Church Life

Many will remember the furore when Prince Charles stated, many years back, that he wanted to be not “defender of the [implied, Christian] faith”, but simply “defender of faith”.

Some of the problems of that should be obvious.

I had a great afternoon at Blenheim Palace on Saturday, listening to Doug Wilson talk about

• The gospel and your church
• The gospel and your family

• The gospel and your government.

I found David Field’s recent post on how they, as a family, applied their thinking on infant baptism immensely helpful.

Specifically, it’s worth asking:

• If we know Jesus will get there in the end, do we need to be impatient with others? Especially given Jesus is patient with us.
• Is baptism a purely personal thing (something “I have to do” because of “my relationship with Christ”) or is it about church membership?

• When we are in the position of needing to find a church to attend, it will never perfectly fit our ideal church in every respect. So what do we let go of for the sake of other things we value?

Thanks for sharing your thought with us, David.

I was asked one very specific question after my last sermon on Luke 21.

I developed one implication that the temple was to come to an end, which is the implication developed in Ephesians 2. The era of Jewish national privilege has closed, so that in the new creation none of us will have a second class spot – specifically, no Gentiles will be penalised for being Gentile.

After the service I was asked why, if this is the case, I still hold that there will be a distinction in the roles taken by men and women in church life.

/a

Happy New Year, everybody!

May I take this opportunity to present to you a new website, Edible Words.

Neil Robbie and I have spent a year or so working on this. It’s not taken a year because it has been an enormous project – more because we’ve been fitting it into the time we can carve out from our other commitments. It is now at the stage where we think it is ready to roll out, go live, launch etc.

“If we love them, our objective will not be to impress them with our learning but to help them with theirs.”

A brief and very helpful reminder from Doug Wilson (quoting and summarising Stott) about the vital necessity of preaching with simplicity and clarity. [Edit: Wilson’s blog post is a paragraph long. The post is, indeed, brief – but not as brief as the sentence I’ve quoted above. Just to make clear!]

“Avoid divisions!”, say the closing three chapters of Romans. And I don’t know one Christian who doesn’t agree with that. We all hate division in church life. It is ugly. It distracts from evangelism. It causes personal pain and grief.

The important thing to notice is that Romans 14-16 offers us two very different ways in which division might arise, and therefore two very different ways of avoiding it.

Version 1

Hello everyone!

Some of you may have wondered why I took a two week break from posting as I didn’t let on much. Others will have seen the issues clearly. Personally, I’ve valued having a couple of weeks to give serious thought to some of the issues that were raised with me. It’s easily to be cheaply dismissive or (equally easily) blown here and there by everything everyone says. I wanted to be neither, but to listen and think with care.

I’ll be taking a 2 week break from posting on this site from now.

Comments still welcome of course – especially in response to this post. I had a really useful conversation with two good friends yesterday about the tensions of blogging. Specifically, what we were talking about was how blogging sits with serving the church in pastoral ministry.

• Is it wise for a minister of a local church to blog?

• How is that changed if I am, more precisely, an assistant minister?

Thanks to Neil Robbie for pointing me to this one.

How do you come up with a policy for a church on paedocommunion that allows for:

• difference of opinion on the issue, and

• clarity on how responsibility and government are apportioned between church and family?

Well, Neil pointed me to the policy adopted by Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birming ham, Alabama. Very helpful indeed.