In his post You Will Never Guess Who Is Really Responsible For The Softening of Males In The Church, Mark Sayers shifts the blame for the current “sea of passivity” in modern males from feminism to men like John Newton.
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Charles Stone introduces his book, ‘Five Ministry Killers and How to Kill Them‘ with an account of how a Church fired their Pastor. As I started the first paragraph, I thought it was a fictional parable used to kick off the main topic of the book. Wrong!
“Rivers of water run down from my eyes,
because men do not keep Your law.” Psalm 119:136
I might bag out [1] the Biblical Horizons crowd for their views on baptism, but otherwise they are giants. They have a hold on Scripture and history that enables them to understand the times.
Rich Blesdsoe recently made the observation that the unbelief which constantly confronts us Western Christians is quite a different animal to the demonism found in other cultures. We don’t suffer the full-scale “possessions” seen in pagan cultures. The rebellion is just as self-destructive, as crazed and zealous, and just as much a “nothing” as the idols of the pagans, but it is a different kind of nothing. What’s going on in our culture?
Part of the process of maturity for the Spirit-led Church is to go where no institution has gone before. The Jews crossed Land and Sea to make proselytes, their Temple a spring in the desert, but Christian mission was the over-tipping of the cleansing Laver, the baptism of the first century world. Of course, this was bound to have political consequences.
Confessions of a Reformission Rev.: Hard Lessons from an Emerging Missional Church by Mark Driscoll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was expecting to be shocked by this book, but perhaps we’re all Driscoll-desensitized now. Sounds like Mark was just what Seattle needed. Lots of wisdom from hard knocks, teachability, but above all, persistence for Jesus. Continue reading
A truly “catholic” church has universal appeal. It doesn’t pander to diverse audience. And it simply can’t be that diverse anyhow. Terry Johnson writes:
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In Against Christianity (pp. 56-58), Peter Leithart writes:
One of the contributions of twentieth-century Catholic nouvelle theologie, and of Henri de Lubac and Hean Danielou in particular, was a rehabilitation of patristic and medieval typological exegesis of the Bible. Typological interpretation assumes that events and institutions of the Old Testament present, to use Augustine’s terminology, “latent” pictures of Christ. Typological interpretation, in short, sees the whole Bible as gospel, with the gospel narrowly conceived (the story of Jesus) as the culmination of a larger story.
“…how we feast and celebrate is a reflection of our beliefs concerning the salvation of the world.”
Sermon Notes on Deuteronomy 14:22-29 - Part 1
Guest post by Michael Shover
It has been one of the most unfortunate developments in the history of the Church that we have gotten away from and have forgotten the Biblical mandate to feast before the Lord. We so often lead lives that are shallow in piety and so consuming in busyness that we become forgetful, nay even neglectful of the fact that our God commands such things as, “And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen or sheep, for wine or strong drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the LORD your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household.”
by Tim Nichols
We worship in heaven, and we are unified with those who join us there in worship—including those believers in other nations, and those who died long before us. This unity surpasses any earthly tie, including ties of where you were born—or when.
The saints of every age and place are Our People, and we should hear the voices of those who have gone before us. They are sinners, and they can be wrong. But so can we, and so we listen to their wise counsel, and—as always—measure everything by Scripture. We cannot be revolutionaries, because we belong to a long line of people from whom we cannot separate, even though we may want to.
A quote from a great book I picked up today. Observations from an (atheistic, agnostic?) Roman Catholic perspective, but, as the blurb says: ‘far from losing himself in a thicket of erudition, Debray knows how to touch on the essential.’
