Christmas: Home and Away

It's Christmas time and for many of us, it represents an annual pilgrimage back home to celebrate the season. But is Christmas about being at home or away? Michael and Megan wonder together what we should be doing to celebrate this time of wonder.

Show Notes

This episode is brought to you by Anglican Aid. Your gift will strengthen churches and help transform communities. You can donate to With All Due Respect's featured causes here.

As Australians have striven to get vaccination rates up and covid spread under control, one carrot held out to the long-suffering population has been the promise of a normal Christmas.

Michael Jensen and Megan Powell du Toit think we often associate Christmas with homecoming and family. For a start, it's a classic trope of Christmas movies - Christmas Homecoming, I'll Be Home For Christmas, Home For The Holidays, even Home Alone. But the very first Christmas, Mary and Joseph leave their home on a journey. So, is Christmas a story of home or away?

The WADR team talk it all out, look at a Christmas movie about a family - Little Women - and then bring back a segment everyone has been asking for as an excuse to exchange gifts. 

Help internally displaced people in Africa!

Disasters and conflicts have led to a record number of over 75 million internally displaced people, or IDPs, around the world. IDPs are people who have been forced to flee their homes but have not crossed international borders. 

 

Almost half of all IDPs - more than the population of Australia and New Zealand combined - are in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Most of the displaced have left everything behind: their homes, belongings, and livelihoods. They urgently need food, shelter, clothing, and trauma counselling. So Anglican Aid has launched a Forced to Flee Emergency Appeal to provide essential aid to IDPs in Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, and beyond. This aid will be distributed by local churches, who are sacrificially providing for the needs of the displaced, and pointing them to the God who is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. 

 

To find out more about this appeal and make a tax-deductible gift, visit anglicanaid.org.au/wadr. 

What is With All Due Respect?

Less aggro, more conversation.

Is it even possible to have a deep discussion without it descending into chaos? Michael Jensen and Megan Powell du Toit think yes, and want to show the rest of us how to do it.

There’s plenty of things they disagree on: free will, feminism, where you should send your kids to school and what type of church you should go to. But there are also plenty of other things that they have in common. They want to talk about all these things with conviction. But they also want the conversation to be constructive. Tune in to find out if that’s possible.