Word and action

Thought, Sola Panel

How do you react when you notice that you or your church has a dull, dry, inactive faith, even though you are committed to God’s word? Elvis, in his song, A Little Less Conversation, gives us a model for one way that we could try to solve the problem:
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When wisdom marries folly

Everyday Ministry, Sola Panel

If there’s ever been a mismatch, it was the union of Nabal and Abigail (1 Samuel 25). You can almost see the announcement: “Stupid, stubborn, surly skinflint marries brainy, brave, benevolent beauty”. It’s as if the characters of Folly and Wisdom stepped out of the pages of Proverbs and got hitched. Those TV advertisements with the clever wife rolling her eyes over her bumbling husband have nothing on this!

What can we learn from their ill-fated union? How can I be Wisdom rather than Folly? And what do I do if I’m Wisdom married to Folly?

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Complementarianism and egalitarianism (part 4): The coming divide (iv)

Pastoral Ministry

This is the fourth post in Mark Baddeley’s series on complementarianism and egalitarianism. (Read parts 1235678, and 9.)

We see a sign of this incompatibility of the two positions of egalitarianism and complementarianism in a recent post on the Ugley Vicar’s blog. He reports a conversation where a prospective ordination candidate in the Church of England was informed that they could not be ordained if they did not agree with women bishops. This was hardly a surprise to me, I have heard similar reports back in Australia coming from dioceses that were seeking to have women bishops (and I’m hardly Mr Networker). What this suggests is that usually, if not in absolutely every instance, when a diocese or denomination is close to having the political numbers to introduce women bishops, it makes support for women being bishops a requirement for ordination. Complementarians are henceforth excluded from that structure—first of all from the clergy and, eventually, from the laity as laypeople eventually find it impossible to find a church where complementarianism is not treated as a form of sin. Only those complementarians prepared to submit to a woman bishop’s authority and, one suspects, not be too vocal about their view that their bishop is sinning by being a bishop in the first place, can be ordained once women bishops are set up. (more…)

Rowland Taylor, Protestant martyr

Life, Sola Panel

 

This month, on October 6, it was 500 years since the birth of the Protestant martyr, Rowland Taylor, in 1510. From Northumberland, Rowland Taylor earned his law degree and then a doctorate from Cambridge in the 1530s. He also married Margaret, niece of William Tyndale (who translated the Bible into English, and for it, was burnt by Henry VIII in 1536). But as evangelical thought developed under Henry and flourished under Protestant King Edward VI, Taylor served each of the three great Bishops of the English Reformation: Latimer, Cranmer (who ordained him) and Ridley. From 1544 he was the Rector of Hadleigh in Suffolk, a post he remained in till his arrest. He also served more broadly as Archdeacon.

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Suffering and decision-making

Everyday Ministry, Pastoral Ministry, Sola Panel

Is it better to choose a more difficult ministry, or an easy one? Is it more godly to choose suffering over comfort when we make decisions about life and ministry? After all, suffering makes us more like Jesus, and surely that’s good for us, isn’t it? (more…)

Complementarianism and egalitarianism (part 3): The coming divide (iii)

Pastoral Ministry

This is the third post in Mark Baddeley’s series on complementarianism and egalitarianism. (Read parts 1245678, and 9.)

We are looking at why various Christian institutions are going to divide over the question of women’s public ministry. In the previous post I argued that the fight over whether women should wield authority over men in the church is a high-stakes debate. It is fundamentally a fight over the question of authority and equality—whether authority and necessary submission must always be linked to genuine inferiority. Those championing women’s ordination generally believe that authority can only exist when one person is inferior to another—a view that I will classify as egalitarianism. Those opposed believe that authority and real equality can coexist—a view that I will classify as complementarianism. (more…)

Jesus at work: Trading places

Thought, Sola Panel

Here’s something really interesting in Mark’s Gospel that my lovely wife Bronwyn noticed when she was reading the Bible the other day. Close to the beginning of Mark, in chapter 1, Jesus meets a man with a skin disease:
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Complementarianism and egalitarianism (part 2): The coming divide (ii)

Pastoral Ministry

This is the second post in Mark Baddeley’s series on complementarianism and egalitarianism. (Read parts 1345678, and 9.)

Complementarians like me see egalitarians as reading the Bible under the shadow of the Enlightenment. Their notion of equality is not value-free, or intuitively obvious, or true at some pre-critical presuppositional level. It is a view of equality that was articulated in the Enlightenment as part of that movement’s attack on Christianity. So for the complementarian there is a close relationship between egalitarianism and theological liberalism: not all egalitarians are liberals; but almost all liberals are egalitarians; and both read the Bible in light of convictions that lie at the heart of the modern liberal-democratic state. For both movements, culture and modern reason define all the key terms, and the Bible is then understood in light of that first step made by culture. God isn’t just a Westerner and a convinced democrat, he is an ideal example—the kind of guy any Western cultural liberal would be proud to know; the very model of a modern major general writ large.

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How to think about multi-site churches

Pastoral Ministry, Sola Panel

 

Have you seen Mark Dever’s chat with Mark Driscoll and James McDonald about multi-site churches? It’s excited plenty of interweb comment, not least because of the rather vigorous way Dever is set upon by the other two in a kind of jokey, jovial but still half-serious way.

(‘Multi-site’ means planting a new congregation or church service at a new location, but having the lead pastor from the mother church still do the bulk of the preaching, usually by means of a video feed. It’s a growing and controversial practice in US churches. Is it healthy? Useful? Biblical?)

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Complementarianism and egalitarianism (part 1): The coming divide (i)

Pastoral Ministry

This is the first post in Mark Baddeley’s series on complementarianism and egalitarianism. (Read parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.)

As I write this it looks overwhelmingly likely that the Church of England will embrace women bishops and—despite commitments made when women priests were introduced—will introduce women bishops without any structural solutions for those who disagree with the change. A structural separation is imminent. Those opposed to women’s ordination—conservative evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics—will leave the Church of England (unless they find a technically illegal mechanism to stay in, such as consecrate their own bishops, who would be Anglican but not Church of England). Consequently, the Church of England will be composed almost entirely by those who agree with, and support, the ordination of women and their role as bishops. Similar moves are afoot in other denominations in different parts of the world.

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From euthanasia to the gospel

Life

Euthanasia is a topic that is not likely to go away any time soon. Our friend or colleague, normally keen to avoid thinking about their own death, may now be talking about their right to end their life at some point. So how can we move a conversation about assisted suicide to the gospel? Tony Payne has some practical (and humorous) advice in an article first published in The Briefing in 1995.
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Love, sex and romance: Sexual purity for every woman

A few years ago our women’s discussion group asked a friend to talk about sex within marriage. Some­­one brought a cake, and I remember lots of laughter—perhaps a little too much!—as we chatted about how to love our husbands sexually. The discussion leader answered our questions honestly and helpfully, but when someone asked about masturbation, she said, “I’d have to ask a guy that one”. The question this raised for me was, “Why? Is this really only an issue for men?”
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Raising kids in a sex-crazed world

Life

Imagine living in a world where husbands wooed their wives with Adam’s passion—bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh—and sex was enjoyed. Imagine living in a world where, after the stress of each day, husbands and wives found comfort in sexual intimacy as David did with his wife after the death of their child. Imagine living in a world in which the only reason for not having sex with your marriage partner was the urgency of prayer. It would be a sex-crazed world.1

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