ABSTRACT
Christine Senini, writing out of her experience as a chaplain in the Royal Australian Navy, offers an extremely rich reflection on some of the fruitful tensions encountered in that ministry. The article is brimming with insights drawn from the evocation of a chaplain’s work marking Christmas on a warship. It stands out as the only contribution in this collection coming from military chaplaincy. It also relates chaplaincy, even if only in passing, to the idea of ‘fresh expressions’ (of religion more broadly and not just church). Grounded in reflections on the lived experience of Advent and the intersecting stories of the run-up to Christmas, it does much to challenge the neatness with which many speak of the sacred / secular divide. In so doing it provokes churches to rethink their conceptions of membership and mission.
