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Bulletin article on the Jensens	Bruce Chapman
	Apr 01, 2003 20:32 PST

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 Bulletin
 April 2, 2003

MEET THE JENSENS







One brother is an archbishop, the other a dean, and they are shaking up the religious world here and overseas. Diana Bagnall seeks the causes of their crusade.

You wouldn't pick the Jensens as brothers. Peter, at 60, is the more physically robust and socially assured. Phillip, two years his junior, is rangier, more worn in his skin, and has a nervy, reactive manner. But on this particular melt-in-your-mouth autumn morning at Bishopsgate, the Anglican Church's massive sandstone residence in Sydney's Darling Point, the Archbishop of Sydney and his dean greet each other wearing almost identical blue shirts and discreetly patterned navy ties. They seem taken aback and somewhat put out by their synchronicity.

Separately, Peter and Phillip Jensen have gone about their respective businesses as clergymen for more than three decades without attracting undue attention. Peter Jensen's career has been built on scholarship (he was principal of Moore Theological College for 16 years until his consecration as Anglican archbishop of Sydney in June 2001). Phillip Jensen has been a working preacher, building a large congregation at St Matthias in Centennial Park since 1978, and being the chaplain at the University of NSW for even longer. While Peter Jensen regularly preached at his brother's church, few people outside the Anglican Church, and probably many within it, would have been aware of the connection or, if they were, would have found it sinister.

In the past six months, however, the Jensens have become the most notorious churchmen in Australia, with the term "Jensenism" emerging as a byword for rabid sectarian proselytising and rigid opposition to gay and women's rights. Their name began to spread beyond parish boundaries last October when Peter Jensen confirmed his brother's appointment as the new dean of Sydney. It was pointed out that another Jensen, Peter's son Michael, was already attached to St Andrew's Cathedral as chaplain of the choir school. Murmurings of nepotism grew louder when the archbishop approved his wife Christine's appointment to a new women's ministry in November.

But the Anglican Church, for all its wealth and establishment connections, is not nearly as vital to the life of this most hedonistic of Australian cities as it was, say, 40 years ago, and the Jensen controversy was largely treated as factional infighting by the secular press. It was only on March 7, when Phillip Jensen gave his inaugural sermon as dean, that the wider non-church public found itself wondering how Anglicanism, that most socially biddable and bankable of Protestant denominations, had suddenly turned feral.

"If one view is right, the others must be wrong," the younger Jensen proclaimed from the pulpit of Australia's oldest cathedral. "We must stop the stupidity of stretching social tolerance into religious or philosophical relativism ... And if other religions are wrong, they are the monstrous lies and deceits of Satan devised to destroy the life of the believers."

The letters and opinion pages of the papers bristled with indignation. How dare he? Didn't he realise what sort of world he was lobbing his religious explosives into? Several days later, the Australian National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims and Jews, a carefully wrought exercise in religious diplomacy, was launched with federal government support - but the shadow cast by the dean's sermon lay heavily across the brightness of the Darling Harbour venue.

The Jensens, plural, were unfazed. Still are. They're not saying anything new. They've held the same convictions since they were converted in their teens. What has changed is their vantage point. From the pinnacle of Australia's biggest Anglican diocese, in Australia's biggest, richest and most powerful city, their voices carry further than ever. If there's a problem, it's not with the message but with the secular media which carry it and distort it to the point of being unrecognisable, they say. "We are forever being characterised as dinosaurs," says Peter. "I don't think of us like that. I think of us as being countercultural."

They grew up in a two-bedroom rented semi on the Bondi Junction side of Bellevue Hill, in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Their father, Arthur, was a self-employed printer; their mother, Dorothy, lived for golf. Actually, both Arthur and Dorothy lived for golf. A motto on the mantelpiece read: "If golf interferes with your business, give up your business." By the early 1950s, although they had been active churchgoers as young adults, it was religion not business that made way for golf. Sunday school was a useful place to park their sons while they got out on the course, so the boys were given - as was usual for the time - a scriptural education. Their religious commitment was more or less a default position, though. "Growing up in Bellevue Hill, where most of the boys in my class were Jewish, I was Christian because I wasn't a Jew," explains Phillip.

Then, in April 1959, the Billy Graham crusade came to town and Peter and Phillip were bussed with their Sunday school youth group to the Sydney Showground. The crowd was more than 100,000 strong on the first afternoon they listened to the American evangelist. "In my imagination I could take you to the spot on the grass where I was sitting," says Peter. "I don't think [of my conversion] as a terrifically emotional experience. I think of it as a clarifying moment when at last what I had been hearing [at Sunday school] made sense." He was 16. He went 17 more times to hear Graham. Phillip, who was 14, went another eight or nine times. "Our parents weren't happy ... they regarded it as the onset of adolescent fanaticism," says Peter.

The Graham crusade, coming as it did at the dawn of the swinging '60s, was a watershed. "If you were not really committed, you wouldn't have survived as a churchgoer," comments Peter Jensen. Their older brother Ralph, a geologist, had left home and missed the moment in history when Peter and Phillip were captured for a life of evangelism. These days, having retired from the public service, he lives in Canberra and practises the old family religion, golf.

When he left The Scots College, Peter began studying law (a young man called John Howard was a senior articled clerk in the firm to which he was attached) but dropped out after two years. Then he taught primary school. But his heart was elsewhere. At 22, he entered Moore Theological College to study for the ministry. His younger brother followed him at 21, with an honours degree in geography. And their paths were set.

Preaching, writes Bill Lawton in Anglicanism in Australia, shapes ministry training in Sydney. "'Preacher' is a definition of priesthood held by a majority of clergy in the diocese of Sydney . It is an interpretation not as prevalent among Evangelicals outside Sydney and hardly credited at all by most other Anglicans," But the Jensens go to great lengths to explain they are not unique or strange but that they represent a "thoroughly authentic Anglican tradition". It is true that Evangelicalism, as distinct from its higher profile cousin Pentecostalism, has a long history in Sydney, where early convict chaplains were products of the Evangelical revival in Britain.

There are various complexions of Evangelicals, from liberal to conservative. The Jensens are conservative. But so are lots of other Christians, both inside and outside the Anglican Church. "To talk about Jensenism is a mistake," says John Bellamy, a long-time researcher with the National Church Life Survey. "They fit within a much broader theological stream."

That stream is at odds with the liberal theology of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Peter Jensen makes no secret of his differences with the Welsh�man. In January, his visit to England at the invitation of 150 dissident Evangelical parishes set off speculation that he was being positioned to lead a breakaway Anglican faction. He says the story, which ran for days in the British media, was fabricated.

Interestingly, he doesn't discount the possibility. The most likely trigger of "this sort of realignment of parishes" would be the consecration of women bishops. "But if I was going to do such a thing, I would like to be in control of it myself," he says. "I don't like lies being told about me." To which some people will respond Amen, while others will undoubtedly say, go to the Devil. But what people say about the Jensens may not be as important to them as putting religion on the front page. There's no reward in preaching to an empty church.

Bruce & Jodi Chapman
St Philip's Anglican Church Eastwood
Bruce: bjcha-@pobox.com
Jodi: jodich-@pobox.com

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 <TD width=175></TD>
 <TD align=right width=*>April 2, 2003
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> MEET THE JENSENS
 
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 width=140></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>One brother is an
archbishop, the other a dean, and they are shaking up the religious world here
and overseas. Diana Bagnall seeks the causes of their crusade. 
You wouldn't pick the Jensens as brothers. Peter, at 60, is the more
physically robust and socially assured. Phillip, two years his junior, is
rangier, more worn in his skin, and has a nervy, reactive manner. But on this
particular melt-in-your-mouth autumn morning at Bishopsgate, the Anglican
Church's massive sandstone residence in Sydney's Darling Point, the Archbishop
of Sydney and his dean greet each other wearing almost identical blue shirts and
discreetly patterned navy ties. They seem taken aback and somewhat put out by
their synchronicity.
Separately, Peter and Phillip Jensen have gone about their respective businesses as
clergymen for more than three decades without attracting undue attention. Peter
Jensen's career has been built on scholarship
(he was principal of Moore Theological College for 16 years until his
consecration as Anglican archbishop of Sydney in June 2001). Phillip Jensen has been a working preacher, building a large
congregation at St Matthias in Centennial Park since 1978, and being the
chaplain at the University of NSW for even longer. While Peter Jensen regularly preached at his brother's church, few
people outside the Anglican Church, and probably many within it, would have been
aware of the connection or, if they were, would have found it sinister.
In the past six months, however, the Jensens have become the most notorious churchmen in
Australia, with the term "Jensenism" emerging as a byword for rabid sectarian
proselytising and rigid opposition to gay and women's rights. Their name began
to spread beyond parish boundaries last October when Peter Jensen confirmed his brother's appointment as the new
dean of Sydney. It was pointed out that another Jensen, Peter's son Michael, was already attached to
St Andrew's Cathedral as chaplain of the choir school. Murmurings of nepotism
grew louder when the archbishop approved his wife Christine's appointment to a
new women's ministry in November.
But the Anglican Church, for all its wealth and
establishment connections, is not nearly as vital to the life of this most
hedonistic of Australian cities as it was, say, 40 years ago, and the Jensen controversy was largely treated as factional
infighting by the secular press. It was only on March 7, when Phillip Jensen gave his inaugural sermon as dean, that the
wider non-church public found itself wondering how Anglicanism, that most
socially biddable and bankable of Protestant denominations, had suddenly turned
feral.
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"If one view is right, the others must be wrong," the
younger Jensen proclaimed from the pulpit of
Australia's oldest cathedral. "We must stop the stupidity of stretching social
tolerance into religious or philosophical relativism ... And if other religions
are wrong, they are the monstrous lies and deceits of Satan devised to destroy
the life of the believers."
The letters and opinion pages of the papers bristled with
indignation. How dare he? Didn't he realise what sort of world he was lobbing
his religious explosives into? Several days later, the Australian National
Dialogue of Christians, Muslims and Jews, a carefully wrought exercise in
religious diplomacy, was launched with federal government support � but the
shadow cast by the dean's sermon lay heavily across the brightness of the
Darling Harbour venue.
The Jensens, plural, were
unfazed. Still are. They're not saying anything new. They've held the same
convictions since they were converted in their teens. What has changed is their
vantage point. From the pinnacle of Australia's biggest Anglican diocese, in
Australia's biggest, richest and most powerful city, their voices carry further
than ever. If there's a problem, it's not with the message but with the secular
media which carry it and distort it to the point of being unrecognisable, they
say. "We are forever being characterised as dinosaurs," says Peter. "I don't
think of us like that. I think of us as being countercultural."
They grew up in a two-bedroom rented semi on the Bondi
Junction side of Bellevue Hill, in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Their father,
Arthur, was a self-employed printer; their mother, Dorothy, lived for golf.
Actually, both Arthur and Dorothy lived for golf. A motto on the mantelpiece
read: "If golf interferes with your business, give up your business." By the
early 1950s, although they had been active churchgoers as young adults, it was
religion not business that made way for golf. Sunday school was a useful place
to park their sons while they got out on the course, so the boys were given � as
was usual for the time � a scriptural education. Their religious commitment was
more or less a default position, though. "Growing up in Bellevue Hill, where
most of the boys in my class were Jewish, I was Christian because I wasn't a
Jew," explains Phillip.
Then, in April 1959, the Billy Graham crusade came to town
and Peter and Phillip were bussed with their Sunday school youth group to the
Sydney Showground. The crowd was more than 100,000 strong on the first afternoon
they listened to the American evangelist. "In my imagination I could take you to
the spot on the grass where I was sitting," says Peter. "I don't think [of my
conversion] as a terrifically emotional experience. I think of it as a
clarifying moment when at last what I had been hearing [at Sunday school] made
sense." He was 16. He went 17 more times to hear Graham. Phillip, who was 14,
went another eight or nine times. "Our parents weren't happy ... they regarded
it as the onset of adolescent fanaticism," says Peter.
The Graham crusade, coming as it did at the dawn of the
swinging '60s, was a watershed. "If you were not really committed, you wouldn't
have survived as a churchgoer," comments Peter Jensen. Their older brother Ralph, a geologist, had
left home and missed the moment in history when Peter and Phillip were captured
for a life of evangelism. These days, having retired from the public service, he
lives in Canberra and practises the old family religion, golf.
When he left The Scots College, Peter began studying law (a
young man called John Howard was a senior articled clerk in the firm to which he
was attached) but dropped out after two years. Then he taught primary school.
But his heart was elsewhere. At 22, he entered Moore Theological College to
study for the ministry. His younger brother followed him at 21, with an honours
degree in geography. And their paths were set.
Preaching, writes Bill Lawton in Anglicanism in Australia, shapes ministry
training in Sydney. "'Preacher' is a definition of priesthood held by a majority
of clergy in the diocese of Sydney � It is an interpretation not as prevalent
among Evangelicals outside Sydney and hardly credited at all by most other
Anglicans," But the Jensens go to great lengths
to explain they are not unique or strange but that they represent a "thoroughly
authentic Anglican tradition". It is true that Evangelicalism, as distinct from
its higher profile cousin Pentecostalism, has a long history in Sydney, where
early convict chaplains were products of the Evangelical revival in Britain.

There are various complexions of Evangelicals, from liberal
to conservative. The Jensens are conservative.
But so are lots of other Christians, both inside and outside the Anglican
Church. "To talk about Jensenism is a mistake,"
says John Bellamy, a long-time researcher with the National Church Life Survey.
"They fit within a much broader theological stream."
That stream is at odds with the liberal theology of the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Peter Jensen makes no secret of his differences with the
Welshman. In January, his visit to England at the invitation of 150
dissident Evangelical parishes set off speculation that he was being positioned
to lead a breakaway Anglican faction. He says the story, which ran for days in
the British media, was fabricated.
Interestingly, he doesn't discount the possibility. The most
likely trigger of "this sort of realignment of parishes" would be the
consecration of women bishops. "But if I was going to do such a thing, I would
like to be in control of it myself," he says. "I don't like lies being told
about me." To which some people will respond Amen, while others will undoubtedly
say, go to the Devil. But what people say about the Jensens may not be as important to them as putting
religion on the front page. There's no reward in preaching to an empty
church.</DIV>
<DIV>Bruce & Jodi Chapman St Philip's
Anglican Church Eastwood Bruce: <A
href="mailto:bjcha-@pobox.com">bjcha-@pobox.com</A> Jodi: <A
href="mailto:jodich-@pobox.com">jodich-@pobox.com</A></DIV>

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