|PIC1|Mr Hewson said, speaking on the subject of the new Liberal Leader and Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, that when he first filled that role (he discovered much later) a class mate from 22 years ago was tracked down, who was living in Canada with her husband and their children.
He was quite bemused by it all, in that someone was attempting to find some dirt on him from as far back as his student days, and he commented that the same treatment will be given to Malcolm Turnbull.
Mind you, John Hewson pointed out that the same treatment had been dished out to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd before he was elected (as it is to to every political aspirant in all western democracies).
Well-Being Australia chairman Mark Tronson, a Baptist minister for 31 years and the Australian cricket team chaplain of 17 years (who moved to Life After Cricket in 2001) says the same thing regularly happens in Christian ministry.
He points out the research done by journalists on any number of high profile Christian ministers. To name just a few: Gordon Moyes, Peter Jensen, Tim Costello, Brian Houston, Rowland Crocuher and many others. M V Tronson said that in 1999 at the height of his debilitating stress, someone was engaged to investigate him, but in this case it was out in the open where this professional visited him for two days.
Yes, M V Tronson says, obviously there are ministers who are nothing but fraudsters (like the preacher recently who falsified he had cancer), and in some sense, nothing annoys an investigator more whose aim it is to find dirt, who then finds nothing.
A political case in point is Sarah Palin the Governor of Alaska and Vice-Presidential candidate of Republican Presidential candidate John McCain where porn was planted on her computer and more recently the hacker who got into one of her email accounts.
M V Tronson asks two serious questions. Is there a difference between research on a Christian minister in relation to behaviour and finances as opposed to political muck raking, an intrusion of privacy. And, if political muck raking is fair game in Christian ministry research, should this extend to the Minister's children and relatives. Does it include junior school reports or like John Hewson, people they dated 22 years ago?
At what point is enough enough? There are Christian ministers who have been astonishingly saved by Grace who have served prison sentences or come through the occult, and who with Christ's wonderful pleasure have reinvented themselves from very dark pasts.
What if a Christian minister could not watch his children play sport without such intrusion? Christian ministers today are in an unenviable position.
They dare not minister to a member of the opposite sex without their office door being open,
They dare not encourage a member of their church's youth group by placing their hand-of-care on a head,
They dare not smile to a person of the opposite sex for fear that person may claim harassment,
They dare not speak against other religious beliefs for fear of prosecution or at least the political correctness police be up-in-arms.
Jesus gives his point of view on these things in the Sermon on the Mount for his followers where he says in Matthew 5 verse 11 "Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake."
For those who dish out the dirt, Jesus has something to say as well. Matthew 7 verse 2, "Look out because the intense scrutiny you put others under will one day be upon you." And this report does not come from a weak and mild Jesus for He himself without quarter, tossed over the money changers tables.