvania .  We will not be able to send out AAANZ Mailings during our time away.  Hopefully we will be back to a regular publishing schedule in December.]

"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan , the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses." - Edward Abbey

Mark 10: 17-31
     Jesus was just about to hit the road when a man ran up with his hat in his hand and asked, “Good Teacher, what do I have to do to be granted eternal life?”
     Jesus said to him, “What are you calling me good for? Only God is really good, not any of us. What must you do? You know the commandments: ‘Don’t murder; Be faithful in marriage; Don’t steal; Don’t tell lies about anyone; Don’t cheat anyone; Treat your parents with respect.’ ”
     The man replied, “Teacher, I’ve kept all these rules, ever since I was a youngster.”
     Jesus looked him straight in the eye and, filled with love for him, he said, “You still haven’t found what you’re looking for though, have you? Come and follow me and you’ll find it. First though, go and flog off everything you own, give the proceeds to charity, and then, with all your investments in heaven, you’ll be free to find it.”
     You could have knocked the bloke over with a feather. The colour drained out of his face and he turned and walked off feeling sick at the very thought of giving up all the trappings of his success.
     Jesus looked around at his disciples and said, “Some people seem to have everything, but for them it is nearly impossible to get into the Realm of God.”
     The disciples thought they must have been hearing wrong, but Jesus pressed the point: “Getting into the Realm of God is not the easiest thing in the world anyway, but for the rich, it is about the most difficult thing you can imagine. You’d have more chance of getting a container ship through the eye of a needle than getting a person who’s loaded into the Realm of God.”
     The disciples were totally flabbergasted. “Can anyone at all be saved then?” they asked.
     Jesus looked them in the eye and said, “If people had to do it themselves, then no, it would be beyond us. But it’s not beyond God. God can do anything.”
     Peter was trying to sort this out in his head. “Look,” he said. “We turned our backs on everything we had and followed you.”
     Jesus cut in and said, “Look, I wouldn’t kid you about this. Everyone who has had to give up house or land, brothers, sisters, mother, father or children in order to cast their lot in with me and with my message will be more than compensated. Hundreds of homes will be open to them, and they’ll have more brothers and sisters and mothers and children than they can poke a stick at! Of course they’ll need them, because they’ll be persecuted a hundred times more too! Then in the coming new age they’ll get the biggest bonus of all — life without limit! Once again you can see that God is turning the world on its head — many of those on top now will be at the bottom, and those at the bottom now will then come out on top.”
©2000 Nathan Nettleton www.laughingbird.net

Blogging toward Sunday: Our hearts laid bare
19th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 23)
Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31
Many things can block our participation in the reign of God. It would be “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle” than for some of us to forgive those who have harmed us. Well-nurtured anger and bitterness can settle into our hearts for so long that we cannot imagine ourselves without them, even for the sake of life with God. Pride, jealousy or envy prevent some of us from knowing the life God wants to share with us; for others it’s excessive ambition, relentless self-promotion or an obsession with success.
http://theolog.org/

Material things
Mark 10:17-31
It's always tempting to look away when Jesus speaks to us of wealth, convincing ourselves that the rich young ruler is someone else who makes more money than we do. In subtle ways we say to Jesus, "Surely not I, Teacher."…The kind of materialism Jesus calls us to requires not the accumulation of goods, but an engagement with people, particularly people in need.
http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=2399

Anabaptist Prayer Book - Take Our Moments and Our Days: An Anabaptist Prayer Book
We invite you to share in a form of prayer that originated in the earliest Christian times and has continued through the centuries. The distinctive Anabaptist flavour of this collection of daily prayers is evident in the predominance of Jesus' voice, the space for communal reflection on scripture, and the specific choices of Bible readings. We offer these services in the hope that you will find in them a way of prayer through which the voice of Jesus will pervade your whole day. To download a PDF copy of either volume, select the Prayer book content link at:
http://www.ambs.edu/prayerbook

Praying for peace with Psalm 67
Sometimes I want to see more results from my praying.  But you say,
 “Let the peoples praise you, O God, let all the peoples praise you.”
     O God, give peace among the Jewish settlers and the Palestinians seeking justice in their own land;
     O God, help the two peoples in Sri Lanka to live together, now that the fighting has ceased.
     O God, strengthen the churches and pastors and those seeking peace in Colombia .
 “Guide the nations upon earth.”
     O God, be with the Christian Peacemaker Team workers and the Kurdish refugees they're seeking to help in northern Iraq .
     O God, be with the Christian peace-seekers in India who are working for understanding between Christians who have been
    persecuted and their radical Hindu persecutors.
     O God, strengthen the struggling government in Zimbabwe , and the churches in a disastrous economy.
“Let all the peoples praise you...let all the ends of the earth revere you.”
     O God, we pray for President Obama, that he would continue to search for ways to talk and dialogue with “enemies.”
    O God, may the United States limit and reduce its military spending,
     including its military support to Colombia and Israel, and to the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, so that we may have
      resources to work toward peace and healthcare for all.
- Written by Marian Hostetler

Church Violence: The surge in U.S. church shootings
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/october/11.7.html

Transforming guns into tools of hope
Seventeen years after the war ended in Mozambique , churches are still collecting and destroying weapons and cleaning up areas of unexploded ordnance so the land can be farmed. When armed conflicts end, the world's attention tends to fade away rather quickly. Reconstruction, however, may take a very long time. Churches in Mozambique know this all too well, as a Living Letters team learnt in late July 2009…"The aim is to mobilize and sensitize communities for a culture of peace."
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/10323

Turning Tanks into Combines
Marvin Wiens proudly flies a Palestinian flag on his combine as he harvests durum wheat on his and his neighbours’ farms. Asked why, he replies, “I fly this flag in recognition of a people who have lost their freedom and lost their farming livelihood, two things I cherish very much and have the privilege to continue to enjoy in Canada .”
http://www.thirdway.com/peace/?Page=5054|Turning+Tanks+into+Combines

Gaza Love Story: The Bride Who Crawled Through a Tunnel
One could look at Mohammed and May's story as a romantic tale, in which two lovers overcame all the odds to be together. However, in reality, this is the sad story of a young couple who suffer under circumstances that are unlikely to change. They belong to neither a nation nor a state, and are as much victims of the internal rivalries between the Palestinians as of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Their shared future looks pretty grim.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,653777,00.html#ref=nlint

An Evangelical Lament
A seasoned journalist looks at the [U.S. Evangelical] movement and sighs. A review of A Lover's Quarrel . - In talking about evangelical political power, he narrates…how evangelicals learned to play the Washington power and spin games. In looking at the evangelical marketplace, he tallies the money flowing through large evangelical organizations (Promise Keepers, at its height, $100 million annually; Women of Faith, $50 million a year; and so on). The point is to demonstrate not that large budgets are intrinsically evil, but that "many of the worse elements of the modern world—materialism, empire building at the expense of community building, and the accumulation of power and money—have become some of the most recognizable attributes of American evangelicalism."…simplicity is certainly one spiritual discipline we desperately need.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/october/19.65.html

Pastor honoured for role in protests that felled the Berlin Wall
Kassel , Germany (ENI). Leipzig Protestant pastor Christian Führer has been honoured for his autobiography that recounts how the weekly peace prayers in his parish led to the 1989 protests that contributed to the fall of communism in East Germany . Führer was awarded a special prize by the Protestant Literature Portal for his book, "Und wir sind dabei gewesen: Die Revolution, die aus der Kirche kam" ("And we were there. The revolution that came from the Church"). On 9 October, Leipzig in eastern Germany marks the 20th anniversary of tens of thousands of people taking to the streets after the prayers for what turned out to be a peaceful demonstration for change, despite fears of a Beijing-style Tiananmen Square crackdown.

A Lost Generation
Mainline churches in East Germany rediscover a sense of mission…Twenty years after the demonstrations that brought down the Berlin Wall, many say East Germany is spiritually moribund. The former Soviet state is today a majority-atheist society with little memory of Christianity, let alone the Reformation. But some formerly liberal church leaders have a newfound interest in evangelism.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/october/12.11.html

  New Book: Defenseless Christianity Anabaptism for a Nonviolent Church
Entering a field of ongoing controversy, this book dares to offer a new model or vision—defenceless Christianity—for understanding Anabaptism, both present and past. An Anabaptism defined as defenceless Christianity should be seen as a nonviolent Christian movement with a world-reconciling theology despite the fact that some first-generation Anabaptists were not pacifists.
http://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/dc/dc.htm

Eco-Justice Notes: From the Whirlwind
God's diatribe from the whirlwind -- sarcastic, scathing and loving -- is a necessary wake up call for us today. Indeed, we may need to take it more seriously than Job did. We face a far greater danger in our modern world. Where the mythical Job raised philosophical questions about the world, our culture has taken decisive action that is reshaping the world, and our approach in doing so runs counter to what God has revealed. We need to listen carefully to the voice from the whirlwind, and we -- like Job -- need to be drawn into confession and repentance.
http://www.eco-justice.org/E-091002.asp

Henri Nouwen Meditation: Losing and Gaining Our Lives
The great paradox of life is that those who lose their lives will gain them. This paradox becomes visible in very ordinary situations. If we cling to our friends, we may lose them, but when we are nonpossessive in our relationships, we will make many friends. When fame is what we seek and desire, it often vanishes as soon as we acquire it, but when we have no need to be known, we might be remembered long after our deaths. When we want to be in the centre, we easily end up on the margins, but when we are free enough to be wherever we must be, we find ourselves often in the centre.  Giving away our lives for others is the greatest of all human arts. This will gain us our lives.
http://www.henrinouwen.org/home/free_eletters/

Anabaptist Story: ‘Stranger’ or neighbour? - Consultation looks at immigration biblically
The question was originally posed to Jesus by a teacher of a law. Mennonite pastors and lay leaders revisited it: Who is my neighbour?... “This parable teaches us how to deal with ‘outsiders,’ and it shows us that those who come from ‘the outside’ are the ones who teach us,” said keynote speaker M. Daniel Carroll Rodas. “When we talk about our neighbour, we are talking about millions of Christian brothers and sisters.”
http://www.mennoweekly.org/2009/10/5/stranger-or-neighbor/?page=1

AAANZ Membership Secretary and Prayer Directory Editor
AAANZ needs someone (or two) who would be the AAANZ Membership Secretary and Prayer Directory Editor.  This could be one or two positions. Job descriptions are available for this volunteer position(s).  If you are interested in helping, write to the address below.