Christmas: Home and Away

With All Due Respect

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.