From Euthanasia to the Gospel
Everyday Ministry, Sola Panel
You’ve invited the neighbours over for dinner. Dessert has been successfully concluded, and the kids have retired to their bedroom where they are conducting experiments in paint durability under various impact scenarios. The coffee orders are being taken. As it so often does, the conversation is meandering down loosely connected paths and byways, and your dreams of perhaps talking about the gospel (or even something vaguely Christian) seem to be fading faster than the paint in the kids’ bedroom.
Factotum #7: What is a leader?
Everyday Ministry
Leadership is one of the pressing issues of today, and not only in the church. Time magazine recently had a special on the ‘leaders of tomorrow’, highlighting the need to prepare for the future or face a world that has little direction and little security.
The Image Disaster: Euthanasia and God’s view of human life
Life
The Best of Intentions
Review
North American scholar, Gordon Fee, is well-known among evangelicals for his New Testament scholarship. His commentary on 1 Corinthians is highly regarded, as is his manual on New Testament exegesis, and his recent large-scale volume on the Holy Spirit (God’s Empowering Spirit).
Two commands to women
Pastoral Ministry
In this age of equal opportunity and storming the glass ceiling, we should expect to see women in the pulpit. Or should we? The way I see it we shouldn’t, unless we’re listening more to 20th-century feminism than the Bible.
Preaching to mixed congregations
Thought
What do the Scriptures say? Is it appropriate for a woman to preach to a mixed congregation? In answering these questions, the long debate over woman’s ordination has not helped.
Strange sayings about 1 Timothy 2:11-12
Thought
In quietness let a woman learn, in all submission; and I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man but to be in quietness. (1 Tim 2:11-12)
Factotum #6: Do-it-yourself-church
Everyday Ministry
Christ vs culture
Everyday Ministry
When I first became a Christian and went to a Protestant church, I noticed two things: one was that the church buildings were very small compared to Catholic churches, and the other was that everyone was different to me: they were in the main Anglo-saxon. Over the last 15 years, I have spent time in six churches, and our church buildings are still too small, and most of the people inside them are still Anglo-saxon.
Top Shelf: Understanding Catholicism (Review)
Review
Leon Theophilus’s top shelf of books critiquing and explaining Roman Catholicism.
It is hard to overemphasize the extraordinary nature of recent developments within Catholicism. In the name of unity and peace, the Pope now prays with Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Animists from Africa, American Medicine men and other non-Christian leaders. And in the Protestant world we hear respected evangelical leaders minimizing those things that have historically divided Protestants and Catholics, even describing them as “petty differences”.1
Old Answers to New Questions
Thought
With Roman Catholicism proving increasingly attractive to some evangelicals, questions are being asked afresh about religious authority and the place of Scripture. Catholic apologists such as Scott Hahn are delivering an eloquent challenge to the traditional Protestant view of the authority of the Bible. This challenge is not new. Rob Smith highlights our need to rediscover how the Reformers dealt with these very challenges under the banner of Sola Scriptura. (more…)
Factotum #5: Church Improvement
Everyday Ministry
Here we stand?
Thought
J. I. Packer, Os Guinness and Charles Colson have all signed it. John MacArthur labels it “destructive”. R. C. Sproul puts it down to “doctrinal apathy”.
No Laughing Matter
Rodney Howard-Browne walked slowly down the aisle in my direction. He was a a bull of a man, short, thick-necked and tremendously broad across the shoulders.