Nearly There…
You wait ages for a blog post to come along, and then two come along at once! Sorry about that – things have been a bit busy recently, as I’m sure you can appreciate. Term is very nearly over, we have just over a week left (eek!) and then a week of exams (eeeeeeeek!!!). *ahem* So, anyway, I haven’t had much time to write blog posts, and I won’t have much time over the next couple of weeks. Just in case you think I’ve been neglecting the blog, or anything.
So apart from being busy, what’s been going on? Well, the usual stuff really – finishing assignments, work and the like. Last weekend we went back to Colchester overnight, we saw AJ and Jen on Saturday afternoon and then spent the evening with A-M and Sarah. All in all, a pretty good day! Then we went to Fordham on Sunday morning, and headed back home after lunch. We did have an ulterior motive for going back to Colchester, but more on that in a couple of weeks. (It’s not very exciting really, but still… I hear that tension and excitement keeps people interested. Probably too late for that now though)
Anyway, as they say about blogs: “I have nothing to say… I say it often”. This is me saying nothing. Back to the studio.
1 Timothy 2 and the created order
Recently I started talking about the Biblical position on women bishops, and mentioned 1 Timothy 2:8-15, the passage which is generally the centre of the discussion around women in authority or leadership roles in the church. Obviously there is a huge amount that could be said about the whole passage: for example, there is some controversy over whether the word authentein (translated ‘to have authority’ in the 1984 NIV but ‘to assume authority’ in the 2011 NIV) means having authority in a negative sense. It’s a hapax legomenon - i.e., it only appears once in the whole New Testament, and (as far as I can tell) pretty rarely outside it. But, in general, the real clincher in the argument seems to be Paul’s appeal to the created order. Because, the argument goes, Paul talks about Adam and Eve, he must have in mind a universal principle rather than something specific to the Ephesian situation. So, what I’d like to do in this post is examine that specific argument: how does the argument work, and does it hold water?
Sermon: 2 Thessalonians 1 – Persecution and God’s righteous judgement
This morning I preached a sermon on 2 Thessalonians 1. At college this term I’ve been learning about Homiletics, and as part of the assessment for that I had to deliver a sermon – which involved doing lots of diagrams as part of the preparation process (it’s Chris Green’s 12-step process for doing sermons).
To be honest, I found the 12-step process quite hard: it didn’t really gel naturally with how I would ordinarily like to prepare a sermon. Some of it was useful, but some was a bit of a struggle! – so when I delivered the sermon this morning, I felt like I wasn’t completely sure if it was any good or not. Not because I think I said anything wrong, but just because it had been prepared in a different way and as such it felt a bit … unnatural.
Anyway, it seemed to go down relatively well, I had a couple of positive comments afterwards! Anyway, if you’d like to have a read of it to tell me what you think, you can download it in PDF form. Feel free to leave comments afterwards, although please be nice!
God’s Image and Women Bishops
A few days ago I had a leaflet in my pigeon-hole at college entitled “Male & Female in God’s Image“. It was published by Reform, and (strangely enough) written by my placement supervisor. (He didn’t specifically give it to me, by the way; it was given to all students at Oak Hill).
The main claim in the leaflet is that if we accept women bishops, then we will damage our understanding of the Trinity. This is what the leaflet says:
Genesis 1:27 does not teach the sameness of men and women. In fact the asymmetry of the words used point to the differentiation in the Triune God which in turn lies at the basis of the differentiation between men and women.
But if our society views men and women as having no significant differences and this is then pursued as an axiomatic principle within the Christian community, it is inevitable that our view of the nature of God will change.
So, what we see is the asymmetry between male and female relationships being a sort of picture of the asymmetry in the Godhead. He goes on:
Read the rest of this entry
Is Twitter making us dumb and angry?
Every few years, it seems to be an unwritten rule that the newspapers have to have a scare about dumbing down, e.g. GCSE results now don’t mean as much as they used to back in the good old days. Now, whether they have a point or not I can’t say, but it does seem to me that a lot of it is alarmism: things aren’t really as bad as all that, the “good old days” were never that good, etc.
That said, I have been thinking a bit about Twitter recently, and how it affects communication. Twitter, if you’ve never got into the craze (and have had your head buried under a rock for the past few years – in which case, how are you even reading this?!) is a social media service where you can send messages to your ‘followers’, people who subscribe to your updates, as long as the messages are 140 characters or less.
In many respects this has been an absolute revolution – but, frankly, lots of people have written about it far more eloquently and intelligently than I ever could. What I’d like to look at is one aspect of Twitter usage which I’ve become more and more disturbed by over the past few months (and years – it’s been building for a long time).
Status Update
Things have been getting a bit heavy once again on this blog recently (sorry!), so I decided to write a quick update about how things are going with me. Funny how things have changed since this time last year – last year I was basically only writing personal updates. Now it’s the other way round, in so many ways…
It’s strange thinking back to last April. Although by that stage we knew we were coming to London, we didn’t know where we were going to be living. Also we both still had regular jobs, we were both involved with our church in Colchester including helping out with a youth club every week. Now, here we are – 12 months later, and only a few weeks away from finishing the year!
I still get days when I wake up and think, “What are you doing?!” Not so much now, but it seems strange to have given up our old lives, relatively secure, for lives which are a lot less certain. That said, I wouldn’t change it for anything – I feel much happier now. I’m loving studying the Bible, I’ve loved having the opportunity to preach a few times recently and just generally get involved in some ministry and learning about ministry. I definitely feel like this is where God wants us for the time being.
So, all that said, here are a few details about the rest of our Easter break. As I think I mentioned, I was on a mission for the first week. Then I spent the week generally chilling out a bit – before the holidays I was somewhat frazzled and stressed out with work, so I needed a bit of time! Then, for Easter weekend we went up to Colchester. On Easter Sunday we saw my parents, in between going to the morning and evening services at Fordham. Then, on the Monday we went round to AJ and Jen’s house and had a lovely day with them.
Then we came back home, Phil was back to work on the Tuesday, and I spent most of the week doing a bit of college work. So, there you have it, that’s how things are going for us in a nutshell!
Just over five more weeks of term left, then one week of exams, and then – academically speaking, it’s over for me until next year. This year has flown by so quickly, it’s scary. Anyway, that’s all from me. Normal service will resume shortly.
Some adverts are controversial. Get over it.
Once again, it falls to me to leap into the quagmire of misinformation and correct it with my iron sword of reason and moderation. (Everyone should have a sword of reason and moderation. They’re all rage these days.)
In case you hadn’t heard, a bus advert has been banned: a group called Core Issues Trust, together with Anglican Mainstream, tried to put an advert on some London buses. Before I say what the advert was, you might want to make sure you’re sitting comfortably and have plenty of air around, maybe a nice cup of tea, because it will shock and dismay you to the very core of your being. Well, maybe not that extreme.
The advert was (are you sure you’re sitting down?): “Not gay! Ex-gay, post-gay and proud. Get over it.”
Wow. Are you shocked and dismayed? Well, apparently good old Boris was – dismayed enough to ban the ads in the name of intolerance (one source quoted him as saying he was ‘intolerant of intolerance’, not sure how that works logically but there we go.)
Anyway, now it’s looking like Core Issues Trust want to sue for the ads being pulled. And, unsurprisingly, many people have been making remarks (on Twitter, where else? I honestly don’t know what we did as a civilisation before outrage could be widely spread in 140 characters or less) about how it would be nice if Christians cared about issues that actually mattered, such as poverty, healing the sick – the usual stuff.
There are just so many things wrong with all this, it’s staggering.
Reverse Missionaries
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been watching a mini-series on the BBC called “Reverse Missionaries”. Unfortunately it seems to have disappeared from the iPlayer, but the basic premise was that three people from countries which were influenced by British missionaries (Jamaica, Malawi, and India) have returned to the places where those respective missionaries were from to try and return the favour. So, for example, in the second episode a pastor from Blantyre in Malawi returned to Blantyre in Scotland, to a church which was struggling, and tried to engage with the local community in the same way that David Livingstone (who was from Blantyre in Glasgow) did in Malawi.
Anyway, I have to say that I found the whole series very encouraging. Each of the churches that the reverse missionaries came to I think were ‘evangelical’ theologically, but in most cases had perhaps lost some of the desire for evangelism. In each case, the numbers at the church had dropped off significantly and there were very few young people there.
What the reverse missionaries did was go out into the community, meet people, and bring them into the church community. I think my favourite was the first episode, where a Jamaican pastor came to a small town in Gloucestershire and by the end of the two weeks had managed to get a football team going, brought in a few new people to the church, and generally made an impact!
Obviously, all of the reverse missionaries were not very British – I think I (and probably most British people) would generally not be very confident with going up to someone in the street and talking to them cold. But what struck me was that, in general, people were actually very receptive.
There are a couple of things I took from watching the series:
- The gospel is the answer to what people are looking for. This is something which I knew on an intellectual level, but it’s great to see it actually happening in the real world. The first episode showed someone hurting; he needed to know that there was a purpose in his suffering and a promise of release. The second episode showed a woman who had lost her husband; she needed to know the promise of resurrection and eternal life. The third episode showed a divided community; what they needed to know was “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
- The things that the reverse missionaries did were not magical, or only doable by an elite few – all they did was care for people, and try to reach out to them with the message of the good news. Now clearly they were gifted with people, which is something I’m not, but at the same time reaching out to people with the message of the good news isn’t rocket science. Sure, there will be different ways of doing it depending on context, but the important thing is not to become insular. I think the churches featured had all become somewhat inward looking, and that’s the worst thing that can happen to a church.
In general, in the midst of what’s been going on with secular society, HOTS and the like – it’s nice to be reminded (in an understated, unassuming way) that the good news is still good news, and that God is still working.
Love Lustres at Calvary
Easter Saturday is a slightly odd day, I find. It falls in between Good Friday, which is a very sombre day looking at the cross, and Easter Sunday which is joyfully looking at the resurrection. I find it’s not really a special day but it’s not a normal day either.
Given that I didn’t post anything up on Good Friday, and given that I won’t be around to post something up tomorrow, I thought I might post up a prayer from “The Valley of Vision”, a collection of puritan prayers. This is one which was given to us as part of a chapel communion service last term, and I find it very helpful.
My Father,
Enlarge my heart, warm my affections, open my lips, supply words that proclaim ‘Love lustres at Calvary.’
There grace removes my burdens and heaps them on thy Son, made a transgressor, a curse, and sin for me;
There the sword of thy justice smote the man, thy fellow;
There thy infinite attributes were magnified, and infinite atonement was made;
There infinite punishment was due, and infinite punishment was endured.Christ was all anguish that I might be all joy,
cast off that I might be brought in,
trodden down as an enemy that I might be welcomed as a friend,
surrendered to hell’s worst that I might attain heaven’s best,
stripped that I might be clothed,
wounded that I might be healed,
athirst that I might drink,
tormented that I might be comforted,
made a shame that I might inherit glory,
entered darkness that I might have eternal light.My Saviour wept that all tears might be wiped from my eyes,
groaned that I might have endless song,
endured all pain that I might have unfading health,
bore a thorny crown that I might have a glory-diadem,
bowed his head that I might uplift mine,
experienced reproach that I might receive welcome,
closed his eyes in death that I might gaze on unclouded brightness,
expired that I might for ever live.O Father, who spared not thine only Son that thou mightest spare me,
All this transfer thy love designed and accomplished;
Help me to adore thee by lips and life.
O that my every breath might be ecstatic praise,
my every step buoyant with delight,
as I see my enemies crushed,
Satan baffled, defeated, destroyed,
sin buried in the ocean of reconciling blood,
hell’s gates closed, heaven’s portal open.
Go forth, O conquering God, and show me the cross,
mighty to subdue, comfort and save.”
What it means to follow Jesus: Sermon on Mark 8:31-38
This is the text of a sermon I preached yesterday morning at at the 9:00 communion service at St Thomas’ Kidsgrove. It was the last day of their ‘week of events’ or mission which I mentioned in my post last week. (The week went well, by the way, thanks for asking.)
The passage is Mark 8:31-38, which it would be helpful to read before reading the sermon! And so, without further ado…
