The Christian religion is often boiled down to one word - salvation - a word that has often had a bad press. It is often associated with well-meaning but overly pious Christians asking people if they are saved from lives they are perfectly content with.

St Paul calls death our ‘the last enemy’. But is this so any more? Perhaps we no longer frightened of death like the people of the first-century AD when Paul was writing his letters.

Jesus said to the crowd all too ready to stone the women taken in adultery as a sinner: ‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her’.

A young couple fall in love and get married. They willingly take their marriage vows to each other, promising mutual faithfulness and the cherishing of each other. For a while that is indeed what happens as they develop their lives together in caring partnership.

In the 1960s the long-term erosion of the traditional Christianity was experienced in Australia. This was similar to the same process common to most western European societies such as Australia in the same period. It is a process known to historians and sociologists as secularisation. This might be described as the loss of a sense or the importance of the sacred in life.